October 31, 2009

Democracy, East Germany and the Berlin Wall, By Stephen Gowans, in: what’s left, on October 25, 2009






















The GDR was more democratic, in the original and substantive sense of the word, than eastern Germany was before 1949 and than the former East Germany has become since the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989. It was also more democratic than its neighbor, West Germany. While it played a role in the GDR’s eventual demise, the Berlin Wall was at the time a necessary defensive measure to protect a substantively democratic society from being undermined by a hostile neighbor bent on annexing it.


While East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) wasn’t a ‘workers’ paradise’, it was in many respects a highly attractive model that was responsive to the basic needs of the mass of people and therefore was democratic in the substantive and original sense of the word. It offered generous pensions, guaranteed employment, equality of the sexes and substantial wage equality, free healthcare and education, and a growing array of other free and virtually free goods and services. It was poorer than its West German neighbor, the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG, but it started at a lower level of economic development and was forced to bear the burden of indemnifying the Soviet Union for the massive losses Germany inflicted upon the USSR in World War II. These conditions were largely responsible for the less attractive aspects of life in the GDR: lower pay, longer hours, and fewer and poorer consumer goods compared to West Germany, and restrictions on travel to the West. When the Berlin Wall was open in 1989, a majority of the GDR’s citizens remained committed to the socialist basis of their society and wished to retain it. [1] It wasn’t the country’s central planning and public ownership they rebelled against. These things produced what was best about the country. And while Cold War propaganda located East Germany well outside the ‘free world,’ political repression and the Stasi, the East German state security service, weren’t at the root of East Germans’ rebellion either. Ultimately, what the citizens of the GDR rebelled against was their comparative poverty. But this had nothing to do with socialism. East Germans were poorer than West Germans even before the Western powers divided Germany in the late 1940s, and remain poorer today. A capitalist East Germany, forced to start at a lower level of economic development and to disgorge war reparation payments to the USSR, would not have become the social welfare consumer society West Germany became and East Germans aspired after, but would have been at least as worse off as the GDR was, and probably much worse off, and without the socialist attractions of economic security and greater equality. Moreover, without the need to compete against an ideological rival, it’s doubtful the West German ruling class would have been under as much pressure to make concessions on wages and benefits. West Germans, then, owed many of their social welfare gains to the fact their neighbour to the east was socialist and not capitalist.

The Western powers divide Germany

While the distortions of Cold War history would lead one to believe it was the Soviets who divided Germany, the Western powers were the true authors of Germany’s division. The Allies agreed at the February 1945 Yalta conference that while Germany would be partitioned into French, British, US and Soviet occupation zones, the defeated Germany would be administered jointly. [2] The hope of the Soviets, who had been invaded by Germany in both first and second world wars, was for a united, disarmed and neutral Germany. The Soviet’s goals were two-fold: First, Germany would be demilitarized, so that it could not launch a third war of aggression on the Soviet Union. Second, it would pay reparations for the massive damages it inflicted upon the USSR, calculated after the war to exceed $100 billion. [3]

The Western powers, however, had other plans. The United States wanted to revive Germany economically to ensure it would be available as a rich market capable of absorbing US exports and capital investment. The United States had remained on the sidelines through a good part of the war, largely avoiding the damages that ruined its rivals, while at the same time acting as armourer to the Allies. At the end of the war, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the USSR lay in ruins, while the US ruling class was bursting at the seems with war industry profits. The prospects for the post-war US economy, however, and hence for the industrialists, bankers and investors who dominated the country’s political decision-making, were dim unless new life could be breathed into collapsed foreign markets, which would be needed to absorb US exports and capital. An economically revived Germany was therefore an important part of the plan to secure the United States’ economic future. The idea of a Germany forced to pour out massive reparation payments to the USSR was intolerable to US policy makers: it would militate against the transformation of Germany into a sphere of profit-making for US capital, and would underwrite the rebuilding of an ideological competitor.

The United States intended to make post-war life as difficult as possible for the Soviet Union. There were a number of reasons for this, not least to prevent the USSR from becoming a model for other countries. Already, socialism had eliminated the United States’ access to markets and spheres of investment in one-sixth of the earth’s territory. The US ruling class didn’t want the USSR to provide inspiration and material aid to other countries to follow the same path. The lead role of communists in the resistance movements in Europe, “the success of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany,” and “the success of the Soviet Union in industrializing and modernizing,” [4] had greatly raised the prestige of the USSR and enhanced the popularity of communism. Unless measures were taken to check the USSR’s growing popularity, socialism would continue to advance and the area open to US exports and investment would continue to contract. A Germany paying reparations to the Soviets was clearly at odds with the goals of reviving Germany and holding the Soviet Union in check. What’s more, while the Soviets wanted Germany to be permanently disarmed as a safeguard against German revanchism, the United States recognized that a militarized Germany under US domination could play a central role in undermining the USSR.

The division of Germany began in 1946, when the French decided to administer their zone separately. [5] Soon, the Western powers merged their three zones into a single economic unit and announced they would no longer pay reparations to the Soviet Union. The burden would have to be borne by the Soviet occupation zone alone, which was smaller and less industrialized, and therefore less able to offer compensation.

In 1949, the informal division of Germany was formalized with the proclamation by the Western powers of a separate West German state, the FRG. The new state would be based on a constitution written by Washington and imposed on West Germans, without their ratification. (The GDR’s constitution, by contrast, was ratified by East Germans.) In 1954, West Germany was integrated into a new anti-Soviet military alliance, NATO, which, in its objectives, aped the earlier anti-Comintern pact of the Axis powers. The goal of the anti-Comintern pact was to oppose the Soviet Union and world communism. NATO, with a militarized West Germany, would take over from where the Axis left off.

The GDR was founded in 1949, only after the Western powers created the FRG. The Soviets and the GDR’s leaders had no interest in transforming the Soviet occupation zone into a separate state and complained bitterly about the Western powers’ division of Germany. Moscow wanted Germany to remain unified, but demilitarized and neutral and committed to paying war reparations to help the USSR get back on its feet. As late as 1954, the Soviets offered to dissolve the GDR in favour of free elections under international supervision, leading to the creation of a unified, unaligned, Germany. This, however, clashed with the Western powers’ plan of evading Germany’s responsibility for paying war reparations and of integrating West Germany into the new anti-Soviet, anti-communist military alliance. The proposal was, accordingly, rejected. George Kennan, the architect of the US policy of ‘containing’ (read undermining) the Soviet Union, remarked: “The trend of our thinking means that we do not want to see Germany reunified at this time, and that there are no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” [6]

This placed the anti-fascist working class leadership of the GDR in a difficult position. The GDR comprised only one-third of German territory and had a population of 17 million. By comparison, the FRG comprised 63 million people and made up two-thirds of German territory. [7] Less industrialized than the West, the new GDR started out poorer than its new capitalist rival. Per capita income was about 27 percent lower than in the West. [8] Much of the militant section of the working class, which would have ardently supported a socialist state, had been liquidated by the Nazis. The burden of paying war reparations to the Soviets now had to be borne solely by the GDR. And West Germany ceaselessly harassed and sabotaged its neighbor, refusing to recognize it as a sovereign state, regarding it instead as its own territory temporarily under Soviet occupation. [9] Repeatedly, West Germany proclaimed that its official policy was the annexation of its neighbor to the east.

The GDR’s leaders faced still other challenges. Compared to the West, East Germany suffered greater losses in the war. [10] The US Army stripped the East of its scientists, technicians and technical know-how, kidnapping “thousands of managers, engineers, and all sorts of experts, as well as the best scientists – the brains of Germany’s East – from their factories, universities, and homes in Saxony and Thuringia in order to put them to work to the advantage of the Americans in the Western zone – or simply to have them waste away there.” [11]

As Pauwels explains,

“During the last weeks of the hostilities the Americans themselves had occupied a considerable part of the Soviet zone, namely Thuringia and much of Saxony. When they pulled out at the end of June, 1945, they brought back to the West more than 10,000 railway cars full of the newest and best equipment, patents, blueprints, and so on from the firm Carl Zeiss in Jena and the local plants of other top enterprises such as Siemens, Telefunken, BMW, Krupp, Junkers, and IG-Farben. This East German war booty included plunder from the Nazi V-2 factory in Nordhausen: not only the rockets, but also technical documents with an estimated value of 400 to 500 million dollars, as well as approximately 1,200 captured German experts in rocket technology, one of whom being the notorious Wernher von Braun.” [12]

The Allies agreed at Yalta that a post-war Germany would pay the Soviet Union $10 billion in compensation for the damages inflicted on the USSR during the war. This was a paltry sum compared to the more realistic estimate of $128 billion arrived at after the war. And yet the Soviets were short changed on even this meagre sum. The USSR received no more than $5.1 billion from the two German states, most of it from the GDR. The Soviets took $4.5 billion out of East Germany, carting away whole factories and railways, while the larger and richer FRG paid a miserable $600 million. The effect was the virtual deindustrialization of the East. [13] In the end, the GDR would compensate both the United States (which suffered virtually no damage in World War II) through the loss of its scientists, technicians, blue-prints, patents and so on, and the Soviet Union (which suffered immense losses and deserved to be compensated), through the loss of its factories and railways. Moreover, the United States offered substantial aid to West Germany to help it rebuild, while the poorer Soviet Union, which had been devastated by the German invasion, lacked the resources to invest in the GDR. [14] The West was rebuilt; the East stripped bare.

The GDR’s democratic achievements

Despite the many burdens it faced, the GDR managed to build a standard of living higher than that of the USSR “and that of millions of inhabitants of the American ghettoes, of countless poor white Americans, and of the population of most Third World countries that have been integrated willy-nilly with the international capitalist world system.” [15]

Over 90 percent of the GDR’s productive assets were owned by the country’s citizens collectively, while in West Germany productive assets remained privately owned, concentrated in a few hands. [16] Because the GDR’s economy was almost entirely publicly owned and the leadership was socialist, the economic surplus that people produced on the job went into a social fund to make the lives of everyone better rather than into the pockets of shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers. [17] Out of the social fund came subsidies for food, clothing, rent, public transportation, as well as cultural, social and recreational activities. Wages weren’t as high as in the West, but a growing number of essential goods and services were free or virtually free. Rents, for example, were very low. As a consequence, there were no evictions and there was no homelessness. Education was free through university, and university students received stipends to cover living expenses. Healthcare was also free. Childcare was highly subsidized.

Differences in income levels were narrow, with higher wages paid to those working in particularly strenuous or dangerous occupations. Full gender equality was mandated by law and men and women were paid equally for the same work, long before gender equality was taken up as an issue in the West. What’s more, everyone had a right to a job. There was no unemployment in the GDR.

Rather than supporting systems of oppression and exploitation, as the advanced capitalist countries did in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the GDR assisted the people of the global South in their struggles against colonialism. Doctors were dispatched to Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola, and students from many Third World countries were trained and educated in the GDR at the GDR’s expense.

Even the Wall Street Journal recognized the GDR’s achievements. In February, 1989, just months before the opening of the Berlin Wall, the US ruling class’s principal daily newspaper announced that the GDR “has no debt problem. The 17 million East Germans earn 30 percent more than their next richest partners, the Czechoslovaks, and not much less than the English. East Germans build 32-bit mini-computers and a socialist ‘Walkman’ and the only queue in East Berlin forms at the opera.” [18]

The downside was that compared to West Germany, wages were lower, hours of work were longer, and there were fewer consumer goods. Also, consumer goods tended to be inferior compared to those available in West Germany. And there were travel restrictions. Skilled workers were prevented from travelling to the West. But at the same time, vacations were subsidized, and East Germans could travel throughout the socialist bloc.

Greater efficiencies

West Germany’s comparative wealth offered many advantages in its ideological battle with socialism. For one, the wealth differential could be attributed deceptively to the merits of capitalism versus socialism. East Germany was poorer, it was said, not because it unfairly bore the brunt of indemnifying the Soviets for their war losses, and not because it started on a lower rung, but because public ownership and central planning were inherently inefficient. The truth of the matter, however, was that East German socialism was more efficient than West German capitalism, producing faster growth rates, and was more responsive to the basic needs of its population. “East Germany’s national income grew in real terms about two percent faster annually that the West German economy between 1961 and 1989.” [19] The GDR was also less repressive politically. Following in the footsteps of Hitler, West Germany banned the Communist Party in the 1950s, and close tabs were kept by West Germany’s own ‘secret’ police on anyone openly expressing Marxist-Leninist views. Marxist-Leninists were barred from working in the public service and frequently lost private sector jobs owing to their political views. In the GDR, by contrast, those who expressed views at odds with the dominant Marxist-Leninist ideology did not lose their jobs, and were not cut off from the state’s generous social supports, though they too were monitored by the GDR’s ‘secret’ police. The penalty for dissenting from the dominant political ideology in the West (loss of income) was more severe than in the East. [20]

The claim that the GDR’s socialism was less efficient than West Germany’s capitalism was predicated on the disparity in wealth between the two countries, but the roots of the disparity were external to the two countries’ respective systems of ownership, and the disparity existed prior to 1949 (at which point GDP per capita was about 43 percent higher in the West) and continued to exist after 1989 (when unemployment – once virtually eliminated — soared and remains today double what it is in the former West Germany.) Over the four decades of its existence, East German socialism attenuated the disparity, bringing the GDR closer to West Germany’s GDP per capita. Significantly, “real economic growth in all of Eastern Europe under communism was estimated to be higher than in Western Europe under capitalism (as well as higher than that in the USA) even in communism’s final decade (the 1980s).” After the opening of the Berlin Wall, with capitalism restored, “real economic output fell by over 30 percent in Eastern Europe as a whole in the 1990s.” [21]

But the GDR’s faster growth rates from 1961 to 1989 tell only part of the story. It’s possible for GDP to grow rapidly, with few of the benefits reaching the bulk of the population. The United States spends more on healthcare as a percentage of its GDP than all other countries, but US life expectancy and infant mortality results are worse than in many other countries which spend less (but have more efficient public health insurance or socialized systems.) This is due to the reality that healthcare is unequally distributed in the United States, with the wealthy in a position to buy the best healthcare in the world while tens of millions of low-income US citizens can afford no or only inadequate healthcare. By contrast, in most advanced capitalist countries everyone has access to basic (though typically not comprehensive) healthcare. In socialist Cuba, comprehensive healthcare is free to all. What’s important, then, is not only how much wealth (or healthcare) a society creates, but also how a society’s wealth (or healthcare) is distributed. Wealth was far more evenly distributed in socialist countries than it was in capitalist countries. The mean Gini coefficient – a measure of income equality which runs from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) – was 0.24 for socialist countries in 1970 compared to 0.48 for capitalist countries. [22]

Socialist countries also fared better at meeting their citizens’ basic needs. Compared to all capitalist countries, socialist countries had higher life expectancies, lower levels of infant mortality, and higher levels of literacy. However, the comparison of all socialist countries with all capitalist countries is unfair, because the group of capitalist countries comprises many more countries unable to effectively meet the basic needs of their populations owing to their low level of economic development. While capitalism is often associated with the world’s richest countries, the world’s poorest countries are also capitalist. Desperately poor Haiti, for example, is a capitalist country, while neighboring Cuba, richer and vastly more responsive to the needs of its citizens, is socialist. We would expect socialist countries to have done a better job at meeting the basic needs of their citizens, because they were richer, on average, than all capitalist countries together. But the conclusion still stands if socialist countries are compared with capitalist countries at the same level of economic development; that is, socialist countries did a better job of meeting their citizens’ basic needs compared to capitalist countries in the same income range. Even when comparing socialist countries to the richest capitalist countries, the socialist countries fared well, meeting their citizens’ basic needs as well as advanced capitalist countries met the needs of their citizens, despite the socialist countries’ lower level of economic development and fewer resources. [23] In terms of meeting basic needs, then, socialism was more efficient: it did more with less.

Why were socialist countries, like the GDR, more efficient? First, socialist societies were committed to improving the living standards of the mass of people as their first aim (whereas capitalist countries are organized around profit-maximization as their principle goal – a goal linked to a minority that owns capital and land and derives its income from profits, rent and interest rather than wages.) Secondly, the economic surplus the citizens of socialist countries produced was channelled into making life better for everyone (whereas in capitalist countries the economic surplus goes straight to shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers.) This made socialism more democratic than capitalism in three ways:

• It was more equal. (Capitalism, by contrast, produces inequality.)

• It worked toward improving as much as possible the lot of the classes which have no other means of existence but the labor of their hands and which comprise the vast majority of people. (Capitalist societies, on the other hand, defend and promote the interests of the minority that owns capital.)

• It guaranteed economic and social rights. (By comparison, capitalist societies emphasize political and civil liberties, i.e., protections against the majority using its greater numbers to encroach upon the privileges of the minority that owns and controls the economy.)

As will be discussed below, even when it came to political (as distinct from social and economic) democracy, the differences between East and West Germany were more illusory than real.

Stanching the outward migration of skilled workers

Despite the many advantages the GDR offered, it remained less affluent throughout its four decades compared to its capitalist neighbor to the west. For many “the lure of higher salaries and business opportunities in the West remained strong.” [24] As a result, in its first decade, East Germany’s population shrunk by 10 percent. [25] And while higher wages proved to be an irresistible temptation to East Germans who stressed personal aggrandizement over egalitarian values and social security, the FRG – keen to weaken the GDR – did much to sweeten the pot, offering economic inducements to skilled East Germans to move west. Working-age, but not retired, East Germans were offered interest-free loans, access to scarce apartments, immediate citizenship and compensation for property left behind. [26]

By 1961, the East German government decided that defensive measures needed to be taken, otherwise its population would be depleted of people with important skills vital to building a prosperous society. East German citizens would be barred from entering West Germany without special permission, while West Germans would be prevented from freely entering the GDR. The latter restriction was needed to break up black market currency trading, and to inhibit espionage and sabotage carried out by West German agents. [27] Walls, fences, minefields and other barriers were deployed along the length of the East’s border with the West. Many of the obstacles had existed for years, but until 1961, Berlin – partitioned between the West and East – remained free of physical barriers. The Berlin Wall – the GDR leadership’s solution to the problems of population depletion and Western sabotage and espionage — went up on August 13, 1961. [28]

From 1961 to 1989, 756 East German escapees, an average of 30 per year, were either shot, drown, blown apart by mines or committed suicide after being captured. By comparison, hundreds of Mexicans die every year trying to escape poor Mexico into the far wealthier United States. [29] Approximately 50,000 East Germans were captured trying to cross the border into West Germany from 1961 to 1989. Those who were caught served prison sentences of one year. [30]

Over time, the GDR gradually relaxed its border controls, allowing working-age East Germans to visit the West if there was little risk of their not returning. While in the 1960s, only retirees over the age of 65 were permitted to travel to the West, by the 1980s, East Germans 50 years of age or older were allowed to cross the border. Those with relatives in the FRG were also allowed to visit. By 1987, close to 1.3 million working-age East Germans were permitted to travel to West Germany. Virtually all of them – over 99 percent – returned. [31]

However, not all East Germans were granted the right to cross the border. In 1987, 300,000 requests were turned down. East Germans only received permission after being cleared by the GDR’s state security service, the Stasi. One of the effects of loosening the border restrictions was to swell the Stasi’s ranks, in order to handle the increase in applications for visits to the West. [32]

Pauwels reminds us that,

“A hypothetical capitalist East Germany would likewise have also had to build a wall in order to prevent its population from seeking salvation in another, more prosperous Germany. Incidentally, people have fled and continue to flee, to richer countries also from poor capitalist countries. However, the numerous black refugees from extremely poor Haiti, for example, have never enjoyed the same kind of sympathy in the United States and elsewhere in the world that was bestowed so generously on refugees from the GDR during the Cold War…And should the Mexican government decide to build a ‘Berlin Wall’ along the Rio Grande in order to prevent their people from escaping to El Norte, Washington would certainly not condemn such an initiative the way it used to condemn the infamous East Berlin construction project.” [33]

GDR sets standards for working class in FRG…and abroad

Despite its comparative poverty, the GDR furnished its citizens with generous pensions, free healthcare and education, inexpensive vacations, virtually free childcare and public transportation, and paid maternity leave, as fundamental rights. Even so, East Germany’s standard of living continued to lag behind that of the upper sections of the working class in the West. The comparative paucity and lower quality of consumer goods, and lower wages, were the product of a multitude of factors that conspired against the East German economy: its lower starting point; the need to invest in heavy industry at the expense of light industry; blockade and sanctions imposed by the West; the furnishing of aid to national liberation movements in the global South (which benefited the South more than it did the GDR. By comparison, aid flows from Western countries were designed to profit Western corporations, banks and investors.) What East Germany lacked in consumer goods and wages, it made up for in economic security. The regular economic crises of capitalist economies, with their rampant underemployment and joblessness, escalating poverty and growing homelessness were absent in the GDR.

The greater security of life for East Germans presented a challenge to the advanced capitalist countries. Intent on demonstrating that capitalism was superior to socialism, governments and businesses in the West were forced to meet the standards set by the socialist countries to secure the hearts and minds of their own working class. Generous social insurance, provisions against lay-offs and representation on industrial councils were conceded to West German workers. [34] But these were revocable concessions, not the inevitable rewards of capitalism.

East Germany’s robust social wage acted in much the same way strong unions do in forcing non-unionized plants to provide wages and benefits to match union standards. [35] In the 1970s, Canada’s unionized Stelco steel mill at Hamilton, Ontario set the standard for the neighboring non-unionized Dofasco plant. What the Stelco workers won through collective bargaining, the non-unionized Dofasco workers received as a sop to keep the union out. But once the union goes, the motivation to pay union wages and provide union benefits disappears. Likewise, with the demise of East Germany and the socialist bloc, the need to provide a robust social safety net in the advanced capitalist countries to secure the loyalty of the working class no longer existed. Hence, the GDR not only furnished its own citizens with economic security, but indirectly forced the advanced capitalist countries to make concessions to their own workers. The demise of the GDR therefore not only hurt Ossis (East Germans), depriving them of economic security, but also hurt the working populations of the advanced capitalist countries, whose social programs were the spill-over product of capitalism’s ideological battle with socialism. It is no accident that the claw back of reforms and concessions granted by capitalist ruling classes during the Cold War has accelerated since the opening of the Berlin Wall.

The collapse of the GDR and the socialist bloc has proved injurious to the interests of Western working populations in another way, as well. From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the territory available to capitalist exploitation steadily diminished. This limited the degree of wage competition within the capitalist global labor force to a degree that wouldn’t have been true had the forces of socialism and national liberation not steadily advanced throughout the twentieth century. The counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and China’s opening to foreign investment, ushered in a rapid expansion worldwide in the number of people vying for jobs. North American and Western European workers didn’t compete for jobs with workers in Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Russia in 1970. They do today. The outcome of the rapid expansion of the pool of wage-labor worldwide for workers in the advanced capitalist countries has been a reduction in real wages and explosive growth in the number of permanent lay-offs as competition for jobs escalates. The demise of socialism in Eastern Europe (and China’s taking the capitalist road) has had very real – and unfavourable – consequences for working people in the West.

Going backward

Since the opening of the Berlin Wall and the annexation of the GDR by the FRG in 1990, the former East Germany has been transformed from a rapidly industrializing country where everyone was guaranteed a job and access to a growing array of free and nearly free goods and services, to a de-industrialized backwater teeming with the unemployed where the population is being hollowed out by migration to the wealthier West. “The easterners,” a New York Times article remarked in 2005, “are notoriously unhappy.” Why? “Because life is less secure than it used to be under Communism.” [36]

During the Cold War East Germans who risked their lives to breach the Berlin War were depicted as refugees from political repression. But their escape into the wealthier West had little to do with flight from political repression and much to do with being attracted to a higher standard of living. Today Ossis stream out of the East, just as they did before the Berlin Wall sprang up in 1961. More than one million people have migrated from the former East Germany to the West since 1989. But these days, economic migrants aren’t swapping modestly-paid jobs, longer hours and fewer and poorer consumer goods in the East for higher paying jobs, shorter hours and more and better consumer goods in the West. They’re leaving because they can’t find work. The real unemployment rate, taking into account workers forced into early retirement or into the holding pattern of job re-training schemes, reaches as high as 50 percent in some parts of the former East Germany. [37] And the official unemployment rate is twice as high in the East as it is in the West. Erich Quaschnuk, a retired railroad worker, acknowledges that “the joy back then when the Berlin Wall fell was real,” but quickly adds, “the promise of blooming landscapes never appeared.” [38]

Twenty years after the opening of the Berlin Wall, one-half of people living in the former East Germany say there was more good than bad about the GDR, and that life was happier and better. Some Ossis go so far as to say they “were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down” while others thank God they were able to live in the GDR. Still others describe the unified Germany as a “slave state” and a “dictatorship of capital,” and reject Germany for “being too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic.” [39]

Much as the GDR was faulted for being less democratic politically than the FRG, the FRG’s claim to being more democratic politically is shaky at best.

“East Germany…permitted voters to cast secret ballots and always had more than one candidate for each government position. Although election results typically resulted in over 99 percent of all votes being for candidates of parties that did not favour revolutionary changes in the East German system (just as West German elections results generally resulted in over 99 percent of the people voting for non-revolutionary West German capitalist parties), it was always possible to change the East German system from within the established political parties (including the communist party), as those parties were open to all and encouraged participation in the political process. The ability to change the East German system from within is best illustrated by the East German leader who opened up the Berlin Wall and initiated many political reforms in less than two months in power.” [40]

West Germany outlawed many anti-capitalist political parties and organizations, including, in the 1950s, the popular Communist Party, as Hitler did in the 1930s. (On the other side of the Berlin Wall, no party that aimed to reverse socialism or withdraw from the Warsaw Pact was allowed.) The West German parties tended to be pro-capitalist, and those that weren’t didn’t have access to the resources the wealthy patrons of the mainstream political parties could provide to run the high-profile marketing campaigns that were needed to command significant support in elections. What’s more, West Germans were dissuaded from voting for anti-establishment parties, for fear the victory of a party with a socialist platform would be met by capital strike or flight, and therefore the loss of their jobs. The overwhelming support for pro-capitalist parties, then, rested on two foundations: The pro-capitalist parties uniquely commanded the resources to build messages with mass appeal and which could be broadcast with sufficient volume to reach a mass audience, and the threat of capital strike and capital flight disciplined working class voters to support pro-business parties.

Conclusion

No one would have built a Berlin Wall if they didn’t have to. But in 1961, with the GDR being drained of its working population by a West Germany that had skipped out on its obligations to indemnify the Soviet Union for the losses the Nazis had inflicted upon it in World War II, there were few options, apart from surrender. The Berlin Wall was, without question, regrettable, but it was at the same time a necessary defensive measure. If the anti-fascist, working class leadership of the GDR was to have any hope of building a mass society that was responsive to the basic needs of the working class and which channelled its economic surplus into improving the living conditions and economic security of all, drastic measures would have to be taken; otherwise, the experiment in German democracy — that of building a state that operated on behalf of the mass of people, rather than a minority of shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers — would have to be abandoned. And yet, by the history of drastic measures, this was hardly drastic. Wars weren’t waged, populations weren’t expelled, mass executions weren’t carried out. Instead, people of working-age were prevented from resettling in the West.

The abridgment of mobility rights was hardly unique to revolutionary situations. While the needs of Cold War propaganda pressed Washington to howl indignantly over the GDR’s measures to stanch the flow of its working-age population to the West, the restriction of mobility rights had not been unknown in the United States’ own revolution, where the ‘freedoms’ of dissidents and people of uncertain loyalty had been freely revoked. “During the American Revolution…those who wished to cross into British territory had to obtain a pass from the various State governments or military commanders. Generally, a pass was granted only to individuals of known and acceptable ‘character and views’ and after their promise neither to inform or otherwise to act to the prejudice of the United States. Passes, even for those whose loyalty was guaranteed, were generally difficult to acquire.” [41]

Was the GDR worth defending? Is its demise to be regretted? Unquestionably. The GDR was a mass society that channelled the surplus of the labor of all into the betterment of the conditions of all, rather than into the pockets of the few. It offered its citizens an expanding array of free and virtually free goods and services, was more equal than capitalist countries, and met its citizens’ basic needs better than did capitalist countries at the same level of economic development. Indeed, it met basic needs as well as richer countries did, with fewer resources, in the same way Cuba today meets the basic healthcare needs of all its citizens better than the vastly wealthier United States meets (or rather fails to meet) those of tens of millions of its own citizens. And while the GDR was poorer than West Germany and many other advanced capitalist countries, its comparative poverty was not the consequence of the country’s public ownership and central planning, but of a lower starting point and the burden of having to help the Soviet Union rebuild after the massive devastation Germany inflicted upon it in World War II. Far from being inefficient, public ownership and central planning turned the eastern part of Germany into a rapidly industrializing country which grew faster economically than its West German neighbor and shared the benefits of its growth more evenly. In the East, the economy existed to serve the people. In the West, the people existed to serve the minority that owned and controlled the economy. Limiting mobility rights, just as they have been limited in other revolutions, was a small price to pay to build, not what anyone would be so naïve as to call a workers’ paradise, but what can be called a mass, or truly democratic, society, one which was responsiveness to the basic needs of the mass of people as its principal aim.

1. Austin Murphy, The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the USA’s Cold War Victory, European Press Academic Publishing, 2000.
2. Henry Heller, The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2006.
3. Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Toronto, 2002; R. Palme Dutt, The Internationale, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., London, 1964.
4. Melvyn Leffler, “New perspectives on the Cold War: A conversation with Melvyn Leffler,” November, 1998. http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1998-11/leffler.html)
5. Heller.
6. John Wight, “From WWII to the US empire,” The Morning Star (UK), October 11, 2009.
7. John Green, “Looking back at life in the GDR,” The Morning Star (UK), October 7, 2009.
8. Shirley Ceresto, “Socialism, capitalism, and inequality,” The Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring, 1982.
9. Dutt; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, Maine, 1995.
10. Pauwels.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Murphy.
15. Pauwels.
16. Green.
17. Ibid.
18. The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1989.
19. Murphy.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ceresto.
23. Ibid.
24. Green.
25. Murphy.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Pauwels.
34. Fred Goldstein, Low-Wage Capitalism, World View Forum, New York, 2008.
35. Ibid.
36. The New York Times, December 6, 2005.
37. The Guardian (UK), November 15, 2006.
38. “Disappointed Eastern Germans turn right,” The Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2005.
39. Julia Bonstein, “Majority of Eastern Germans felt life better under communism,” Der Spiegel, July 3, 2009.
40. Murphy.
41. Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Zed Book Ltd., London, 1984

Hard times and the lure of fascism, first posted: March 28, 2009, Source: The Toronto Star, Thomas Walkom

















http://www.thestar.com/News/Insight/article/608947


During the Great Depression of the 1930s, two of the world's most "successful" economies were those of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
In hindsight, this sounds perverse – even obscene. But at the time, political leaders from around the world watched the Italian and German economic experiments and, in many cases, lauded them.

During a 1937 visit to Germany, Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King noted in his diary how impressed he was by Adolf Hitler's labour policies.

In the U.S., as German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch recounts in his book Three New Deals, then president Franklin Roosevelt pronounced himself "deeply impressed by what (Italian dictator Benito Mussolini) has accomplished..."
King and Roosevelt made these comments not because they favoured Hitler's murderous anti-Semitism or Mussolini's brutal blackshirt tactics.

Rather they were intrigued by the combination of authoritarianism and capitalism that the two dictators used to reduce unemployment and revive their respective economies.

Both Hitler and Mussolini spent massive amounts of government funds on public works and rearmament.

At the same time, their bans on independent trade unions ensured that workers wouldn't interfere with any recovery by demanding higher wages – an example of labour-management co-operation that appealed particularly to King.

Even more important than the praise of foreign leaders, however, was the fact that many, if not most, Germans and Italians liked what their dictators were doing.
The reason is fairly simple. With the notable exceptions of Jews, Communists, social democrats, liberals, Roma, gays, dissident pastors and anyone with a shred of conscience – most Germans and Italians were materially better off than they had been.

All of this is worth keeping in mind today as the world heads into what many economists believe will be the worst slump since the 1930s.
Because the Great Depression teaches us two things.

First, capitalism doesn't need liberalism or even democracy to be successful. In fact, in the '30s, many came to the not illogical conclusion that an authoritarian market economy could provide a higher standard of living.

Second, in times of stress, people are susceptible. They want strong leaders and fear outsiders. They are desperate to hold on to what they have and anxious to find scapegoats.

A version of this kind of right-wing populism aimed at Muslims swept the U.S., and to a lesser extent Canada, after the terror attacks of 9/11.
An economic version is waiting in the wings today.

The signs are there. In the U.S., right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh is treated by much of the media as a fool. His rantings against President Barack Obama are deemed so beyond the pale that even Canadian-born, conservative ideologue David Frum has weighed in against him.

Yet Limbaugh is still avidly listened to by an estimated 20 million Americans each week, far more than read Frum's learned treatises.

What's more, Limbaugh's message of anger and resentment resonates. Many Americans are increasingly turning their rage against migrant Mexican workers believed to be stealing jobs. That's a Rush Limbaugh issue that's now raised by even Hispanic members of the U.S. Congress.

As the economy worsens, the message of right-wing populism will almost surely resonate more.

In Europe, there are similar rumblings.

British workers have protested against Italian and Portuguese labourers imported to do local jobs. While insisting that it is maintaining its open-door policy to other European Union members, the government there has quietly made it harder for non-EU immigrants to get work visas.

In France, the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has persuaded carmaker Renault – in exchange for government aid – to move some of its auto production from Slovenia to Paris.

Sarkozy insists the move won't cost Slovenia any jobs. But the decision has unnerved Eastern Europe's low-wage countries that, until recently, were big fans of global trade.

Indeed, the recession has already brought political instability to Eastern Europe. With export markets drying up and their currencies foundering, Hungary and Ukraine face bankruptcy.

Bulgaria and Lithuania have been hit by protests. On Tuesday, the Czech government fell.

Meanwhile, the promises of those advocating the more liberal version of capitalism have proven remarkably hollow.

In the fall, leaders of the world's 20 main economies, the so-called G-20, promised not to raise any new trade barriers – even those permitted under international treaties.

Yet since then, almost all of these countries have broken this vow. The U.S. was the most flagrant with its Buy America provisions imbedded in President Barack Obama's stimulus package.

But the World Bank calculates that at least 16 other members of the G-20, including Canada, have introduced similar trade-restrictions measures since November.
The international body targets Canada's decision to subsidize North American auto plants in this country as one such measure that has caused distortions in the international trading economy.

None of which is to say that fascism is just around the corner. History rarely repeats itself in such an obvious manner.

Indeed, the modern version of authoritarian capitalism, Chinese capitalism, is neither racist nor (for the time being at least) imperialist.
Besides, if governments are willing to admit the failings of the market economy, there are ways to deal with this slump that do not require dictatorship.

But simplistic and dangerous ideas do exist out there. And if, as former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge suggested this week, the crisis continues for several years, and if governments can provide nothing more than ineffective market nostrums, these dangerous ideas will gain popular appeal.

That's the part of history that does repeat itself.



Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

ZIZEK ON ANTI-SMOKING CAMPAIGN IN USA, Source: Doug Henwood Interviews Slavoj Zizek , (Excerpt), Oct 31, 2009


Anti-Smoking Zealots in America













"Let's take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in liberalism, that comes down to "I want to be left alone by others; I don't want to get too close to the others." Also, in this fight against the tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct yuppie who is doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain anti-capitalist aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big Tobacco? It functions as an ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock market gains, but you can say, "I'm against tobacco companies." Now I should make it clear that I don't smoke. And I don't like tobacco companies..."

The growth of the extreme right in Hungary, Source: Hungarian Spectrum, October 29, 2009



















http://esbalogh.typepad.com/hungarianspectrum/2009/10/the-growth-of-the-extreme-right-in-hungary.html


There is no question that the most burning issue in current Hungarian political life is the spectacular growth of the extreme right. Political Capital, one of those "independent" think-tanks József Debreczeni wrote about the other day, published a study in Hírszerző dealing with the "causes of the growth of the extreme right."

The authors mention five possible causes: (1) strengthening of a critical attitude toward the regime itself, (2) a shift toward the right in general, (3) growth of belief in a more authoritarian regime, (4) lack of trust in politicians, and (5) growth of societal antagonism.

As usual these categories are nebulous at best. What does "shift toward the right in general" actually mean? This to my mind is not a cause but the result of certain political and social changes. Or, what does "societal antagonism" mean? Perhaps it would have been better to dispense with this list and instead move straight to the details. They make more sense.

There is nothing new in the statement that Hungarian society expected too much from the change of regime. Most people believed that with the introduction of a "market economy" (they judiciously avoided the term "capitalism") Hungary would be an earthly paradise overnight. Just the opposite happened. About 1.5 million pople lost their jobs, inflation set in, and interest rates were sky high. The government tried to tell people that eventually everything would be better, but five years after the change of regime came the "Bokros package" that meant a 17% drop in real wages. Yet it did the trick and eventually life was getting better although living standards were still somewhat below the 1989 level. Between 2002 and 2006 living standards soared, but not because of the simultaneous growth of the Hungarian economy. Most of the goodies the government provided came from foreign loans. The country's financial situation became dire and something had to be done. A new austerity program had to be introduced just at the time that people were expecting further improvements in their lives. As soon as it became clear that people's expectations couldn't be fulfilled, the socialist-liberal coalition's popularity dropped precipitously. Way before the the leaked speech of Ferenc Gyurcsány in which he tried to convince the socialist parliamentary members that their old ways of "economic management," if you can call it that, couldn't be continued. No more raising living standards from borrowed money.

The beginning of real dissatisfaction can be dated to the summer of 2006 when it became clear that another round of austerity measures would be introduced. Admittedly not as stringent as those of Lajos Bokros but even a drop of a few percentage points set off the Hungarian publict hat was accustomed to economic benefits from the state. Their dissatisfaction with the austerity program was translated into disappointment with the democratic regime itself. According to data gathered by the European Social Survey, out of twenty-one European countries only in Bulgaria is dissatisfaction greater than in Hungary. With this general dissatisfaction came discontent with the institutions, the political parties, the politicians, the European Union. In turn there was an increased responsiveness to radical messages. What is especially worrisome is that young people are leery about the benefits of democracy. According to a survey, "Ifjúság 2008," less than fifty percent of young people (between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine) think that "democracy is superior to any other regime."

The extreme right began to flourish in this environment of discontent. While in 2004 perhaps 6% of the adult population belonged to the group, today, according to Political Capital, the extreme right has about a 13% "market share". This growth has a lot to do with the weakness of civic society. Again, according to the World Value Survey, Hungary and Bulgaria are at the bottom of the list as far as the activity of civic organizations is concerned. There is also a general suspicion about the democratic institutions, and one cannot even blame the Hungarians. It is enough to see the work of the prosecutor's office or the activities of the courts. One can hear constant complaints about the lack of law and order, often due to endless legal wranglings over the letter of the law. The police accordingly don't quite know what is lawful and what is not.

Intolerance has become stronger in the last few years than ever before. Or, it is also possible that while a few years ago people didn't think that it was acceptable behavior to make anti-Gypsy or anti-Semitic remarks in public, today there are no such compunctions. I found a chart in the study comparing political anti-Semitism in seven countries especially interesting. Participants were asked to agree or disagree with two statements. The first was that Jews have too much power in the business world; the second, that Jews are responsible for the recent global economic crisis.Political antisemitism The brownish colored column shows the percent of positive responses to the first question, and the grey measures positive responses to the second. Hungary has the highest values, followed by Spain, Poland, Austria, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Finally, one mustn't forget about Jobbik's "genius" in building a mass movement. Surely, Vona and his friends hit the jackpot when they decided to make the Gypsy question the central theme of their propaganda. Anti-Gypsy feelings are strong and widespread. According to some studies perhaps 85% of Hungarians find the Gypsies an undesirable ethnic group. In addition to adopting a successful central theme, Jobbik also managed to create an institutional network. A great help in this regard was another of their brainstorms: the Hungarian Guard. With the help of the Guard Jobbik could pose as not so much a party but as a civic, grass roots movement. Before August 2007, that is before the establishment of the Hungarian Guard, Jobbik had practically no local chapters. As soon as the Hungarian Guard appeared on the scene Jobbik spread like wildfire, and by now it can boast almost 180 local chapters. In its membership three groups are overrepresented: young people, villagers, and inhabitants of the northeastern counties of Hungary.

The authors of the study do not predict long-term success for Jobbik. Once an extremist movement becomes a party and participates in the political processes its weaknesses are exposed. Soon enough it becomes obvious that it doesn't have instant remedies. That the movement's simplistic answers to complicated issues don't work. And then comes the disappointment of their followers and a waning of their popularity. This was the case with the Arrow Cross Party after 1939 and MIÉP after 2002. It may also be the fate of both Jobbik and Fidesz.

NOT ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, by Andy Newman, in: socialistunity.com/, 30 October, 2009

The invitation by his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans to join the Church of Rome is not the sort of topic that the political left tends to find very interesting. So I was very pleased to see Splintered Sunrise tackling the issue. Although Splinty’s understandable irritation with the National Secular Society gives those numbskulls more significance than they really have.

The importance of the issue is recognising that any multicultural and pluralistic society will include within it individuals and faith communities who take their moral and ethical guidance from their religion.

Splintered Sunrise is particularly strong in recognising that debate among religious communities must be accepted in their own terms. Atheist liberals simply have no business in telling Christians what they should or should not believe; and Christians are as entitled as anyone else to participate in the wider democratic debate in our society, to seek to bring society closer to their own moral and ethical codes.

There is a naïve form of progressive politics that seeks to polemicise in favour of atheism and secularism. The assumption that a religious authority should not prevail over people who do not accept its values is a fundamental one for secularists. But conversely why should the authority of a secular society prevail over people who do choose to self-identify with a religious faith, and its entailed values? Secularists who are also atheists even argue that both the secular and the religious laws are both the product of human thought, so why should one be privileged over the other?

It is worth remembering Dr Rowan Williams’s controversial and misunderstood lecture on Sharia law in February 2008. Fundamental to Dr Williams’s argument is the importance of collective identities: in a multi-cultural society people who are all equally law abiding can have more than one sense of identity or allegiance. What is more, for the religious believer, the core teachings of their faith are Divinely inspired, and as such are typically non-negotiable. What we need to do is avoid a false polarisation that regards religious belief as inherently conservative, and which creates a mythology of progressive and universal humanist values – a “universalism” that by happy coincidence just happens to coincide with the preferred lifestyle choices of the metropolitan middle classes in our very own society.

As Dr Williams ably argued last year:

There is a bit of a risk here in the way we sometimes talk about the universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics. The great protest of the Enlightenment was against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number. Its claim to override traditional forms of governance and custom by looking towards a universal tribunal was entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe. The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process.

So “Universality” is itself a socially created myth. The universality of the human values of the Enlightmenment was no more than the particularity of the specific form of the French Revolution, (and the preceding reformism of the absolutist monarchy) to seek to establish a single collective and communal identity through promoting ubiquity of the French language and a single political authority and legal system around allegedly universal values. This was a political project of nation building. The limits of such universality could never extend beyond the protection of the bayonets of the Grand Armee, and couldn’t really be universal even within France for those who chose a different allegiance. We should not regard this enlightenment project as any more “universally” valid and rationalist than any other historically contingent ideology.

We must recognise that people who choose to self-identify with a religious community, and its associated laws and ethics have a right to do so. The actual, and so far relatively successful, experience of multi-culturalism and convergence towards consensual tolerant values in British society has not been on the basis of any campaign for secularism, but has succeeded by offering choice and empowerment.

The media discussion of the Pope’s offer to conservative clergy in the Anglican communion has been met with some alarmism, for example the front page article in the Times effectively predicting the end of the Anglican church, the discussion has also revealed some lazy thinking.

The final form of the deal is not yet clear, although it may involve “a church within a church”. Deacon Greg Kandra, in his blog, quotes two well connected Italian newspapers. According to

“Il Giornale and Il Foglio, canon lawyers are continuing to define what has been a particularly unclear aspect of the new provision: whether married Anglicans could train as seminarians. Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale reports that over the last few days, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts has been working to clarify this point. He writes that “everything suggests” seminarians in these future Anglo-Catholic communities “will have to be celibate like all their colleagues in the Latin Catholic Church.”

This would not apply to the converting clergy, but would reduce the distinctively Anglican flavour of the proposed “Personal Ordinariate” if new clergy could not marry; a question that might be of more concern to the laity is whether or not the “Personal Ordinariate” would be expected to rule against the use of contraception for heterosexual, married couples.

Despite the hype, there is not exactly a stampede for people to convert. For example Anglican Mainstream reports

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, a long-term mem­ber of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) and the International Anglican- Roman Catholic Commis­sion for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), who was the subject of press speculation that he could accept the offer, said on Tuesday that he was not going to become a Roman Catholic. … The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Most Revd Fred Hiltz, said that he did not expect “a groundswell of response” to the papal decree. Even among those who have separated themselves from the Angli­can Church of Canada, there is an abiding desire to remain in commu­nion with the Archbishop of Canter­bury.”

The lazy thinking revolves around stereotypes that Catholics are en bloc more conservative that Anglicans; and that the most conservative parts of the Anglican communion tilt towards Rome. Neither of these suppositions are necessarily true.

Not all Anglo-Catholics are conservative; and many of the conservatives in the church are evangelicals. For example, two Anglican bodies, the Society of Catholic Priests and Affirming Catholicism issued a joint press release pointing out that:

The majority of catholics within the church are in favour of women’s ministry and wish to remain loyal to the Anglican tradition within the Anglican Communion.
The Society of Catholic Priests, which has over 500 members in this country and is about to establish chapters in the American Episcopal Church and in Australia, and Affirming Catholicism which draws together clergy and laity in this country and throughout the Anglican Communion, are committed to the catholic nature and teaching of the Church of England. We are actively working to see women ordained to the episcopate and hold that this is entirely consistent with the teaching of the church and the historic nature of our orders. We are also convinced that the issues of human sexuality should not be ones that divide the church.

On the other hand, it is conservative evangelicals not Catholics who have been stirring up bigotry against gay people in Uganda; and the Anglican Church of Uganda has so far been silent about the proposed draconian anti-gay laws in that country, despite the ruling of the 1998 Lambeth conference that committed the whole Communion to “listen pastorally to the experience of homosexual persons and … to assure them that they are loved by God…” and to “minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn the irrational fear of homosexuals…”.

In modern British society organised religion is not a structurally conservative social force, although it can be conservative it can also be progressive, - for example those Catholics who are both conservatively opposed to abortion, and yet deeply opposed to nuclear weapons and social injustice. Such people are not simply “bigots” even if they do take illiberal positions on some social issues. The task is to work with them on the political issues we agree with them over, and via the democratic process we seek to minimise their influence over those issues we disagree with them.

Churches provide institutional continuity and expression for religious faith. There will always therefore be a tension between an evolving and changing society and the what believers hold to be eternal truth embodied in the faith. Father Ivan Aquilina, the Anglo-Catholic priest of St John the Baptist in Sevenoaks, expresses how this affects the divergence between Rome and Canterbury like this:

“The fact is that what happened in that process is that the two communions entrusted God to lead them on, if they have not arrived where they had hoped to then it is a question of seeking what the Spirit is saying to the Churches. However some Churches are happier to listen to the spirit of this world than the Spirit of the living God.”

But the question is, for religious believers, how do you know what is the spirit of the world, and what is the spirit of God? The conservative evangelical, Revd John Richardson, poses a very good defence of Anglicanism on his blog

the Church of England is not a Church which operates by ‘Scripture alone’ in the sense that it gives people the Bible and nothing else to represent its core beliefs. Rather, there are many points of potential theological controversy where the formularies of the Church of England take a settled view —on infant baptism, for example, or on the nature of bread and wine at Communion.

The Church of England has therefore set itself under the authority of Scripture, but via its formularies it also offers at certain critical points an interpretation of Scripture. And this allows it to be a dynamic, rather than a static body. In particular, it does not require us to be committed to the formularies as if they were infallible and beyond criticism.

We may compare this with the way that most Christians still use the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds. There are indeed those who are willing to question even these, but there are far more who regard them as, in some sense, having settled certain theological disputes, if not beyond question, at least in a way that means questioners must acknowledge they are departing from certain historical ‘norms’

In other words Scripture needs human interpretation, and the human interpretation is fallible and open to modification.

This is of course a workable dividing line between what is human and what is Divine in the church’s teaching. But moving the goal posts has not solved the problem. This is because the scriptures are themselves the work of human beings, and indeed with regard to the New Testament, the books included and the books rejected from the years of the early Church were clearly a human decision.

So reference to scripture requires not only interpretation of how the Bible applies to novel situations, but also human interpretation of what parts of the Bible merely reflect the social norms of the Judaic and early Christian societies who created it. Unless you believe that God himself directly wrote the Bible, then it was open to the authors of the Gospels to misinterpret the spirit of God’s law in light of their own fallible, human, and socially contextualised experience.

How that question is resolved one for religious individuals and communities to decide for themselves; and non religious people should have no voice in the matter; which is why the bleetings of the National Secular Society, and the Richard Dawkins’s of this world are so annoying.

We should accept that in reality the content of religions and religious observance is not static, but changes with time as influenced by the changing values of society and by political pressure, so the political battles should not be between secularism and religion, but to shape the values of both wider society and the religious communities.

As society moves in a more liberal direction, then there will be those within religious communities who resist that change, and there will also be those who believe that the liberalisation of social attitudes is also the working of God’s love. For the former, the word of scripture acts as authority, for the latter the spirit of scripture needs to be reaffirmed in the light of the changing values of society.

Of course, life is never even that simple, and there will be those who are conservative on what they see as moral issues, and yet who are strong believers in social justice and equality; and there will be those who are liberal on social issues, and yet have conservative politics on economic justice.

What the left needs to do is understand that the past traditions of militant atheism, telling religious people that they are wrong, stupid or bigoted, are indefensible and counter-productive. Many people with liberal, socialist or emancipatory politics are inspired by their religious faith.

Majority of Eastern Germans Believe that 'Life was better" in the German Democratic Republic,Der Spiegel, By Julia Bonstein, Saturday, October 31, 09















Andrew's blog note: This article is from Der Spiegel, an anti-marxist newspaper in western Germany. Nevertheless, despite its obviously anti-socialist tilt, this article shows the many advantages and social solidarity available to citizens of the former German Democratic Republic
************************************************************

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
The life of Birger, a native of the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in northeastern Germany, could read as an all-German success story. The Berlin Wall came down when he was 10. After graduating from high school, he studied economics and business administration in Hamburg, lived in India and South Africa, and eventually got a job with a company in the western German city of Duisburg. Today Birger, 30, is planning a sailing trip in the Mediterranean. He isn't using his real name for this story, because he doesn't want it to be associated with the former East Germany, which he sees as "a label with negative connotations."
And yet Birger is sitting in a Hamburg cafe, defending the former communist country. "Most East German citizens had a nice life," he says. "I certainly don't think that it's better here." By "here," he means reunified Germany, which he subjects to questionable comparisons. "In the past there was the Stasi, and today (German Interior Minister Wolfgang) Schäuble -- or the GEZ (the fee collection center of Germany's public broadcasting institutions) -- are collecting information about us." In Birger's opinion, there is no fundamental difference between dictatorship and freedom. "The people who live on the poverty line today also lack the freedom to travel."
Birger is by no means an uneducated young man. He is aware of the spying and repression that went on in the former East Germany, and, as he says, it was "not a good thing that people couldn't leave the country and many were oppressed." He is no fan of what he characterizes as contemptible nostalgia for the former East Germany. "I haven't erected a shrine to Spreewald pickles in my house," he says, referring to a snack that was part of a the East German identity. Nevertheless, he is quick to argue with those who would criticize the place his parents called home: "You can't say that the GDR was an illegitimate state, and that everything is fine today."
As an apologist for the former East German dictatorship, the young Mecklenburg native shares a majority view of people from eastern Germany. Today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 57 percent, or an absolute majority, of eastern Germans defend the former East Germany. "The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there," say 49 percent of those polled. Eight percent of eastern Germans flatly oppose all criticism of their former home and agree with the statement: "The GDR had, for the most part, good sides. Life there was happier and better than in reunified Germany today."
These poll results, released last Friday in Berlin, reveal that glorification of the former East Germany has reached the center of society. Today, it is no longer merely the eternally nostalgic who mourn the loss of the GDR. "A new form of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former GDR) has taken shape," says historian Stefan Wolle. "The yearning for the ideal world of the dictatorship goes well beyond former government officials." Even young people who had almost no experiences with the GDR are idealizing it today. "The value of their own history is at stake," says Wolle.
People are whitewashing the dictatorship, as if reproaching the state meant calling their own past into question. "Many eastern Germans perceive all criticism of the system as a personal attack," says political scientist Klaus Schroeder, 59, director of an institute at Berlin's Free University that studies the former communist state. He warns against efforts to downplay the SED dictatorship by young people whose knowledge about the GDR is derived mainly from family conversations, and not as much from what they have learned in school. "Not even half of young people in eastern Germany describe the GDR as a dictatorship, and a majority believe the Stasi was a normal intelligence service," Schroeder concluded in a 2008 study of school students. "These young people cannot, and in fact have no desire to, recognize the dark sides of the GDR."
"Driven Out of Paradise"
Schroeder has made enemies with statements like these. He received more than 4,000 letters, some of them furious, in reaction to reporting on his study. The 30-year-old Birger also sent an e-mail to Schroeder. The political scientist has now compiled a selection of typical letters to document the climate of opinion in which the GDR and unified Germany are discussed in eastern Germany. Some of the material gives a shocking insight into the thoughts of disappointed and angry citizens. "From today's perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down," one person writes, and a 38-year-old man "thanks God" that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn't until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people.
Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic. Schroeder finds such statements alarming. "I am afraid that a majority of eastern Germans do not identify with the current sociopolitical system."
Many of the letter writers are either people who did not benefit from German reunification or those who prefer to live in the past. But they also include people like Thorsten Schön.
After 1989 Schön, a master craftsman from Stralsund, a city on the Baltic Sea, initially racked up one success after the next. Although he no longer owns the Porsche he bought after reunification, the lion skin rug he bought on a vacation trip to South Africa -- one of many overseas trips he has made in the past 20 years -- is still lying on his living room floor. "There's no doubt it: I've been fortunate," says the 51-year-old today. A major contract he scored during the period following reunification made it easier for Schön to start his own business. Today he has a clear view of the Strelasund sound from the window of his terraced house.
'People Lie and Cheat Everywhere Today'
Wall decorations from Bali decorate his living room, and a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty stands next to the DVD player. All the same, Schön sits on his sofa and rhapsodizes about the good old days in East Germany. "In the past, a campground was a place where people enjoyed their freedom together," he says. What he misses most today is "that feeling of companionship and solidarity." The economy of scarcity, complete with barter transactions, was "more like a hobby." Does he have a Stasi file? "I'm not interested in that," says Schön. "Besides, it would be too disappointing."
His verdict on the GDR is clear: "As far as I'm concerned, what we had in those days was less of a dictatorship than what we have today." He wants to see equal wages and equal pensions for residents of the former East Germany. And when Schön starts to complain about unified Germany, his voice contains an element of self-satisfaction. People lie and cheat everywhere today, he says, and today's injustices are simply perpetrated in a more cunning way than in the GDR, where starvation wages and slashed car tires were unheard of. Schön cannot offer any accounts of his own bad experiences in present-day Germany. "I'm better off today than I was before," he says, "but I am not more satisfied."
Schön's reasoning is less about cool logic than it is about settling scores. What makes him particularly dissatisfied is "the false picture of the East that the West is painting today." The GDR, he says, was "not an unjust state," but "my home, where my achievements were recognized." Schön doggedly repeats the story of how it took him years of hard work before starting his own business in 1989 -- before reunification, he is quick to add. "Those who worked hard were also able to do well for themselves in the GDR." This, he says, is one of the truths that are persistently denied on talk shows, when western Germans act "as if eastern Germans were all a little stupid and should still be falling to their knees today in gratitude for reunification." What exactly is there to celebrate, Schön asks himself?
"Rose-tinted memories are stronger than the statistics about people trying to escape and applications for exit visas, and even stronger than the files about killings at the Wall and unjust political sentences," says historian Wolle.
These are memories of people whose families were not persecuted and victimized in East Germany, of people like 30-year-old Birger, who says today: "If reunification hadn't happened, I would also have had a good life."
Life as a GDR Citizen
After completing his university degree, he says, he would undoubtedly have accepted a "management position in some business enterprise," perhaps not unlike his father, who was the chairman of a farmers' collective. "The GDR played no role in the life of a GDR citizen," Birger concludes. This view is shared by his friends, all of them college-educated children of the former East Germany who were born in 1978. "Reunification or not," the group of friends recently concluded, it really makes no difference to them. Without reunification, their travel destinations simply would have been Moscow and Prague, instead of London and Brussels. And the friend who is a government official in Mecklenburg today would probably have been a loyal party official in the GDR.
The young man expresses his views levelheadedly and with few words, although he looks slightly defiant at times, like when he says: "I know, what I'm telling you isn't all that interesting. The stories of victims are easier to tell."
Birger doesn't usually mention his origins. In Duisburg, where he works, hardly anyone knows that he is originally from East Germany. But on this afternoon, Birger is adamant about contradicting the "victors' writing of history." "In the public's perception, there are only victims and perpetrators. But the masses fall by the wayside."
This is someone who feels personally affected when Stasi terror and repression are mentioned. He is an academic who knows "that one cannot sanction the killings at the Berlin Wall." However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."
This brings up an old question once again: Did a real life exist in the midst of a sham? Downplaying the dictatorship is seen as the price people pay to preserve their self-respect. "People are defending their own lives," writes political scientist Schroeder, describing the tragedy of a divided country.

[Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.]

Afghanistan sacrifices may have been in vain, Toronto Star, October 31, 2009,Thomas Walkom


Where does the war in Afghanistan go? My sense is that it is finally beginning the long and drawn-out process toward an inglorious end.

For Canada, this would mark the finish of the longest – and the least considered – war that this country has ever fought.

The latest hint comes from the New York Times, which has been following the intricate debates over war strategy within U.S. President Barack Obama's administration.

This week, the Times reported that Obama now seems to favour a compromise between those in the military who want to send at least 40,000 more troops to a conflict that could last another decade and those, like Vice-president Joe Biden, who want to scale back the anti-Taliban ground war in order to concentrate on Al Qaeda terrorists.

The reported compromise would involve NATO forces – beefed-up by a few thousand new U.S. troops – withdrawing from much of the countryside to focus on a handful of Afghan cities and areas.

Although administration officials deny it, most of the country would effectively be ceded to the Taliban.

Not that this would make much practical difference to Afghans. According to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama's man in charge of the war, the Taliban already act as the real government in much of the south and east, levying taxes, operating courts and even appointing ombudsmen empowered to hear citizen complaints.

But a retreat to the cities would signal that America was readying itself for the last act in the tragedy that has been the Afghan war.

In the end, this may not be the exact strategy that emerges once Obama announces his revamped plans. But that it is even being considered speaks volumes.

It's clear that America is losing its stomach for this war. Public opinion polls point to this, as does the president's decision to revisit and revise war plans that he announced just seven months ago.

Still, don't expect a dramatic about-face. Obama is not likely to announce that he has begun a process of ignominious retreat. That would be too embarrassing.

Instead, the war is sure to drag on – as it did in Vietnam five years after then president Richard Nixon promised an end to the conflict.

More civilians and soldiers (including Canadians) are likely to die in the name of preserving what the politicians like to call Western credibility.

But, as in Vietnam, the stages of withdrawal have been put inexorably into motion. Already, NATO and the U.S. are talking of training Afghan troops to do the fighting (40 years ago, this was called Vietnamizing the war).

Surrendering large chunks of the countryside would be the final stage before the inevitable denouement.

Yet, realistically, pulling out is the only viable option. The only possible way for the U.S. and its allies to win this war would be to adopt McChrystal's strategy of occupying the country village by village – and staying for years.

Even that would involve an impossibly high risk of failure. McChrystal's counter-insurgency vision depends upon American and NATO troops exercising a degree of restraint and cultural sensitivity during their occupation that is unreasonable to expect from any foreign fighting force.

(It's worth noting here, as journalist Robert Fisk points out in his book, The Great War for Civilization, that the former Soviet Union attempted its own version of cultural sensitivity by using Muslim troops to invade Afghanistan in 1979. That quickly broke down once Afghan insurgents began to literally crucify and display captured Soviet soldiers).

More to the point, however, the McChrystal strategy is politically impossible. Americans are sick of this war. They will not accept the cost in soldiers and money that the escalation he wants would require.

For NATO countries like Canada, this has not been a glorious time. They joined the conflict in 2001 because, as military allies of a country that claimed to be under attack from Afghanistan (even though, in any real sense, this wasn't true), they had little choice.

Yet this ill-thought-out war quickly became an opportunity.

Bureaucrats at Brussels' NATO headquarters saw Afghanistan as a war that could make the old anti-Communist alliance, largely meaningless since the Soviet collapse, relevant again.

In Canada, then prime minister Paul Martin's Liberal government viewed robust Canadian participation in this war as a chance to mend fences with a U.S. administration still angered by Ottawa's earlier decision to avoid the Iraq conflict.

As well, Ottawa hoped that its decision to play a serious military role in Afghanistan's dangerous south would convince security-conscious Washington to keep the Canada-U.S. border wide open for trade.

For Canada's generals, the war was a chance to winkle more money and equipment from their tight-fisted political masters – as well as an opportunity to burnish the image of the military.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who inherited the war, saw it as a chance to further their overall strategy of shifting the federal government away from social policy toward more traditional 19th-century functions like defence.

And the media saw it as a chance to reinvent the simple but powerful narrative of heroes (us) and villains (them). Indeed, at times the glee with which the media embraced the war bordered on the unwholesome.

Yet in the end, Canadians – with the notable exception of those whose friends and family were soldiers – paid little attention to the war.

It was not an issue in the federal election of 2006. Nor, thanks in part to a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Liberals and Conservatives, was it an issue in the next election two years later.

Soldiers continued to die, usually in ones and twos. But, with the on-again-off-again exception of the New Democrats and a handful of media gadflies, there was no national debate as to what, if anything, these deaths accomplished.

The answer, it now seems, is very little. Canadian soldiers acted professionally; they did what they had contracted to do. They risked life and health and, in too many cases, lost the bet.

But as the long countdown to final withdrawal begins, we now know that their deaths were pointless. The terrorists that the West was supposed to capture have moved on to Pakistan. The xenophobic and misogynistic Taliban that ran most of Afghanistan in 2001, run most of it again.


The war we never should have waged is effectively lost. We have only to admit it.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

I am from workers, fishers, swilers, a poem by Andrew Taylor


Mary Ann Ford Taylor













"I am from workers, fishers, swilers", a poem by Andrew Taylor

October 30, 2009

The assault of two ind. journalists in Tunisia and the arrest of a third in the wake of last week's elections must be punished, Amnesty, 30 Oct 09

Assaults on journalists in Tunisia must be punished
Slim Boukhdir was stopped in the street and forced into a car on the evening of 21 October, by five men in plain clothes


30 October 2009
The assault of two independent journalists in Tunisia and the arrest of a third in the wake of last week's elections must be punished, Amnesty International said on Friday.

"It appears that these three journalists were targeted because they have criticized the government and opposed the re-election, for a fifth term, of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali," said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's director for the Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"This is an extremely worrying development, indicating that there is likely to be no let-up in the Tunisian government's repression of dissent."

Slim Boukhdhir, an independent journalist who has previously been jailed for writing articles critical of the government, was stopped in the street and forced into a car on the evening of 21 October, by five men in plain clothes, all believed to be police or security officials.

They forced him to close his eyes, beat and insulted him as they drove away, then stopped the car, threw him out and kicked and punched him until he lost consciousness.

Before he did so, one of the assailants brandished a knife and threatened to stab him.

He was stripped of his clothes and his mobile phone, identity documents, money and house keys were taken, apparently to give the impression that he was the victim of an ordinary criminal mugging, and he was dumped in Belvédère Park in north Tunis.

A passer-by helped him to get a taxi and a friend then took him to hospital where he learnt that he had sustained a broken nose and damage to his left eye, in addition to multiple bruising to his face and chest pain.

Two hours before his abduction and assault, Slim Boukhdhir had given an interview to the BBC in which he criticized the lack of press freedom in Tunisia.

On Thursday, another journalist and well-known government critic, Taoufik Ben Brik was arrested when he went to a police station in response to a summons he had received in connection with an alleged assault on a woman near his daughter's school on 22 October.

He appeared before an investigating judge in the absence of his lawyers and charged with "assault, breaching pubic morality and damage to property" according to an official statement. He is currently being detained in Mornaguia Prison and is due to stand trial on 19 November.

Before the election, he wrote several articles criticizing President Ben Ali's government.

Later on Thursday, Lotfi Hajji, local correspondent for the Al Jazeera satellite TV channel, was subjected to a sustained verbal assault when he arrived at Tunis Carthage Airport after returning on a flight from Qatar.

His unknown assailant, who is suspected of being a member of the security forces or someone acting on their behalf, shouted and insulted him in a highly intimidating manner, accusing him of opposing the government. In his reporting for Al Jazeera, Lotfi Hajji, had criticized aspects of the recent presidential and legislative elections.

Amnesty International said that the targeting of these journalists, all known critics of the Ben Ali's government, reflects a wider and long standing pattern in which critics of the government, and human rights activists, are routinely subjected to oppressive police surveillance, threats and intimidation by security officials or people in plain clothes believed to be acting on their behalf.

"It is high time that the Tunisian government put its house in order and lived up to its obligations under international human rights law," said Malcolm Smart.

"The government portrays itself internationally as one committed to human rights and good governance but this, sadly, is far from the truth. In practice, the government is intolerant of criticism and allows its security forces and strong arm men to assault and intimidate critics with impunity."

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