31 years ago #history edit: #WallObserver
Source: BBC/getty images - in case someone claims I pretend to have taken this photo myself.Thanks for remembering history.
One step forward—two steps back...
Are we the commies now?
Some years ago, I spoke to an erstwhile East German who was already quite elderly.
He loathed Communism, despised the DDR government,—but hated the Americans
worse, and accordingly hated the BRD American satellite even worse than the DDR Soviet satellite.
His view: In the DDR, all decent people knew that the system was their enemy. But Reunification had poisoned people. The culture became Americanized. Instead of focusing on internal resistance and external survival, as in the DDR, people lived in a shallow fantasy of consumerism, trash culture, and meaningless games that they believed meant “freedom”. The Americanized BRD did what the Sovietized DDR never could: It killed people’s spirits from the inside out.
If that sounds like me, it is only because along the course of my life, I have learned from others; and I hereby recount in my own words what I learned from the real-life experiences of East Germans, Russians, and others whom I have known from the Eastern bloc, as viewed through the integral lens of my studies of philosophy and history.
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end? [...]
The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. [...]
How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification.... Thus we may see terrorists made heroes, or secret matters pertaining to one’s nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan “everyone is entitled to know everything.” [...]
A fact that cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West, while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.... After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
* Solzhenitsyn would not have been a fan of “hookers, Lambos, and blow”.
P.S., for the benefit of the Wall, I should observe that diametrically opposite to idiotic popular perceptions promulgated in the Western mass media, Russian women are not cheap sluts like Western women (worst of all American women). —Or perhaps it may be better said that Russia dumps its filthy sluts and two-faced gold diggers by exporting them to their proper place in America, while keeping the good ones at home.
