Here’s an absolutely fascinating photo essay showing the transformation of East Germany. Need any more evidence that socialism only (and always) leads to destruction?!
Here’s an absolutely fascinating photo essay showing the transformation of East Germany. Need any more evidence that socialism only (and always) leads to destruction?!
Those damn capitalists are ruining everything.
/s
Juxtapose that with the Detroit pix.
Love the restoration, keeping the original architecture.
Obama as well as the socialists in Canada want to take us back to the ‘before’ era.
Thanks Robert for that very vivid visual difference between liberal democracy and socialist Marxism.
The difference in Saskatchewan from five years ago is not quite as visual, but is almost as significant.
Of course there is nothing of the USSR, the GDR, China, etc that may correctly be identified as socialist in the Marxist sense. Marx saw socialism as ultimately a consequence and necessary supplement to capitalism. Feudal economies cannot bypass or short circuit the historical necessity of capitalism and attempt to go directly to a socialist economy.
Hence, all of these so called communist democratic republics have more more in common with fascism and even capitalism than they do with Marxism. Fascism because they were virulent and extreme forms of totalitarian control and ethnic nationalism. Capitalism because, as some have pointed out, the Soviet Union was, economically, a state capitalist economy, where the State performed the role of the capitalist in maximally exploiting and appropriating the fruits of workers labour for its own profit.
But hey, don’t let misunderstanding get in the way of your misunderstanding.
Gee, thanks Bill. And the beacon of Marxist utopia on the hill is . . .?
You sound like a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman with a special new vacuum. Every home in which he’s demo’d it has been turned into a flaming wreck, and each time he’s claimed that the vacuum has been fixed and will work better than ever. After he’s burned down every other home on the block are you going to let him demo it in your home? No thanks.
Communism and Fascism were spawns of Marxist socialism.
“Feudal economies cannot bypass or short circuit the historical necessity of capitalism and attempt to go directly to a socialist economy.” Menshevism and rightist Bolsheviks ideology, Lenin and Hitler just wanted to speed things up a bit. Labour camps were just a necessary stepping stone to Marx’s utopia.
“What was spared by war doesn’t survive under socialism!”
bill stewart; You finally figured out what communism really is and what it always has been,state sponsered capitalism.People in the former Soviet union didnt pay income tax because they ALL worked for the govt.There was no unimployment their because there was NO employment.They were all essentialy in the Russian army and the army isnt considered being employed.There were worker unions but they were more groupings than unions and were prohibited to strike under penalty of law.
Brings back memories of my two trips to East Germany at the height of the Cold War in 1977 and 1986.
I still remember hauling coal in buckets to feed the space heaters from the 1880s for my great aunt in Dresden.
Loved the inscription on the building right after the Berlin Wall fell:
“WHAT WAS SPARED BY THE WAR, WAS NOT MISSED BY THE RUIN OF SOCIALISM!!”
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
An associate, former KGB, now a Russian civil servant….said in the early 70’s.
“Socialism doesn’t work…but youw ill have to try it.”
“They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”
So,they made a few renovations,but what about SOCIAL JUSTICE?!
The “before” pictures aren’t as bad as Detroit and Cleveland today. I wonder if, in 20 years time, those vistas will be better or worse.
Makes me wonder where Russia would be today if the germans had won against them.
It’s sad to think that there were people whose only life experiences occurred during the ‘before’ time frame.
Bill Stewart, Ph.D.: Only a nitwit like you would assert that East Germany wasn’t a communist or socialist totalitarian state. You’ve truly outdone yourself.
But the fact that you simply can’t accept the facts of history and need to spin some other narrative explains a whole lot about the delusional “other world” that you clearly live in.
After the collapse of East Germany, West Germany had a choice. Or to be more specific, West German unions and their flunkey government had a choice.
Turn the east into a massive welfare operation, make east wage rates the same as west even with no job prospects, and let those with initiative seek employment
in West Germany or abroad. Or permit west German domestic and western foreign investment to reinvent the east with a few decades of lower than west German
wages with massive hiring and a quick march to prosperity. No need to guess which choice was made by the west German union bosses for the “benefit” of their
long to remain jobless “eastern brothers”.
.
@ Robert W. (Vancouver):
You should save your breath Robert, Bill Stewart is completely divorced from reality and hews only to socialist talking points.
His assertions above are only a heaping pile of steaming BS, which every sane person would recognize. Bill Stewart is a dysfunctional ideologue, full stop.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
What absolute right wing propaganda!!!! I’m POSITIVE the photog got the captions reversed on those pics,right Bill?
I visited East Berlin in 1992. The main streets looked okay but the dereliction and decay away from the main thoroughfares was tragic. The same for Prague. I visited there five years later and the transformation was already underway and showed that capitalism is the way to go.
When everyone owns a piece of property, no one owns it. And when no one owns it, no one has an incentive to maintain and improve it.
Bill Stewart:
I keep hearing from socialists that socialism hasn’t really been tried yet.
I’m left wondering how many more hundreds of millions must die before socialists “get it right.”
For kicks & giggles, I visited the Left’s (aka Bill Stewart’s & Soledad O’Brien’s) favourite site, Wikipedia. Here is the entry for East Germany. Here’s the opening sentence:
“… East Germany was a socialist state established by the USSR in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city.”
And then later on: “East Germany was one of the satellite states of the Soviet Union.” Keep in mind that fascists & communists were bitter enemies at the end of WW2 but according to our resident “Ph.ud” the Soviets would allow a fascist state to spring up under their control. Sure.
Underneath the section entitled “GDR created 1949” is this: “West Germany saw itself as the legal successor to the Third Reich, shouldering the burdens of legal responsibility for its crimes. By contrast, East Germany renounced ties to the Nazi past, styling itself the “anti-fascist rampart” and proclaiming itself the first socialist state on German soil.”
Bill, you truly are a piece of work … and proof positive that the letters after a person’s name may very well be just as worthless as all the years they spent “earning” those letters.
That’s quite a comparison of socialism / liberty.
What will Cuba look like when the regime collapses? Here’s what it looked like before the Castros seized freedom:
http://www.therealcuba.com/Page8.htm
Robert, sometimes the letters Ph.D. stand for piled higher and deeper.
A fascinating photo essay. I was in West & East Germany during July of 1990 and the Before pics brings back many memories of the filth and decay that you saw everywhere in the east. I clearly remember the bullet strike marks on many Berlin buildings that were never repaired, the sterile dirty grey concrete apartment blocks of Rostock and the despair that you could read like an open book on the face of every East German you encountered. For a westerner it was a real eye opener to what socialism ultimately brings to every country it infects.
I was so blown away by what is probably Stewart’s most ignorant statement ever (and that’s saying a lot) that I’ve informed both James Delingpole and Roy Green. He might just become rather famous … though not for the reasons he might like!
Bill Stewart – you wrote:
” Capitalism because, as some have pointed out, the Soviet Union was, economically, a state capitalist economy, where the State performed the role of the capitalist in maximally exploiting and appropriating the fruits of workers labour for its own profit.”
I’m unclear of your terminology. How can public ownership of a production system be defined as capitalistic? The basic definition of capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Your definition of capitalism as meaning a system for ‘maximally exploiting and appropriating the fruits…etc. is invalid.
Also, you ignore the basic distinction between a Formal Description and Actual Reality (Plato, Aristotle, Godel) where the actuality never 100% duplicates the formal description. The latter remains ‘pure’ as an image or verbal description.
So, your claim that the states that have self-defined themselves as communist and socialist have not ‘really, really been that’ because they don’t fit the words-of-Marx – is illogical. Since when does fiction become fact?
Ha ha. Robert. Sour grapes I presume for the times I’ve questioned Kate’s judgment for posting your second rate, uninspired drivel that makes Celestial Junk sound reasonable.
Anyway, if you read with the least bit of goodwill or integrity you would have seen that I simply remarked that the GDR etc. were not in any way socialist in Marx’s sense of the term, and even less so “communist” in the Marxian sense. I’m defending Marx not totalitarian state capitalist so called democratic republics.
I’m intrigued the way folk around here love to have it both ways. On the one hand, “the Left” around here means anything this side of idiotic neoliberal market fundamentalism and social conservatism -that way you can lump democrats, liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists etc together in one homogenous category. On the other hand, “the Left” refers to a conflated and misunderstood category that confuses Marx with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc… all so that socialism can be bandied about around here as shorthand for pure evil and thus allow you to avoid looking at your own faulty ideological presumptions.
“Socialist in the Marxist sense”.
Your original premise is nonsense, Bill. Stalinism is what you get when you try to bring a fantasy (Marxism) into practice when you try to structure a nation with it. Sorry, your’s is nothing more than a feeble attempt to deny responsibility for results of a fundamentally inane theory.
But then you Marxists are good at denying responsibility aren’t you? Back in 1992, there was a whole truckload of western Marxist pseudo-intellectuals running around claiming that Enver Hoxha was now the great exponent of Communism. Embarrassing, wasn’t it, watching Stalinism collapsing all around you after you lot had spent decades defending its supposed virtues?
It’s not your Marxism that is despicable; it’s your denial of the consequences of applied Marxism that’s utterly vile.
What rabbit said @ 2:15. Some here have some fairly close family experience with that experiment, especially in its more virulent form.
Robert @ 3:01, we saw buildings off the main streets in Gdansk in 2010 that still showed the bullet strike marks.
I hope that this fellow is not teaching our children somewhere.
Bill Stewart – could you explain how the act of questioning your definitions is a result, not of the weakness of your definitions, but of the character weakness of the person who questions – ie, your description of someone who questions you as ‘lacking goodwill or integrity’.
And again, could you answer my questions? I’m most interested in how you can come up with the term ‘totalitarian state capitalism’ – when these terms contradict each other. As you know, capitalism refers to private not state ownership and as such, cannot be statist or totalitarian.
Just because you link words together does not give such a phrase any validity in reality.
As for your defending Marx – who cares? As I’ve said, fact is not fiction, and Marx’s rhetoric and abstract ideology remains trapped within words. His words and his theories have no relevance to reality and certainly no possibility of actualization. They remain trapped within the sophistry and security of the seminar room.
Let us see now,
The wise guy above says:
” Marx saw socialism as ultimately a consequence and necessary supplement to capitalism.”
Is this guy really is, what he says he is or is he a totalitarian mind shooting shit.
Then he says:
“Feudal economies cannot bypass or short circuit the historical necessity of capitalism and attempt to go directly to a socialist economy.”
This is not news to anyone and the communists knew this, to the totalitarian mind this is no obstacle, the way they go about it is, we will make you do it if it kills you.
Then he goes on like this:
” Hence, all of these so called communist democratic republics have more in common with fascism and even capitalism than they do with Marxism.”
Most of those countries were industrialized, specially what became, East Germany.
Only a useful idiot, an ignorant jack ass cannot see, real life laboratories of formerly and currently divided states, like Germany, Korea, Vietnam where capitalism brought immense prosperity in comparison to the totalitarian, socialist misery . One only has to look at China, where the communists, while in power, unleashed capitalism on the country and look at the what some may call economic miracle. Not talking about the other aspects of life in China.
And again:
“Soviet Union was, economically, a state capitalist economy”
There is no such a thing as state capitalism. There is no capital, there is no innovation, there no competition. State owns the means of production prohibits anyone else to engage in business, industry or anything else, it lasts until the money runs out and then it collapses. This is where the current American president is taking their country.
Capitalism cannot exist as a branch of totalitarian state.
Capitalism was invented by Marx as a foil to his socialism. It doesn’t exist. Free enterprise, on the other hand, does exist.
BS is exercising the Hegelian Dialectic. The way he has framed the argument predetermines the outcome, just as Marx and Engel planned.
Fiddle is of course right, it’s free enterprise the totalitarians are agains. Captalism is marxist construct to obfuscate.
Fiddle: “BS is exercising the Hegelian Dialectic.”
Absolutely right, Fiddle. There has been as much vileness come out of that philosopher as has come from Plato and JJ Rousseau.
BS: “…avoid looking at your own faulty ideological presumptions.”
The Left has been making a virtue avoiding looking at its ideological assumptions for the past couple of thousand years. The very nature of Platonic thought, which leftism is thoroughly contaminated with, is one huge assumption after another. From Plato to the present day, all of you are riddled with a streak of authoritarianism. You just can’t stand the thought of people being held responsible for their own actions and being left to live their own lives, can you?
cgh- great comments – and I fully agree with your description of Hegel, Plato, Rousseau.
Thank you to those of you who are more articulate than some of us to defend freedom.
We do not need reeducation labour camps.
Claiming that these pictures are representative of capitalism vs. socialism is simplistic. The US, which financed the rebuilding of post war West Germany, suffered very little from the war and if anything, prospered from the increase in manufacturing. On the other hand, the Soviet Union was occupied for three years, suffered over 25 million fatalities and the mass destruction of much of its industrial and agricultural capacity. Is it any wonder the why, if for no other reason, the west was better off?
After the war, West Germany received billions of dollars of aid through the Marshall Plan…East Germany was making war reparations to the Soviets…restoring buildings to high standards was not a priority.
In any case, even today certain parts of New York City, Chicago and LA look no better than 1990 East Berlin.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=402544
Great photo essay, Robert. This is also an exhibition on the benefits of risk investment, foreign and domestic. When political and social conditions encourage risk takers to invest, functional economies develop. And when conditions discourage risk investment, economies and cultures degrade. Your friend Bill may inquire as to Marx’s position on risk, value creation, and accountability. These three foundational tenets of capitalism were clearly missing in East Germany (when no one has ownership, no one has an incentive to create value or maintain assets).
The Soviet Union had 70 years to show the advantages of socialism, communism.
Could not do it even with total control of the people.
Can’t be done. It has failed and will fail every time it was and will be done.
The road to bancrupcy may take a little longer with the wealth that free enterprise provided, though it will bancrupt any country that will try it. Without a doubt.
Socialism is based on hot empty air and is supported by people that are miserable due to their own doing.
Iberia, true enough as far as it goes. However, even the devastation of WW2 doesn’t explain why visible bomb damage could still be seen nearly 50 years later when I was in East Berlin in 1991. The devastation of WW2 does not explain why Leipzig in 1991 had an atmosphere made of Javex and with an infant mortality rate about 1000 times higher than the European average and about 100 times higher than the East German average. That is much of the reason why the 1990 revolt started in Leipzig.
I toured a number of East German industrial facilities that year. A number of facts became overwhelmingly apparent from their layout and working conditions. The communist system treated its workers like cheap, disposable parts. And it did so because of its economic ideology, not because of post-war impoverishment.
Now, your reference to New York, Chicago and LA is also correct. To which list I would certainly add Detroit which is the motherlode of post-industrial collapse. I would suggest that these are all beneficiaries of failed socialist experiments to a greater degree than implemented in much of the rest of the US. They’ve been ruined by a disintegrating education system, collapse of family life, collapse of law and order.
Capitalism doesn’t promise prosperity for everyone; it promises the opportunity for prosperity if you work. Communism doesn’t promise prosperity; it promises an equally shared poverty, except of course for the Platonic Philosopher Kings, better known as the Party Members.
The question for you and the rest of the left is simple. Do you want to live in a society where you can exercise free choice in your economic activity, or do you wish to live in a regimented one where your economic choices are made for you? You should be aware that the Communist model looks an awful lot like mediaeval serfdom from the inside.
Mountains of murdered people are a feature of the more robust forms of socialism, not a bug.
The more squeamish and patient American form finds the problem overpopulation today of
non elite persons can be dealt with by providing mass abortions, recreational sex, rec pharma,
and a fairly speedy demise for the elderly members of this group.
.
Incredible investment.
Isn’t it remarkable that men like Mao and Stalin, who took control of Communist Parties, led them to power and exercised power over openly communist societies for long periods, somehow never managed to learn anything at all about communism; whereas, some little wanker who’s never left his parents’ basement knows all about it?