Stalin, Gypsies and Evil Empires...

georgeob1 wrote:

nimh pointed at this already.

Just adding that "communist paradise" was a very common sentence in post war (West)Germany: for everything, which was supposed to good, but even didn't look that way.

I think for some some US-Americans the countrie sbehind the 'Iron Curtain' really were close and in an unknown world.
West-Europeans and even Germans (I have been three times in the GDR and East Berlin in the sixties - with my school!) were able to see how the situation was looking like. (In the fifties and sixties, West-Germans used to send parcels at christmas to [unknown] "brothers ans sisters" in East Germany: organitzed besides others by the SPD.)


None of the media* and political elites, perhaps some 'intellectals' were praising a 'communist paradise. [*We had a very small sister-party of the SED here in the West, called KPD: ~ 500 members.]

The SPD being the Socialdemocrats, or those lefties who, even when they lost elections, were always said (by conservatives) to have the intellectuals and journalists behind them. They were sending parcels to their oppressed East-German brothers. Little romanticisation there.

I hate it when people try to reduce the entire left to those New Lefties of the mid-seventies only.

Even in the mass demonstrations against the nukes, in the early eighties - even when the original plan may have been hatched by some group of fellow-travellers, there ended up 800,000 people on the streets here, and few Soviet flags to be seen, I tell you. But a lot of demonstrators making sure that, even though the issue was NATO Pershings, their banners condemned the Soviets, too ("against both").

Now that "against both" kinda line may have been misguided - as if there was any kind of equivalence there - but an idealisation of the Eastern Bloc it was not.

In fact, many of the same people who demonstrated helped with the collections that were held for the Poles at the time, too, in solidarity with Solidarnosc, when the communists clamped down there.

Nimh,

An eloquent rebuttal. I am not so much criticizing the elites of Western Europe, as I am defending the aptness and correct timing of Reagan's remark.

While the Soviet Union in 1983 was a somewhat ossified relic of its former self, it was still quite dangerous. It was still financing and arming revolutions in Central America and threatening retaliation and repression in Poland and other Eastern bloc countries. It was also rapidly adding to its military arsenal and deploying SS-20 mobile ballistic missiles throughout western Russia in unprecedented numbers. The growing economic and political stagnation increased the fears of many analysts that they might attempt something reckless.

You asked to what time and place and to which figures I was referring. I believe the crisis over the Pershing missile deployment, to which you referred is a particularly good example. While the hundreds of thousands of European "peace" demonstrators may have carried a few banners denouncing the Soviets (along with many others denouncing the USA), the fact remains that they were marching in opposition to the deployment of the Pershing missiles. In effect they were making a political act in support of a deliberate Soviet policy of intimidation of Europe. Reagan clearly labeled the Soviet Empire for what it was and firmly persisted in his confrontation of it. We now know that this firm stance finally broke their self-confidence and significantly hastened the unlamented fall of this wretched political system that had destroyed so many lives.

I have been part of these 'peace' demonstrators. Not daily on the road, but at least supporting their ideas. (Which led to a quite peculiar-funny situation during the Kiel week, where I was sailing 'uniformed' and stayed in a navy barracks, with "anti-demonstration marines" next door to my room .... But that's another story [Due to my "uniform" (red socks! no rank signs, addidas shoes) the commanding admiral asked me, if I was part of the local town guerilla] .

Where was I? :wink:

Well, you certainly remember that in the early seventies that started, what later led to the unification as well: relations between East and West Germany. This might have been influenced - or might have influenced - these years and peace devolpment as well.

Nice summary here:History of Germany

Walter,

What do you suppose might have happened if the cause for which the marches were then being held - to prevent the deployment of U.S. Pershing missiles in NATO - were to have succeeded? Play out the likely possibilities if the Andropov regime has successfully deployed their SS-20s and used political action to prevent a response by NATO. Please recall that at the same time the Soviet army was staging military mobilization exercises on the Polish border and amphibious landing exercises on the Polish Baltic coast. Would this have helped speed the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the reunification of Germany? I don't think so. Germany was a particular beneficiary of the policies of President Reagan, both before and after the wall came down, and his successor did a good deal to support quick acceptance for the reunification opportunity when history offered it.

I don't at all suggest that the people of Germany had no role in all this. Quite the contrary. Their relatively steadfast support for NATO, and the stark contrast between the freedom and prosperity of the FRG and the sad, gray regime in the East, both were constant obstacles to the Soviet cause. However, it wasn't the peace and no Pershing missiles marches that brought the Soviet Union down - they gave extended life to the ailing beast.