Many and perhaps most people who grew up in East Germany are rather nostalgic for it. Take it up with them as to why, but they are. Purveyors of the relevant material do a roaring trade.
And even though it went that way because of foreign force rather than indigenous revolution, East Germany remains only place ever to have followed the script and become Communist as an advanced industrial economy with a huge and highly organised proletariat. Perhaps that is why so many people still pine for it?
But the main point of this post is that the Soviet Union and its Bloc collapsed exactly as and when traditional conservatives in Britain, the United States and elsewhere said that it would. Figures such as Enoch Powell and the intellectual guiding lights of American paleoconservatism had been predicting it at least since the 1940s.
It owed something to Saint John Paul II, as the figure who happened to emerge, an emergence in 1978 that itself illustrated the point. But it had absolutely nothing to do with the dazzling intellects of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who in any case appeared elsewhere only once the Cold War was in its obvious final stages, as they would have known if they had ever read Powell or the paleocons. You may as well attribute it to David Hasselhoff.
Nor was it any doing of the right-wing hawks in the Democratic, Labour and broadly comparable parties. Like the Trotskyists to whom they were far closer than either of them liked or like to admit, they would have kept the Cold War going forever if they could have done, and to this day they propagate the fiction that its end was "unexpected". In any case, the society that they favour, even to point of wishing to spread across the whole wide earth by force of arms, is in many ways more East than West German.
Across all parties, Thatcherites and the heirs to Labour's Cold War hawks, Trotskyist and otherwise, have British politics largely sewn up. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.
After nearly 30 years of suggestion, speculation, and even a sort of preparation, I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
Nor was it any doing of the right-wing hawks in the Democratic, Labour and broadly comparable parties. Like the Trotskyists to whom they were far closer than either of them liked or like to admit, they would have kept the Cold War going forever if they could have done, and to this day they propagate the fiction that its end was "unexpected". In any case, the society that they favour, even to point of wishing to spread across the whole wide earth by force of arms, is in many ways more East than West German.
Across all parties, Thatcherites and the heirs to Labour's Cold War hawks, Trotskyist and otherwise, have British politics largely sewn up. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it.
After nearly 30 years of suggestion, speculation, and even a sort of preparation, I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
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