Austria is fucked
(files.catbox.moe)
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No, it didn't take decades. It happened suddenly, and all at once. East Germany could have gone on for a long, long time. They were a competently run commie dictatorship, if there is such a thing. It was Germans after all.
Nobody expected it, it was a total surprise, especially the Berlin Wall falling. One day, there were crowds, to big to handle, and the East German government wasn't going to send in the tanks like the Chinese and slaughter their own people.
Yeah, youre right. But generations went by under that tyranny before it ended was my point.
People shouldnt make stereotypes though. For many people in the DDR life was .. fine. Could be better, could be worse. I have a lot of East German friends. Very few of them have "horror stories".
tyranny?
One of the dangers of stereotypes is you dont recognize things in reality because they dont look like the movies.
Well, I suppose tyranny is relative, but yes - I would consider it tyrannical.
Ja I dunno. You have to remember that "the victors write the history books" and if the USA was defeated and it's CIA files were all cracked open, a pretty grim picture could be spun a well.
It's interesting to see "East" propaganda against the West. They would paint poverty and crime and violence as the "tyranny" of capitalism. And they would argue that they had to be hard (they would call it "vigilant") or else the West would take over their way of life.
They would also point at the wars as being part of "Imperialist Tyranny". They could certainly point to lots of global examples of homegrown socialist movements being squashed by US-backed forces.
The East also pointed at the race issues of the West as examples of the "tyranny" of it's system. There have surely been a lot of victims there, no?
The standard of DDR life was not bad by the 70s - 80s. And there were opportunities to travel. You just had to go "East". Although there were more and more possibilities for people to cross west legally.
In opinion polls, most East Germans think back on their lives in the DDR as "not perfect, but on the whole .. good". I think a lot of them would trade the uncertainty of today's life for their secure little flawed socialist dream back behind the Wall.
If the checks from the Soviets were still paying them they would have
Unknowable hypothetical. And the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Lots of people in Russia remember the glory days of the Soviet Union, which in some endevours of human ambition, did do great things. Made rose colored by time, we wax nostalgic.