what is the communist response to Kennedy's famous Berlin Wall quote: "...democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in..."
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It's really hard to find non Western sources about the Berlin Wall
Aside from what others have said, the US is a slave colony. Slaves are not allowed to leave. Having the largest prison population in the world requires a lot of walls! Kennedy said that quote during Jim Crow.
I live in a 24/7 hellscape of propaganda, manipulation, and surveillance. A wall would be quaint.
Yeah, that's clearly the vibe, but I'm looking for a little more analysis than that.
This is a pretty decent read.
Yeah, those are the kind of sources I'm looking for. Thanks!
Using the wall to keep GDR citizens in was definitely a big reason. But the context is more complicated. The GDR spend a ton of money on free education that was better than what could be found in the west. People that had some „low quality“ jobs before had the opportunity to become highly skilled members of society, all paid for by the state. That was a huge investment, but worth it for society. However the west targeted this specifically, giving people that went from the GDR to the west huge amounts of free cash.
i guess the slaves on the plantations stayed of their own volition
The wall was built by the Soviets because of the anticommunist groups funded and organised in West Germany. They would easily infiltrate into East Germany and pull off sabotage, intelligence and terrorist activities because of the free flow across the border.
The ProleWiki article actually could be fleshed out more with the above sources. I don't know how to do wiki editing though.
"Communism isn't perfect, but we have never had to shoot our leader in the head for not being evil enough"
Wait, i thought that the Berlin wall encircled West Berlin, which was part of West Germany?
If, so, when looking at a map...
Yeah in the west it is never taught where the border was. I've seen people say the Berlin Wall was the border of the cold war, like bro more than half the width of the DDR is west of the wall.
I think this is the context that is always omitted from the Western analysis, thanks
I suppose all of Berlin was also surrounded by another wall? Because if not, couldn't people from West Berlin just go around the wall?
While the availability of consumer goods is seen as a giant success story by most historians of the present, the perception at the time was a different one: prices were so high that average people could not afford to shop, especially since prices were free-ranging but wages still fixed by law. Therefore, in the summer of 1948 a giant wave of strikes and demonstrations swept over West Germany, leading to an incident in Stuttgart where strikers were met by US tanks ("Stuttgarter Vorfälle"). Only after the wage-freeze was abandoned, Deutschmark and free-ranging prices were accepted by the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mark#Currency_reform_of_June_1948
The Western powers unilateral currency reform is what caused the partition of Germany beyond the existing 4 Allied Zones. This is often glossed over in any pro-NATO historical analysis. This is essentially the first act of the Cold War from the Western powers. The UK zone started it, and was quickly joined by the other 2 Western Zones (US, France).
incident in Stuttgart where strikers were met by US tanks ("Stuttgarter Vorfälle").
Is this those tankies I've been hearing about?
Don't forget about this similar incident in Japan the same year. A pattern presents itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toho_strikes
At 9:30 on the morning of August 19 a district police chief arrived at the front gate to read out the court decision. Two thousand policemen surrounded the studio, reinforced by a platoon of soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division, three scout planes, and six armored cars and five tanks sent by the U.S. Eighth Army. The New York Times reported that the American soldiers had arrived in response to a "call for a show of force" by Japanese authorities. However, the incident was initiated by the Eighth Army, which claimed Americans living in the vicinity were in danger and pressed for intervention by the Tokyo Military Government Team, which in turn instructed Toho to request police action. After 10:40, the union leaders agreed to end their occupation on the condition the union was not disbanded, and led a procession out of the rear gate, waving red flags and banners, and singing The Internationale.
Imagine if half of Toronto was controlled by the USSR during the cold war, with a large military base and a constant stream of planes coming in and out. Of course the US would build a wall around the soviet sector
I think the best answer is the honest one: that it represents a contradiction in a world with mixed Socialist and Capitalist systems. It's not an easy to surmount problem and is a valid one, though maybe not in the way Liberals believe.
By and large, the people "fleeing" Socialist states for the West were not peasants and workers. They were Professionals. If you were a common laborer, you were treated well in, say, East Germany and had little reason to leave. The people who were leaving were those just a bit higher up the scale.
"Professional" is a broad category in this case that could represent any "skilled laborer" or small business owners. Lawyers and doctors, grocers, cobblers, accountants, plumbers, whatever.
These are people who could live a good life in East Germany but could live a better life in the West. You can't really blame them for this - they're just furthering their material interests, which is what Marxism tells us they must do.
You don't get the opposite - the poor fleeing to Socialist states - at least partially because Socialist states were not open to that sort of immigration. Socialist nations already oftentimes struggled to maintain full employment and rarely needed excess labor.
Try crossing the border from Occupied Korea into Real Korea as a US citizen and see how the American troops stationed there respond.
South Korea totally doesn't shoot civilians trying to cross to the north
The US charges income tax on US citizens who live and work outside of the United States, resulting in "double tax", you pay taxes to the US and the country you reside in. In 1966, 3 years after JFK's assassination, the US passed an "expatriation tax" law which allows the IRS to charge taxes on former US citizens for up to 10 years after they renounce citizenship.
You get charged extra income taxes for living outside of the US and you might be charged extra taxes for renouncing your citizenship. This may not be a literal wall, but it is a metaphoric wall which prevents people from leaving.
on top of everything else on this thread, it's a lot cheaper to just declare them a criminal and put out an international arrest warrant
you don't need walls when you control everything inside and outside the border
The formation of bourgeois nation states is literally a story of liberal democrats et al. building walls to keep people in. But I'm sorry, liberals just do not have long-term memory or the ability to look beyond the surface level (even just that can confuse them!).
Yeah you and your Democratic friends just put barriers of oppression around the global south. How many african/asian/south american countries self determination efforts did you Democratic countries support shutting down? Or lives snuffed? I'll need to use a black book criteria because those numbers would be diabolical
Just point at the global border regime which exists purely to keep poor people in the exploited global south and unable to enjoy the wealth plundered from them, which is hoarded in the global north. It's far larger and more violent than the Berlin wall ever was; it spans the entire planet.
What do you need a wall for when you have bad credit scores and drug possession charges?
what do credit scores have to do with it? pretty common loan trust system (yes even in China)
A bad one, and what it more broadly represents, can severely limit your freedom of movement.
I don't know if anything Kennedy said can be used to defend our system, which ultimately killed him because the gangsters running it felt their bottom line being threatened. But yeah even conceding the premise to him, it's not impressive that the West amassed such a fortune over centuries of colonizing the planet that they could terrorize people with arms escalation, manage to pay their skilled workers for a few decades, and bribe ones from the rest of the world to migrate.
Don't need a wall when you have total branwashing
The capitalists built a wall around the world to keep their enslaved masses trapped in servitude
You mean the antifascist defense wall?