As AfD becomes the dominant party of the former DDR, East Germans find themselves slandered as antidemocratic by a ruling establishment that has systematically excluded and subjugated them
The equivalent to rural East Germany here in the US would be the Rust Belt -- the area around the great lakes whose industrial job base was gutted by free trade and outsourcing. And the politics are similar, too. These are people who have had their jobs and their lives stolen from them by corporate America and the elites in Washington, and who form the basis of the populist MAGA movement which the elites fear more than anything.
and also large parts of the South, especially (but not only) among the colored people. I just read an article about the median income in the US, where people thought everyone had about 250 000
I have less than 10% of that, and I am far from alone. Most people I know have less than 50 000. If we cut off the top 1 percent, I assume the median would drop quite a bit, since the likes of gates and zuckerberg and musk push the balance one way, whereas millions are somewhere in my category.
Median income ≠ average income. Median income is defined by how much the person earns who is exactly at the spot in which 50 % earn more and 50 % less than him. So it doesn't matter for the median how much the 1 % earn. For the average it's different and extreme values can indeed change the average quite a lot. But since you refer to median income the income of billionaires is irrelevant for this statistics
Hm the German Rust Belt is probably rather the Ruhr Valley. The East is something different. Its wealth wasn't destroyed by the West but by the Soviets. It was just that the Western German economic system they implemented in 1990 for the East was already overregulated and overtaxed (and it only got worse since) and by itself no longer competitive in creating new industries (but still had a lot of substance). So they never had the 'economic miracle' conditions of a relatively free market economy the BRD had in the 50s to have a new founder boom. This system was already not working so great for the West as well, but their companies could compensate by globabilizing outside of Germany. But yeah, that could backfire soon when China should start to struggle
I think Danno was making a rough comparison here, one of political and economic alienation, the realization of the working class that the Ds, The Rich Men North of Richmond no longer represent them in DC.
It’s in some ways equally analogous to Appalachia to some extent because it didn’t enjoy a period of relative prosperity in the mid-20th century like the Great Lakes region, as thus it is a generationally neglected, impoverished region with similar psychographics which are deemed deplorable by the cosmopolitan liztards. Simultaneously the political and economic ghetto-ization of Eastern Germany could apply equally to Appalachia or small American industrial cities which have fallen on hard times with global outsourcing and are now viewed with contempt by the Uniparty grandees.
But didn’t the Treuhand basically hire a bunch of consultants and did the “favor” of chopping up all the manufacturing plants in the east and selling them cheaply (underselling them I’ve since heard) so that consultants could earn their finder’s fee?
Well, the Eastern German plants weren't that much worth to begin with. They had outdated machinery and more labor intense procedures than the West. They were only competitive because they had much lower environmental and labor safety standards and - especially - much lower wages than the West. Also they created products for the socialist economic zone which weren't demanded anymore. Western German unions also pushed after the reunification that Eastern wages increase rapidly and so these factories would never had a chance to be profitable. And well, the Eastern industry was collapsing rapidly. The German state just hadn't any centralized management capacity on its own (since it was a market economy) so there weren't any structures existing which could've been able to restructure thousands of struggling companies at once. The Treuhand was just something improvized. So they were glad when someone wanted to buy it. I don't think there really would've been a chance that the Treuhand could really restructure successfully the GDR economy, but of course they get blamed. Also there was also a supply & demand issue for the plant problem: so there wasn't so much demand for Eastern plants in the first place. But they put all supply on the market at once. So oversupply = rapidly falling prices. Imo the problem was that they implemented the Western German standards (and union wages) and regulations which were just much too high for Eastern Germany to be competitive. They should've created some kind of special economic zone
I knew someone who worked for them and was helping to self the plants. I really remember us all sniffing a bit and thinking, these East Germans, so far behind... And now I realize what a complete dolt I was. Yes, the communism was bad (Karl Marx Stadt was positively scary to drive through) but they did have a good work ethic in some areas. And the Chinese sure got a great deal on those brown coal plants- Iremember them picking them up for a song and then rebuilding them stone by stone in China.
But communism surely killed east Germany ; likely never to fully recover . Just as happened in so many other places where the right kind of communism would have succeeded if only it had been invented.
Hm thing is that other Eastern European nations seem to recover better from communism than East Germany. Poland and Czech Republic aren't that wealthy yet but their economic structure seems to be much healthier than the one of East Germany even if East Germany was more wealthy than them during communism. So something went very wrong there after reunification. And it wasn't a lack of money since there was a flow of hundreds of billions from Western Germany to the East in the 90s. The infrastructure there is in most cases today better than in the West. For the Eastern European comparisons the money flow didn't start until entry into the EU in 2004 and even then they never did get such amounts as East Germany did get. So with a more wealthy starting point and a headstart with having a big western brother with (at this time) respected institutions somehow East Germany developed worse than Eastern Europe. That's probably a bad sign for the future of Europe since East Germany got implemented pretty much the standard EU model of very high regulatory standards in combination with high subsidizes to make doing business still profitable and that doesn't seem to lead to long term prosperity
That is already part of the West propaganda. You have first to state it's worthless, to sell it as cheap as possible. Isn't it? And by fast introduction of DEM and cutting of from traditional markets in the East - yes, there where a lot of problems. Created to sell items as cheap as possible. Chef of Treuhand, Rohwedder, got even killed, supposedly for being to slow and critical in cheap selling. Ofc, there is a different story, Oswald did it.
Agreed that the Ruhr Valley would be a closer analogy. Did it lose manufacturing jobs when the EU started up? Is there much working class support for AfD policies there?
AfD is in polls at 15 % in NRW, which is the state of the Ruhr Valley, ie below the German average of the AfD and much lower than the +30 % in the East. Afaik economic problems of the Ruhr Valley started around the same time as for the Rust Belt, so around 1970s. Hm, it was more the general structural trend away from heavy industry (and global competition) which hit the RV, I wouldn't blame the EU for that. Rate of people with migration background now is pretty high at the Ruhr (starting with the 'guest workers' in the 1960s), so Ig that could explain why the AfD is much weaker there than in Eastern Germany (which still has a much lower share of migrants)
Danno said: "the Rust Belt ... whose industrial job base was gutted by free trade and outsourcing."
If you start the clock at the moment when a company board decided to move its plant to China or Vietnam, then free trade looks like the culprit. But the picture will look very different if you factor in the decades of state interference that made US factories uncompetitive in the first place.
Tariff barriers are subsidies to industries that shield them from foreign competition; the unseen opportunity cost is much higher prices for consumers, and ultimately, better job openings that would otherwise have been created for workers.
Minimum wage legislation sounds good, but creates unemployment - potential employers will lay off workers, not open businesses that would no longer be profitable (ask yourself, if the logic of minimum wages works, why do legislators not simply raise the minimum wage to a million dollars, or a billion, or a quintillion?).
Then there are direct subsidies (lost opportunity costs for taxpayers), non-competitive government contracts and public-private partnerships (economic fascism), inflation (a tax on everyone who isn't a government employee or in a corporation with government contracts), and regulation (with revolving-door regulatory bodies that indemnify businesses against litigation).
This is what unfree trade looks like. It's easy to be misled by the "free trade" rhetoric of many Republican politicians, but they're as strongly tied to state interference as the Democrats.
The real problem Rocio is the 13th Amendment! If only Lincoln had let the nation go all slave, rather like now, we wouldn’t have had to offshore.
As it happens we’re reshoring as we speak in a tidal wave.
There never was Free Trade, certainly not with the Nations of China and Vietnam vs any particular company, any country can lower prices until the private sector can’t compete. The notion was always laughable. Ford vs GM is free market , Ford vs China is not.
Most of the reshoring was done based on lower price alone, for example shipping (add 20% before COVID) usually wasn’t worked in, if a TCO (total cost of ownership ) is done we lost money on free trade. Free Trade was just another lie to make a quick bonus for the managerial and consultant class. The procurement department often did not check with Operations, never mind Engineering.
Your points about runaway government, regulation, the idiocy of both management and unions are just. So are the criticisms against free trade, cheaper footware wasn’t worth the cost to society and the nation. Now we claw it back.
Industry coming back strong in WNY. I’m here, I’m from here.
Western NY state.
And you are correct, the Rust Belt period is the nadir of recorded history of this region , going back to the Iroquois Beaver Wars. In the Beaver Wars the Iroquois at least made money.
To return to good news- under NAFTA a $6T economy quietly created around Great Lakes between the USA and Canada, and its real not Financial economy. Quiet works better than loud, but Mexico insists on being Homicidal Latin Opera.
Interesting analogy to the East Germans who were subjugated to USSR pre unification. They had a different ethos. Their industry was changed or destroyed built they had no taste of prior freedom
Even in the rust belt you still have more opportunity for upward mobility and it isn’t as institutionally closed out as eastern Germany. From what I see you wouldn’t even have an outlying success story like J.D. Vance there.
I am not a fan of MAGA or Trump, to put it mildly. Trump is at best a con man and an opportunist. But it is certainly true nonetheless that the seeds of that movement were planted decades ago from what the predatory oligarchs did to the Rust Belt (and also coal country and Appalachia as well) and how both mainstream parties ignored the people there who got a raw deal prior to Trump.
US elections for the presidency, and for the senate, usually offer a choice between psychopaths. Trump is certainly flawed but the best the US has been able to come up with in a long time. At least, unlike most US presidents, he didn't start any new wars, let alone carpet bomb or nuke civilian cities.
The Greens are simply the NSDAP in contemporary guise. As Professor Anna Bramwell made clear in her "Hidden History of Environmentalism," the NSDAP were a radical environmentalist regime. AfD is abulwark against the resurgence of Hitler's Green Party.
"What follows is a critical and supplemented condensation of three books on the history of environmentalism written between 1985 and 1994 by Oxford History Professor Anna Bramwell. The latter two books were published by Yale University. The books make clear the Third Reich was a radical environmentalist regime. The Nazis promoted organic farming, reforestation, species preservation, naturalism, neo-paganism, holistic science, animal rights, sun-worship, herbalism, anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-urbanism, alternative energy, hysterical anti-pollutionism and apocalyptic anti-industrialism. At the same time the British ecology movement was stridently, treasonously fascist. While these aspects of Bramwell’s writings have been commented on, however inadequately, much less has been said about her treatment of post-WWII environmentalism. Here she provides useful insights into the wholesale corruption of the scientific community, the capturing of key organizations and the manipulation of the mass media by the environmental movement. Bramwell is not a passive observer of this process and conceals key players, interests and motives."
Review of Bramwell's Hidden History of Environmentalism:
Of course “green” is just Marxism and a massive wealth and income redistribution scam. Why is China with 67% more Co2 emissions than EU and USA COMBINED immune from political activism and attack ? Why isn’t Greta in China protesting ?
Exactly correct. Green is a Trojan horse. It’s been said that the West, especially America, will never knowingly embrace Marxism. It started in our schools, first gaining a foothold in the Universities and now running rampant in primary and secondary education. It’s a divide and conquer strategy, splitting our societies along every possible fault line alongside the now disproven theory that China would adopt more liberal western values as they were enmeshed into our economies with their entry into the WTO, which the opportunistic and thoroughly vile Clinton’s championed.
I think that environmentalism is pushed to break down the classical liberal/christian value system to prepare for a totalitarian anti-human sociopolitical system rather than the other way around. However, they still go hand in hand.
"So you want to destroy Western Civilization to respond to a highly exaggerated environmental crisis that 90% of the worlds inhabitants don't care about or even acknowledge?"
If we don't have domain over the planet, how would we be able to kill it or save it?
>The Nazis promoted organic farming, reforestation, species preservation, naturalism, neo-paganism, holistic science, animal rights, sun-worship, herbalism, anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-urbanism, alternative energy, hysterical anti-pollutionism and apocalyptic anti-industrialism. At the same time the British ecology movement was stridently, treasonously fascist.
Did it ever occur to you geniuses that maybe those "nazis" were onto something and you simply grew up exposed to the victorious party's version of history?
"As a based chad racist alpha male right-wing extremist I want nothing to do with environmentalism, that's for nazis! I'd much rather be a docile wagecuck for the Blackrock and Goldman Sachs shareholders!"
If it was a binary choice, I'd certainly rather be a "docile wagecuck for the Blackrock and Goldman Sachs shareholders" than an enviroNazi. Those anti-science misanthropes with their crazy cult of anthropogenic global warming hysteria threaten the very survival of humanity. It is your cult, with its agenda of radical population reduction to reduce CO2 emissions and "save the planet" that is the driving force behind the crazy cult of coerced mass vaccination salvation hysteria.
Indeed, only a fool or an economist (same difference) would believe that infinite growth on a finite world is somehow possible or desirable. There really is no realistic "Planet B". At least not until FTL travel is perfected, which I am not holding my breath for.
It's hardly the only planet we have. The Russians, who reject your cult, will likely colonise and eventually terraform and mine the moon and the asteroids and then Mars. Greta's brainwashed ideology, born in large part of her and her fellow travellers' anankastic personality disorder, the same one that Hitler had, will in time be rightfully confined to the dustbin of history, provided it does not destroy all of European civilsation first. Of all the "ISMS," it is the most dangerous and murderous one we have ever faced.
From my (brief) Web search, it doesn't look like Anna Bramwell wrote a book with the title "Hidden History of Environmentalism." I suspect that that's a descriptive title that the reviewer on ininet.org gave to Bramwell's work as a whole. The review says she wrote three books on the subject, but the writing is disjointed and I haven't found the titles of the second and third books.
True, ecofascism is a real thing, unfortunately. Environmentalism in the genuine sense doesn't *have* to be like that, of course, but if one is not careful it can readily become such. Otherwise, though, nearly all of the Nazi Party's political positions put them squarely on the far right, much like Gilead (which was also ecofascist) in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Horseshoe Theory in action.
You'd think, wouldn't you, that someone, somewhere would think back to what came from the gleeful superiority of the victors after WWI and how much pleasure they got from humiliating Germany in every way they could. Creating feelings of resentment and inferiority on top of extreme economic suffering sure turned out great for everyone!
That plus ca change thingy is really annoying how it keeps comin' round again.
Just a question--how did Angela Merkel overcome the awful taint of her Eastness to make it to the top as she did? Was that a unique and not-replicable moment?
She became politically active right on the verge of reunification in Demokratischer Aufbruch, an incipient Christian party that emerged in the last moments of the DDR, and was soon folded into CDU. From there she got elected to the Bundestag with a direct mandate in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Then Kohl almost immediately gave her a (largely symbolic) position in his cabinet.
I'm not sure of all Kohl's reasons, but one thing that massively helped Merkel's rise, was her lack any associations with the communist DDR government. In the East, the CDU had been a "block party" – basically a non-ruling somewhat fictional organisation subordinate to the SED. After reunification much of the senior leadership was considered politically tainted and so Merkel's clean record won her a quick rise in the ranks of the party itself.
I think there was a desire in the CDU itself to move pro-Western voices into positions of prominence in the East as quickly as possible. The degree to which lower-ranking members of the party still harboured communist/antidemocratic sympathies wouldn't have been completely known. Whatever his other reasons, Kohl presumably thought Merkel was particularly reliable.
Is there any significance in Frau Merkel’s father’s “red” politics, even as a Christian minister, which led to his move to East Germany? And his daughter’s deliberate (?) moving of the CDU heavily leftward?
Kasner's politics have always been somewhat mysterious to me, but I agree he had clear socialist sympathies.
Merkel I think was overwhelmingly pragmatic and devoid of ideological commitments. She tended to appropriate leftist positions to deprive the opposition of support. She bought in to Green nuclear phase-out, apparently, to hurt Greens in a regional election who were campaigning on Fukushima doom and gloom. She approved one license fee increase after the other to win the support of state media journalists. When the left started citing her migration-sceptic rhetoric critically she became an open borders fanatic, it goes on and on like this.
Thanks: a really helpful summary. Reminds me of the following line by Eric Ambler in the Mask of Dimitrios:
“In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.”
Merkel isn't exactly a person from East Germany. Born in Hamburg, West Germany, her parents moved to the East for engagement as pastor. Whether or not as an asset for some 3-letter-agencies. Anyway she didn't grew up in a typical East German family.
I believe it was you, Eugyppius, who, at the height of the vaxx mandates, mapped out the areas of Germany that were most resistant to getting the experimental jab and it covered nearly the entirety of the former East Germany following precisely the old BRD/DDR border, just as support for AfD seems to be tracking. Fascinating. Better bullshit detectors indeed.
I can only speak to Switzerland and (western) Germany. Mr. E you are right on the money. The „easterners“ are considered inferior, lacking proper education and cultural values and are frequently under suspicion of a criminal bent. And of course, the west GRANTED them welcome with reunification and will not forget their own largess. In the 90‘s I heard many business owners saying they would not consider paying easterners in parity with western workers. These are the same people that ask me how can I live in America with all that racism. It speaks to the weakness in humanity.
That must have been the reason why, until recently, Germany didn't have a binding national minimum wage until very recently. They were still "absorbing" the dilapidated East Germany, you see, and didn't want to "price them out" of the labor market. Or more accurately, they still wanted to exploit their relatively cheap labor. How very kind of them. Natch.
Coincidentally I recently had some lengthy conversations with a visiting East German who, as a young man, was unwillingly drafted to serve in a junior position within Erich Honecker's inner circle. The stories het told me about the dying days of the DDR are eerily reminiscent of what we are witnessing now - a total disregard of the bottom 99% driven by a corrupted dogmatic ideology.
In our exchanges he told me was not sad to see the DDR go, not even from his relative high up position. The DDR had run its course and failed - but so did the Wiedervereinigung.
He did stress several times that the social discontent in the states that used to make up East Germany is far worse now than it was in the 1989 -1990 era. Back then people could see a hopeful alternative just across the western border - there is none today. Which makes for an explosive social dynamic.
He said (and I am paraphrasing here) that people in the downtrodden rural East often voted AfD not because it is a good alternative, but because they feel it is the only available alternative. He himself was quite worried about the ideologies behind the AfD.
This is not uniquely German
The downfall of the former DDR and its citizens you describe here is an extreme example of what has been happening all over Europe, especially in provincial Europe, far away from the decision making economic centers.
Even in my tiny Netherlands there is a growing gap between the Randstad and the rest of the country that feels they don't get a say in anything. Having dabbled in Dutch politics I know that there is truth to this gut feeling. The provinces, where the majority of the population lives, are poorly represented in parliament and they are generally worse of when it comes to getting their fair share of the state budget.
Yes, I think also a substantial portion of AfD support in Saxony is not right-leaning, and probably even consists of many former SED sympathisers. They just want any way out of this system, any way to vote against it.
It's classic "Protestwahlverhalten". They are not so much voting VOR AFD as AGAINST the ruling parties. It's really a sign of desperation - the alternative for Germany as the ONLY alternative as far as they can see.
One thing that occurred to me after reading eugyppius’s previous piece on the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the AfD, and again today, is that it is peculiar and maybe problematic – if I understand the setup correctly – that Germany has charged the same agency (the BfV) with both domestic intelligence-gathering, which dovetails with the Interior Ministry’s (of which BfV is a part) general responsibility for internal security, and also with protecting the liberal constitutional order.
It will always be the case that the state’s security and intelligence apparatus is one of the primary threats to the people’s rights, in particular the right to mobilize politically, so putting both objectives in the hands of the selfsame agency seems to promise bad times for any political party that looks likely to shake things up too much.
Thanks for pointing that out and apologies for my lack of German; now I understand they are the same organisation. That is a pretty spectacular structural flaw in a constitution designed to prevent another iteration of totalitarianism.
Indeed. Communism was bad, but the Neoliberalism (i.e. capitalism with a vengeance) that replaced it proved to be pretty bad as well. "Shock therapy" thus proved to be a very fitting description for what was essentially vulture capitalism by western corporate carpetbaggers. Which is of course an insult to actual vultures, lol.
Look, as an American I really dont like commenting on or criticizing other nations parties, its not my business and I dont know much of the day to day etc..
I have done some reading, as best I can here, The only remark I will make is, it appears AfD is akin to what we may call the center right ( the mainstream media call us far right) here.
God forbid folks want to be German not 'European' or get a handle on migration and fiscal issues.
If the average German has seen their purchasing power disintegrate as we have seen here in the US and AfD speaks up for that, I wish them godspeed.
I smiled as I read "flyover country." That had been my exact thought as I was reading this post.
I am routinely appalled that American Coastal Elites are so damned ignorant and SNOBBISH about those who live in "flyover country."
Among my own family and friends--all dyed in the wool New Englanders--I've watched their surprise that someone from, say Missouri, is well educated. There's an assumption that everyone in Kansas or Tennessee has missing teeth and manure on their shoes.
My best friend is one of those Coastal Elites. She's retired to Florida. She regularly remarks her surprise that, "Midwesterners are such NICE PEOPLE."
However, like others in the northeast, she scowls when she discovers, "They all go to church."
Since she's my best friend, I tell her she's an insufferable snob and might want to consider church attendance.
"Because liberal democratic theory holds that desired political outcomes are pre-determined by the liberal system itself, there is no other way to make the logic work."
Perfectly put and relevant not just to East Germany but all of living under this new globalist "liberal" order.
The equivalent to rural East Germany here in the US would be the Rust Belt -- the area around the great lakes whose industrial job base was gutted by free trade and outsourcing. And the politics are similar, too. These are people who have had their jobs and their lives stolen from them by corporate America and the elites in Washington, and who form the basis of the populist MAGA movement which the elites fear more than anything.
Plus they are largely immune to woke in both areas, and seen as backward by the enlightened as a result.
and also large parts of the South, especially (but not only) among the colored people. I just read an article about the median income in the US, where people thought everyone had about 250 000
I have less than 10% of that, and I am far from alone. Most people I know have less than 50 000. If we cut off the top 1 percent, I assume the median would drop quite a bit, since the likes of gates and zuckerberg and musk push the balance one way, whereas millions are somewhere in my category.
Median income ≠ average income. Median income is defined by how much the person earns who is exactly at the spot in which 50 % earn more and 50 % less than him. So it doesn't matter for the median how much the 1 % earn. For the average it's different and extreme values can indeed change the average quite a lot. But since you refer to median income the income of billionaires is irrelevant for this statistics
thanks for the correction. It was the average they werre talking of, not the median
https://www.justice.gov/ust/eo/bapcpa/20230401/bci_data/median_income_table.htm
I C G, in many ways , I think your income status is a blessing.
Hm the German Rust Belt is probably rather the Ruhr Valley. The East is something different. Its wealth wasn't destroyed by the West but by the Soviets. It was just that the Western German economic system they implemented in 1990 for the East was already overregulated and overtaxed (and it only got worse since) and by itself no longer competitive in creating new industries (but still had a lot of substance). So they never had the 'economic miracle' conditions of a relatively free market economy the BRD had in the 50s to have a new founder boom. This system was already not working so great for the West as well, but their companies could compensate by globabilizing outside of Germany. But yeah, that could backfire soon when China should start to struggle
I think Danno was making a rough comparison here, one of political and economic alienation, the realization of the working class that the Ds, The Rich Men North of Richmond no longer represent them in DC.
Yeah but most people are well aware of the US dilemmas.
It’s in some ways equally analogous to Appalachia to some extent because it didn’t enjoy a period of relative prosperity in the mid-20th century like the Great Lakes region, as thus it is a generationally neglected, impoverished region with similar psychographics which are deemed deplorable by the cosmopolitan liztards. Simultaneously the political and economic ghetto-ization of Eastern Germany could apply equally to Appalachia or small American industrial cities which have fallen on hard times with global outsourcing and are now viewed with contempt by the Uniparty grandees.
But didn’t the Treuhand basically hire a bunch of consultants and did the “favor” of chopping up all the manufacturing plants in the east and selling them cheaply (underselling them I’ve since heard) so that consultants could earn their finder’s fee?
Well, the Eastern German plants weren't that much worth to begin with. They had outdated machinery and more labor intense procedures than the West. They were only competitive because they had much lower environmental and labor safety standards and - especially - much lower wages than the West. Also they created products for the socialist economic zone which weren't demanded anymore. Western German unions also pushed after the reunification that Eastern wages increase rapidly and so these factories would never had a chance to be profitable. And well, the Eastern industry was collapsing rapidly. The German state just hadn't any centralized management capacity on its own (since it was a market economy) so there weren't any structures existing which could've been able to restructure thousands of struggling companies at once. The Treuhand was just something improvized. So they were glad when someone wanted to buy it. I don't think there really would've been a chance that the Treuhand could really restructure successfully the GDR economy, but of course they get blamed. Also there was also a supply & demand issue for the plant problem: so there wasn't so much demand for Eastern plants in the first place. But they put all supply on the market at once. So oversupply = rapidly falling prices. Imo the problem was that they implemented the Western German standards (and union wages) and regulations which were just much too high for Eastern Germany to be competitive. They should've created some kind of special economic zone
I knew someone who worked for them and was helping to self the plants. I really remember us all sniffing a bit and thinking, these East Germans, so far behind... And now I realize what a complete dolt I was. Yes, the communism was bad (Karl Marx Stadt was positively scary to drive through) but they did have a good work ethic in some areas. And the Chinese sure got a great deal on those brown coal plants- Iremember them picking them up for a song and then rebuilding them stone by stone in China.
Your analysis makes much sense.
And maybe some kind of SEZ would have helped.
But communism surely killed east Germany ; likely never to fully recover . Just as happened in so many other places where the right kind of communism would have succeeded if only it had been invented.
Hm thing is that other Eastern European nations seem to recover better from communism than East Germany. Poland and Czech Republic aren't that wealthy yet but their economic structure seems to be much healthier than the one of East Germany even if East Germany was more wealthy than them during communism. So something went very wrong there after reunification. And it wasn't a lack of money since there was a flow of hundreds of billions from Western Germany to the East in the 90s. The infrastructure there is in most cases today better than in the West. For the Eastern European comparisons the money flow didn't start until entry into the EU in 2004 and even then they never did get such amounts as East Germany did get. So with a more wealthy starting point and a headstart with having a big western brother with (at this time) respected institutions somehow East Germany developed worse than Eastern Europe. That's probably a bad sign for the future of Europe since East Germany got implemented pretty much the standard EU model of very high regulatory standards in combination with high subsidizes to make doing business still profitable and that doesn't seem to lead to long term prosperity
Has the East seen a disproportionate share of refugees settled there?
That is already part of the West propaganda. You have first to state it's worthless, to sell it as cheap as possible. Isn't it? And by fast introduction of DEM and cutting of from traditional markets in the East - yes, there where a lot of problems. Created to sell items as cheap as possible. Chef of Treuhand, Rohwedder, got even killed, supposedly for being to slow and critical in cheap selling. Ofc, there is a different story, Oswald did it.
Agreed that the Ruhr Valley would be a closer analogy. Did it lose manufacturing jobs when the EU started up? Is there much working class support for AfD policies there?
AfD is in polls at 15 % in NRW, which is the state of the Ruhr Valley, ie below the German average of the AfD and much lower than the +30 % in the East. Afaik economic problems of the Ruhr Valley started around the same time as for the Rust Belt, so around 1970s. Hm, it was more the general structural trend away from heavy industry (and global competition) which hit the RV, I wouldn't blame the EU for that. Rate of people with migration background now is pretty high at the Ruhr (starting with the 'guest workers' in the 1960s), so Ig that could explain why the AfD is much weaker there than in Eastern Germany (which still has a much lower share of migrants)
Danno said: "the Rust Belt ... whose industrial job base was gutted by free trade and outsourcing."
If you start the clock at the moment when a company board decided to move its plant to China or Vietnam, then free trade looks like the culprit. But the picture will look very different if you factor in the decades of state interference that made US factories uncompetitive in the first place.
Tariff barriers are subsidies to industries that shield them from foreign competition; the unseen opportunity cost is much higher prices for consumers, and ultimately, better job openings that would otherwise have been created for workers.
Minimum wage legislation sounds good, but creates unemployment - potential employers will lay off workers, not open businesses that would no longer be profitable (ask yourself, if the logic of minimum wages works, why do legislators not simply raise the minimum wage to a million dollars, or a billion, or a quintillion?).
Then there are direct subsidies (lost opportunity costs for taxpayers), non-competitive government contracts and public-private partnerships (economic fascism), inflation (a tax on everyone who isn't a government employee or in a corporation with government contracts), and regulation (with revolving-door regulatory bodies that indemnify businesses against litigation).
This is what unfree trade looks like. It's easy to be misled by the "free trade" rhetoric of many Republican politicians, but they're as strongly tied to state interference as the Democrats.
The real problem Rocio is the 13th Amendment! If only Lincoln had let the nation go all slave, rather like now, we wouldn’t have had to offshore.
As it happens we’re reshoring as we speak in a tidal wave.
There never was Free Trade, certainly not with the Nations of China and Vietnam vs any particular company, any country can lower prices until the private sector can’t compete. The notion was always laughable. Ford vs GM is free market , Ford vs China is not.
Most of the reshoring was done based on lower price alone, for example shipping (add 20% before COVID) usually wasn’t worked in, if a TCO (total cost of ownership ) is done we lost money on free trade. Free Trade was just another lie to make a quick bonus for the managerial and consultant class. The procurement department often did not check with Operations, never mind Engineering.
Here’s a TCO calculator.
https://reshorenow.org/tco-estimator/
Your points about runaway government, regulation, the idiocy of both management and unions are just. So are the criticisms against free trade, cheaper footware wasn’t worth the cost to society and the nation. Now we claw it back.
We are reshoring. 🇺🇸 or 💀
https://gard.omeclk.com/portal/public/ViewCommInBrowser.jsp?Sv4%2BeOSSucycChMyyb2Rmvjd%2F7XjqUZCYjhWovRA3WpgkSXc2bZxr2BiQGJNtpy4F%2FBGfjZDs9wFDdDQR1RF0A%3D%3DA
All sound points. 100% agree.
Industry coming back strong in WNY. I’m here, I’m from here.
Western NY state.
And you are correct, the Rust Belt period is the nadir of recorded history of this region , going back to the Iroquois Beaver Wars. In the Beaver Wars the Iroquois at least made money.
To return to good news- under NAFTA a $6T economy quietly created around Great Lakes between the USA and Canada, and its real not Financial economy. Quiet works better than loud, but Mexico insists on being Homicidal Latin Opera.
Fine.
Interesting analogy to the East Germans who were subjugated to USSR pre unification. They had a different ethos. Their industry was changed or destroyed built they had no taste of prior freedom
I totally agree that this is the most interesting aspect of all.
Yeah, we got that.
Even in the rust belt you still have more opportunity for upward mobility and it isn’t as institutionally closed out as eastern Germany. From what I see you wouldn’t even have an outlying success story like J.D. Vance there.
I am not a fan of MAGA or Trump, to put it mildly. Trump is at best a con man and an opportunist. But it is certainly true nonetheless that the seeds of that movement were planted decades ago from what the predatory oligarchs did to the Rust Belt (and also coal country and Appalachia as well) and how both mainstream parties ignored the people there who got a raw deal prior to Trump.
US elections for the presidency, and for the senate, usually offer a choice between psychopaths. Trump is certainly flawed but the best the US has been able to come up with in a long time. At least, unlike most US presidents, he didn't start any new wars, let alone carpet bomb or nuke civilian cities.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-08-23-presidential-candidates-may-be-psychopaths-%E2%80%93-could-be-good-thing
In the UK, the Red Wall...
The Greens are simply the NSDAP in contemporary guise. As Professor Anna Bramwell made clear in her "Hidden History of Environmentalism," the NSDAP were a radical environmentalist regime. AfD is abulwark against the resurgence of Hitler's Green Party.
"What follows is a critical and supplemented condensation of three books on the history of environmentalism written between 1985 and 1994 by Oxford History Professor Anna Bramwell. The latter two books were published by Yale University. The books make clear the Third Reich was a radical environmentalist regime. The Nazis promoted organic farming, reforestation, species preservation, naturalism, neo-paganism, holistic science, animal rights, sun-worship, herbalism, anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-urbanism, alternative energy, hysterical anti-pollutionism and apocalyptic anti-industrialism. At the same time the British ecology movement was stridently, treasonously fascist. While these aspects of Bramwell’s writings have been commented on, however inadequately, much less has been said about her treatment of post-WWII environmentalism. Here she provides useful insights into the wholesale corruption of the scientific community, the capturing of key organizations and the manipulation of the mass media by the environmental movement. Bramwell is not a passive observer of this process and conceals key players, interests and motives."
Review of Bramwell's Hidden History of Environmentalism:
https://ininet.org/review-of-bramwells-hidden-history-of-environmentalism.html
Of course “green” is just Marxism and a massive wealth and income redistribution scam. Why is China with 67% more Co2 emissions than EU and USA COMBINED immune from political activism and attack ? Why isn’t Greta in China protesting ?
Green is the new brown as well as the new red and the CCP are really just the Chinese version of the NSDAP.
Horseshoe Theory in action.
Exactly correct. Green is a Trojan horse. It’s been said that the West, especially America, will never knowingly embrace Marxism. It started in our schools, first gaining a foothold in the Universities and now running rampant in primary and secondary education. It’s a divide and conquer strategy, splitting our societies along every possible fault line alongside the now disproven theory that China would adopt more liberal western values as they were enmeshed into our economies with their entry into the WTO, which the opportunistic and thoroughly vile Clinton’s championed.
Indeed, much of it is "watermelon Marxism", green on the outside, red on the inside.
1.4 billion people just using enough energy just for essential domestic usage would also be more than Euro and Fatmerica Co2 combined!
Yeah, those Chinese just know how to manipulate the the rules based order for their betterment.
How dare they!
I think that environmentalism is pushed to break down the classical liberal/christian value system to prepare for a totalitarian anti-human sociopolitical system rather than the other way around. However, they still go hand in hand.
Let's kill the planet to preserve Christianity.
So much hypocrisy gets spewed when all parameters are not analysed in the defence of an Ideology.
We do NOT have dominion over this planet.
Prokaryotes rule the roost. They will always be here unless the planet gets completely blown up.
If we don't start putting humanity first again... we're just another species committing suicide.
My reply is:
"So you want to destroy Western Civilization to respond to a highly exaggerated environmental crisis that 90% of the worlds inhabitants don't care about or even acknowledge?"
If we don't have domain over the planet, how would we be able to kill it or save it?
As I once quipped, "Everything that is green by nature has brown roots."
>The Nazis promoted organic farming, reforestation, species preservation, naturalism, neo-paganism, holistic science, animal rights, sun-worship, herbalism, anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-urbanism, alternative energy, hysterical anti-pollutionism and apocalyptic anti-industrialism. At the same time the British ecology movement was stridently, treasonously fascist.
Did it ever occur to you geniuses that maybe those "nazis" were onto something and you simply grew up exposed to the victorious party's version of history?
"As a based chad racist alpha male right-wing extremist I want nothing to do with environmentalism, that's for nazis! I'd much rather be a docile wagecuck for the Blackrock and Goldman Sachs shareholders!"
Sad!
Zing! Even a stopped clock can be right twice a day, after all.
If it was a binary choice, I'd certainly rather be a "docile wagecuck for the Blackrock and Goldman Sachs shareholders" than an enviroNazi. Those anti-science misanthropes with their crazy cult of anthropogenic global warming hysteria threaten the very survival of humanity. It is your cult, with its agenda of radical population reduction to reduce CO2 emissions and "save the planet" that is the driving force behind the crazy cult of coerced mass vaccination salvation hysteria.
>Those anti-science misnanthropes with their crazy cult of anthropogenic global warming hysteria threaten the very survival of humanity.
Nope.
The ideology of eternal economic growth on a finite planet threatens the survival of humanity.
Indeed, only a fool or an economist (same difference) would believe that infinite growth on a finite world is somehow possible or desirable. There really is no realistic "Planet B". At least not until FTL travel is perfected, which I am not holding my breath for.
It's hardly the only planet we have. The Russians, who reject your cult, will likely colonise and eventually terraform and mine the moon and the asteroids and then Mars. Greta's brainwashed ideology, born in large part of her and her fellow travellers' anankastic personality disorder, the same one that Hitler had, will in time be rightfully confined to the dustbin of history, provided it does not destroy all of European civilsation first. Of all the "ISMS," it is the most dangerous and murderous one we have ever faced.
Greta is a propaganda soldier, psyop pawn. Nothing more. She's the product of a pr campaign, as much is clear from the bread crumbs
Is this book not available in the US? Amazon does not have it, though it has the older books.
From my (brief) Web search, it doesn't look like Anna Bramwell wrote a book with the title "Hidden History of Environmentalism." I suspect that that's a descriptive title that the reviewer on ininet.org gave to Bramwell's work as a whole. The review says she wrote three books on the subject, but the writing is disjointed and I haven't found the titles of the second and third books.
The original book is for sale for hundreds of U.S. dollars, but there's a PDF of it on the Internet Archive: https://ia904600.us.archive.org/16/items/blood-and-soil-walther-darre-and-hitlers-green-party-by-anna-bramwell/Environmentalism/Blood_and_Soil_Walther_Darr%C3%A9_and_Hitler%E2%80%99s_Green_Party_by_Anna_Bramwell.pdf
Get it before they catch on and remove it!
ADDENDUM: The second and third volumes are listed in the review's bibliography: https://ininet.org/review-of-bramwells-hidden-history-of-environmentalism.html?page=8
Thank you so much.
Got it. Also purchased her history of the Green movement in the 20th c.
I think tt's out of primt. It's hard to get. Open Library may have it.
True, ecofascism is a real thing, unfortunately. Environmentalism in the genuine sense doesn't *have* to be like that, of course, but if one is not careful it can readily become such. Otherwise, though, nearly all of the Nazi Party's political positions put them squarely on the far right, much like Gilead (which was also ecofascist) in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Horseshoe Theory in action.
You'd think, wouldn't you, that someone, somewhere would think back to what came from the gleeful superiority of the victors after WWI and how much pleasure they got from humiliating Germany in every way they could. Creating feelings of resentment and inferiority on top of extreme economic suffering sure turned out great for everyone!
That plus ca change thingy is really annoying how it keeps comin' round again.
Just a question--how did Angela Merkel overcome the awful taint of her Eastness to make it to the top as she did? Was that a unique and not-replicable moment?
Merkel's early rise was down to Helmut Kohl.
She became politically active right on the verge of reunification in Demokratischer Aufbruch, an incipient Christian party that emerged in the last moments of the DDR, and was soon folded into CDU. From there she got elected to the Bundestag with a direct mandate in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Then Kohl almost immediately gave her a (largely symbolic) position in his cabinet.
I'm not sure of all Kohl's reasons, but one thing that massively helped Merkel's rise, was her lack any associations with the communist DDR government. In the East, the CDU had been a "block party" – basically a non-ruling somewhat fictional organisation subordinate to the SED. After reunification much of the senior leadership was considered politically tainted and so Merkel's clean record won her a quick rise in the ranks of the party itself.
Thank you. Your writing on history is extremely helpful.
I think there was a desire in the CDU itself to move pro-Western voices into positions of prominence in the East as quickly as possible. The degree to which lower-ranking members of the party still harboured communist/antidemocratic sympathies wouldn't have been completely known. Whatever his other reasons, Kohl presumably thought Merkel was particularly reliable.
Is there any significance in Frau Merkel’s father’s “red” politics, even as a Christian minister, which led to his move to East Germany? And his daughter’s deliberate (?) moving of the CDU heavily leftward?
Kasner's politics have always been somewhat mysterious to me, but I agree he had clear socialist sympathies.
Merkel I think was overwhelmingly pragmatic and devoid of ideological commitments. She tended to appropriate leftist positions to deprive the opposition of support. She bought in to Green nuclear phase-out, apparently, to hurt Greens in a regional election who were campaigning on Fukushima doom and gloom. She approved one license fee increase after the other to win the support of state media journalists. When the left started citing her migration-sceptic rhetoric critically she became an open borders fanatic, it goes on and on like this.
Thanks: a really helpful summary. Reminds me of the following line by Eric Ambler in the Mask of Dimitrios:
“In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.”
How depressing.
because she was a WEF groomed person?
🔥
Merkel isn't exactly a person from East Germany. Born in Hamburg, West Germany, her parents moved to the East for engagement as pastor. Whether or not as an asset for some 3-letter-agencies. Anyway she didn't grew up in a typical East German family.
Plus she studied in Moskau, something which would normally have been impossible for the daughter of a pastor in the GDR
Good to get back to the topic at hand, not the detailed dramas of the USA.
I believe it was you, Eugyppius, who, at the height of the vaxx mandates, mapped out the areas of Germany that were most resistant to getting the experimental jab and it covered nearly the entirety of the former East Germany following precisely the old BRD/DDR border, just as support for AfD seems to be tracking. Fascinating. Better bullshit detectors indeed.
eugyppius links to that post in the first line of today’s post
I can only speak to Switzerland and (western) Germany. Mr. E you are right on the money. The „easterners“ are considered inferior, lacking proper education and cultural values and are frequently under suspicion of a criminal bent. And of course, the west GRANTED them welcome with reunification and will not forget their own largess. In the 90‘s I heard many business owners saying they would not consider paying easterners in parity with western workers. These are the same people that ask me how can I live in America with all that racism. It speaks to the weakness in humanity.
That must have been the reason why, until recently, Germany didn't have a binding national minimum wage until very recently. They were still "absorbing" the dilapidated East Germany, you see, and didn't want to "price them out" of the labor market. Or more accurately, they still wanted to exploit their relatively cheap labor. How very kind of them. Natch.
Coincidentally I recently had some lengthy conversations with a visiting East German who, as a young man, was unwillingly drafted to serve in a junior position within Erich Honecker's inner circle. The stories het told me about the dying days of the DDR are eerily reminiscent of what we are witnessing now - a total disregard of the bottom 99% driven by a corrupted dogmatic ideology.
In our exchanges he told me was not sad to see the DDR go, not even from his relative high up position. The DDR had run its course and failed - but so did the Wiedervereinigung.
He did stress several times that the social discontent in the states that used to make up East Germany is far worse now than it was in the 1989 -1990 era. Back then people could see a hopeful alternative just across the western border - there is none today. Which makes for an explosive social dynamic.
He said (and I am paraphrasing here) that people in the downtrodden rural East often voted AfD not because it is a good alternative, but because they feel it is the only available alternative. He himself was quite worried about the ideologies behind the AfD.
This is not uniquely German
The downfall of the former DDR and its citizens you describe here is an extreme example of what has been happening all over Europe, especially in provincial Europe, far away from the decision making economic centers.
Even in my tiny Netherlands there is a growing gap between the Randstad and the rest of the country that feels they don't get a say in anything. Having dabbled in Dutch politics I know that there is truth to this gut feeling. The provinces, where the majority of the population lives, are poorly represented in parliament and they are generally worse of when it comes to getting their fair share of the state budget.
Yes, I think also a substantial portion of AfD support in Saxony is not right-leaning, and probably even consists of many former SED sympathisers. They just want any way out of this system, any way to vote against it.
It's classic "Protestwahlverhalten". They are not so much voting VOR AFD as AGAINST the ruling parties. It's really a sign of desperation - the alternative for Germany as the ONLY alternative as far as they can see.
Similar to disillusioned twice-Obama voters who then voted for Trump.
Very clarifying post. Many thanks.
One thing that occurred to me after reading eugyppius’s previous piece on the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the AfD, and again today, is that it is peculiar and maybe problematic – if I understand the setup correctly – that Germany has charged the same agency (the BfV) with both domestic intelligence-gathering, which dovetails with the Interior Ministry’s (of which BfV is a part) general responsibility for internal security, and also with protecting the liberal constitutional order.
It will always be the case that the state’s security and intelligence apparatus is one of the primary threats to the people’s rights, in particular the right to mobilize politically, so putting both objectives in the hands of the selfsame agency seems to promise bad times for any political party that looks likely to shake things up too much.
yes, the BfV is kind of domestic intelligence and political police agency rolled into one. basically the most dystopian combination imaginable.
Thanks for pointing that out and apologies for my lack of German; now I understand they are the same organisation. That is a pretty spectacular structural flaw in a constitution designed to prevent another iteration of totalitarianism.
Add "state terrorism" to that, and presto! You have all the ingredients for a new Schutzstaffel.
"Defamer of the state"
Can I get that on a T-shirt?
The German term is "Delegitimierung des Staates", which might not only look great in a cool font, it's also a bogus accusation to the nth degree.
This piece is incredibly important.
Good reminder in case anyone needed it that communism is evil and should be stamped out.
Either system has its issues.
It depends on where you look and when the people were in the system.
I went to school with a lot of people from Eastern Europe and Russia/Ukraine.
The ones who left before the collapse, hated the USSR.
The ones who left after the collapse, found the western corporate take over to be horrible.
A normal job barely paid for the food and gas and housing that was affordable under Soviet times.
A lot of them had family that needed money sent to live.
Indeed. Communism was bad, but the Neoliberalism (i.e. capitalism with a vengeance) that replaced it proved to be pretty bad as well. "Shock therapy" thus proved to be a very fitting description for what was essentially vulture capitalism by western corporate carpetbaggers. Which is of course an insult to actual vultures, lol.
Yeah, vultures only feed on the dead. These corporations feed on the living lol
To be sure, all cults are bad.
Communism and fascism are two wings of the same bird. Horseshoe Theory, basically.
Look, as an American I really dont like commenting on or criticizing other nations parties, its not my business and I dont know much of the day to day etc..
I have done some reading, as best I can here, The only remark I will make is, it appears AfD is akin to what we may call the center right ( the mainstream media call us far right) here.
God forbid folks want to be German not 'European' or get a handle on migration and fiscal issues.
If the average German has seen their purchasing power disintegrate as we have seen here in the US and AfD speaks up for that, I wish them godspeed.
So what you are saying is, East Germany is Germany, and West Germany is a globohomo hell?
I smiled as I read "flyover country." That had been my exact thought as I was reading this post.
I am routinely appalled that American Coastal Elites are so damned ignorant and SNOBBISH about those who live in "flyover country."
Among my own family and friends--all dyed in the wool New Englanders--I've watched their surprise that someone from, say Missouri, is well educated. There's an assumption that everyone in Kansas or Tennessee has missing teeth and manure on their shoes.
My best friend is one of those Coastal Elites. She's retired to Florida. She regularly remarks her surprise that, "Midwesterners are such NICE PEOPLE."
However, like others in the northeast, she scowls when she discovers, "They all go to church."
Since she's my best friend, I tell her she's an insufferable snob and might want to consider church attendance.
Your best friend is lucky to have you! :-)
America's East Coast "elites" in general are astoundingly and embarrassingly provincial. They are in fact the actual rubes.
And you might want to consider getting a different best friend
A true friend doesn’t give up on being a friend, although I can understand the temptation to do so.
"An unravelling yet hardening liberal system." Well put!
"Because liberal democratic theory holds that desired political outcomes are pre-determined by the liberal system itself, there is no other way to make the logic work."
Perfectly put and relevant not just to East Germany but all of living under this new globalist "liberal" order.
Have you seen this?
https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/jitsuvax/
The really dark side of science: (has strong vibes of Soviet Union)
Developing psych strategies of publicly pathologizing doubters - and there are no legit doubters, it's a priory fixed that it has to be wrong...