East Germany balloon escape
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.
(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
But when Musk took that approach to DOGE, chaos.
And some of the approach hasn’t always gone well at Tesla either.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/06/01/elon-musk-wan...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/24/elon-musk-...
Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets
A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.
A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.
The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.
Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.
But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.
In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.
That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later.
The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
Maybe because of your language?
"Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable."
But if the choice is between no punishment and somebody gunning them down in the street or droning them, i prefer the latter.
Court processes are useful when guilt is uncertain at first look and you want to increase certainty. But dictators and their close supporters, the certainty is often sufficient by nature of many their actions being public. Sometimes they literally go on TV and declare they're going to a foreign country to kill their people and take their land. At that point, it only becomes a matter of making sure you have the right person.
And don't forget the victims. Many authoritarian regimes don't kill opposition outright (for various reasons) but imprison them instead. Such a victim knows many of the people (cops, judges, informants, etc.) responsible for / guilty of falsely imprisoning them. After a regime change, the victims go free and have often more knowledge of the offenses than can be proven to a court by the simply virtue of being there and therefore have more than enough confidence to deliver a just punishment.
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
Look at Unit 731 as an example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ).
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
There ws a great cost to a "peaceful transition". The entire judiciary was basically full of extremely corrupt people, half of the political class. Even today when the old judges are almost all gone the horrible culture they had still corrupts many younger ones (although today it is more towards incompetence and indifference rather than corruption).
Would it be better to have half a million (or possibly entire million if you count inevitable victims on the other side) die to avoid it? We are still paying the price.
There is an argument that had we sorted the communist problem successfully back then we wouldn't have politicians later that let themselves be corrupted by Putin into funding his army. And perhaps there would never be an invasion of Ukraine.
Or if we done away with the peaceful transition, the communists in other neighbouring countries would attempt to hold on to power with everything they got. Who knows.
The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement).
If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
Perhaps it would be better to pick the government at random and then have much more frequent votes with the only choice being whether to pick a new random government or not.
EVERYONE IS HAPPY.
They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.
And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.
But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
Perhaps the least recognized example is America. The Constitution imposes libertarianism on the population against majority will. You can't change the constitution with a 50%+1 vote, so it forces freedom of speech and other rights on people who might otherwise easily vote to get rid of them. There's no one man enforcing the constitution, just a general agreement to obey SCOTUS.
Sharia law. Beat your wife. law. Fine rape victims. Use slaves, flog gay people.
Name a regressive and disgusting way of treating humans - it’s probably done there.
Lichtenstein and Singapur found their niches, which do not scale to larger countries, Dubai was just lucky.
Happy slaves don’t dream of freedom.
I wonder what would happen to Lichtenstein if the EU would pull a Trump on them and block trade and airspace until the adjust their tax policies…
Not that this would ever happen.
There was a lot of contact between West and East Germans due to the awkward nature of the division of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. In contrast, that contact doesn't exist between North and South Korea.
(Remember, West Berlin was an enclave inside of East Germany, and West Germans were allowed to travel through East Germany in order to travel in and out of West Berlin.)
Authoritarianism is the oldest form of effective government. Just as curious note, dictatorship was introduced during the Roman epoch and was used as temporary measure during war times. Look for example in Ukraine where the same ruler is avoiding elections since some time due to war, in the root sense of the government-style it is possible to describe it as a dictatorship today, if it hadn't been for the negative connotation of that term in the last 100 years.
Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
Eg: Shall we improve public healthcare?
But... why would you include that? They're certainly not discussions of the DDR.
This AI slop is a pretty accurate description of my local medical practice (bar the cheap joke at beginning and everyone having an English accent): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw
We hardly ever hear about East Germany or all the horrors of living in such a place. Very rarely these days. I've known quite a few people who lived under that regime and they told me what it was like. Everyone was being watched, and even school children had to write spy reports on their neighbours. All while the East German state kept proclaiming how it was a place of freedom and equality.
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
This was in the late 80s.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.
I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.
But all the same it's important to be able to recognize where we could do better. Optimizing for investor return is frequently not synonymous with optimizing for societal well being. I don't think engagement algorithms that result in negative emotions are really a benefit to anyone other than the company that deploys them.
So too for the online advertising industry. We - ie capitalists - have dedicated some of our best minds to building out something that vaguely resembles a panopticon. When you consider the intangible social and political externalities it seems to me that the place we've arrived at isn't a good one.
Don't forget that in addition to any negative impacts of the things that were built, every day spent in that way was a day not spent pursuing scientific or mathematical breakthroughs.
In my country, there is a barrage of Russian propaganda trying to relativize our shitty experience with the communist regime. They keep flooding the zone with claims about democracy being flawed, weak, bureaucratic, meaningless, and decadent. And it is working. People appreciate democracy a lot less than ten or twenty years ago.
Sure, there is a time for the self-criticism of the flaws of the West. I just think now is not the time. Democracy and freedom are under serious threat worldwide. Now is the time to keep reminding ourselves how great it is what we have built. Now is the time to be absolutely clear that the flaws of democracies are not in the same category as the flaws of authoritarian regimes.
I still remember what it was like living in a totalitarian regime - and I was living in a soft totalitarianism nearing its collapse. I am not old enough to remember the hardcore Stalinist era. And still, it was so bad that whatever you believe is bad about capitalism is like 1% of how bad it was. Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
Look, I am a pessimist. I think there is a very real chance that the US is turning into a Russia-like state. I hope not, but if that happens, very bad things are likely to happen in Europe too. We will all live it once again. If you still don’t understand what I mean, I suggest this: let’s bookmark this discussion and get back in 5 years, if we are still alive. Then, you will tell me what you think about optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. If you still think it is a problem worth mentioning by then, I will be very happy.
I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding.
Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amount of opportunity available to our society in a general sense, it's more than a bit depressing to think that this is how we (collectively) chose to use it so far.
A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. Like yeah I think the advanced bioengineering is a fantastic accomplishment. I don't think we should get rid of it. Things were definitely worse before we got that figured out. I don't miss amputations and lobotomies. But is it really necessary to so badly misappropriate the opportunity that it affords us?
Given how different your perspective is from my own I can appreciate that my original short and rather flippant comment failed to convey that particular message.
> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus
What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.
I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.
The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.
Engagement metrics = making entertainment that's popular rather than what's mandated by the state's culture committees.
Optimizing them is a virtuous and noble profession.
Extensive effort to improve engagement metrics tends to result in negative emotional states (and increased revenue).
When it comes to entertainment, optimizing return on investment often means maximizing the size of the potential audience. The end result of that process is usually slop.
My ex partner wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos.
This should be standard practice, I do it as well. Not East German but East European. We had our own Stasi that would terrorize youths for listening to Western music of Radio Free Europe.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesbeauftragter_f%C3%BCr_di...
Not anymore.
That said, there is a substantial disconnect between the substantive preferences of the voting population and the actual policies and decisions of the parties they elect. This is partly because promises like “internal security” gain much more traction in times of growing uncertainty and global instability, while only a relatively small portion of the population fully thinks through, or is willing to think through, the consequences and concrete legislative changes behind those promises.
Nevertheless, looking at both public attitudes and court rulings, it is still fair to say that data protection in Germany, even compared to other EU countries, currently enjoys a particularly high status.
Do you have any sources to substantiate this claim? In particular, including under which law a prison sentence or fine was imposed for the expression of a constitutionally protected political opinion.
Example: the American author CJ Hopkins has been repeatedly prosecuted in Berlin despite being acquitted the first time, because in Germany there's apparently no constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. His "crime" was criticizing COVID authoritarianism. You're now going to tell me why the German constitution allows this, and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
The claim that Germany has "no constitutional protection against double jeopardy" is false. Art. 103(3) of the constitution embodies ne bis in idem. The German criminal procedure allows legal remedies (appeals), including Revision (appeal on points of law), which can be brought by both parties before a judgment becomes final. That’s what happened in this case.
In the CJ Hopkins case, the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB. One can freely say "the government acted authoritarian during COVID"; that kind of political criticism is protected speech under Art. 5 GG.
> and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
I’m not interested in moral justifications. Morality is a matter of opinion, and you’re entitled to yours just as I am to mine. The same applies to your view of the German constitution.
However, backing up claims about concrete cases with sources helps me (and others) understand which cases you’re referring to and whether they actually support your argument in a way that lets me learn something new (preferably) or whether we'll simply end up acknowledging that we have different opinions on the matter ;)
> the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB
Of course it was the issue. German media puts swastikas on things without any legal problems when they are government aligned.
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/SPIEGEL-Nichts-gelernt-Jahre-Bund...
It's only people criticizing the left who get prosecuted under such laws. That's deliberate.
> Which specific law were they convicted under?
Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively. Habek has filed criminal complaints against over 800 people. The German Chancellor has probably filed thousands of such complaints given the numbering of the case files.
From a German court order:
At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.
The public prosecutor's office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.
This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. ...
I'd be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion.
> Of course it was the issue. German media puts swastikas on things without any legal problems when they are government aligned.
Are we talking about the use of swastikas or your statement that people are imprisoned or fined for voicing anti-left opinions? I'm happy to do both, but it feels like those are two different things.
The use of swastikas (and other symbolism of banned organizations like the NSDAP) is prohibited in Germany if there is no clear rejection of the NS tied to it or if the rejection cannot unequivocally be derived from the context.
Using swastikas is therefore somewhat risky in any context, since it is a matter for the courts to decide whether a specific case qualifies as allowed use or not. It is far more probable that the use of a swastika in an anti-left statement will not qualify, since it is challenging to add value to an anti-left statement by using a swastika while still clearly rejecting the NS at the same time.
Again, happy to talk about § 86a StGB, but I would first be interested in how you come to the conclusion that this is being used to suppress anti-left opinions. I.e., how is using a swastika necessary or even helpful when voicing an opinion?
CJ Hopkins said he wanted to warn the public of a 'newly rising totalitarianism'. He posted a picture of a corona mask with a visible swastika and the caption 'Masks are symbols of ideological conformity' and a quote from the then minister of health stating 'Masks also always send a signal'.
Pretty much all of that is legal, also when looking at § 188. The only real issue is the use of the swastika. Using common symbolism like 'OBEY' instead would immediately remove any legal doubts.
> Germany forbids insulting politicians, and German politicians use it extensively.
True, Germany also forbids insulting anyone. This is not restricted to politicians, and there is no difference in which insults are punishable for politicians and non-politicians. This is very different from how things are in the US, where insults are not punishable offenses per se. § 188 mostly refers to the degree of penalty possible when directing an insult towards any politician and what's necessary for a different degree of penalty to apply.
However, this is used by politicians across the whole political spectrum alike, including the far-right. The same reports you mentioned with regard to Robert Habeck exist for Alice Weidel, who filed hundreds of complaints under §§ 185 and 188. This is regardless of ongoing criticism of this paragraph voiced by the far-right, liberals, and others alike.
How is this specifically targeting anti-left opinions?
> You're doing exactly what I said you'd do. Zero shame.
Meta: Reading this, it feels like you don't particularly enjoy this conversation. So let me say this: I'm really happy we are having this discussion. It is something completely different to read about other opinions in the paper versus actually talking to someone with a different perspective. I'm genuinely interested in your opinion, and my questions are serious questions, not rhetorical ones.
I don't feel any animosity towards you, and I hope you can also gain something from this. If you don't share that sentiment, I'm completely fine with leaving this thread as is and accepting that we won't reach any agreement right now.
The film The Lives of Others should give folks a pretty good idea of what the Stasi was.
There is actually gunfire in it and a teenager dies in the beginning but it still feels less intense due to the 80s pace IMO.
For the East there were 2 citizenships. They had no adjectives, they only talked about "citizen of the German Democratic Republic" and "citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany".
The occupation view was not official politics after 1970. The West had recognized the East as a state. But citizens of both states were assumed to have the same citizenship.
Edit: recognized as state should maybe recognized as some kind of state. Like the citizenship there were numerous differences compared to other foreign nation states.
At that point I leaved Venezuela inmediatly with my 2 minor aged kids, because for me it was a NO BRAINER that the first thing they will do was to limit the emigration and the free ciruculation. My train of tought was very simple. As any other Socialist Dictatorship before, this one needs to halt the staggering loss of skilled proffesionals like Medics, Engineers or whatever they deemed of National Security, I mean, you still need Doctors, you still need the Electricity and Water to get into the industries and houses, and specially for Venezuela, you need to keep the Oil flowing off the earth...
BOY WAS I WRONG, they never put a formal limit to the emigration and at least another 5 million people leaved Venezuela (so far). It did not matter at all that the already in shambles Public Health system collapsed, they doctors that stayed were private and they attended only the capacity that could pay for the scarse services, the basic services did not matter that much either, as people got use to get them once or twice per week, and even a country wide blackout of 3 weeks was not the end of the regime, and the Oil, well, does not matter either because what was once 3.5 million barrels per day went to be as low as 300.000 bpd.
So, what was the difference? well, for all its downfalls, it seems to me that the XX century Communist/Socialist dictatorships were guided by Ideology, they really thought theirs ideas were for the better of their people, so having no Healthcare was a REAL PROBLEM, having no public services was a REAL PROBLEM. Of course, their recipes were doomed as their political ideals, but at least they tried.
The Venezuelan Regime has no Ideology (it has some in form of propaganda, but that is different that actions) as the latest news can attest, They couldn't care less about the people and the wellness. They did not use any "Natural Resouces" to keep any level of living conditions, they just let loose the ruins of the economy they had messed so badly to let the most savage neoliberalism to correct the course while they stayed in power to keep leaching two sources of income, whatever oil they could produce and the drugs operations revenue, alongside their cut on any business their allies (AKA "Enchufados) could come up in the "liberalized" economy.
All the people that leaved the country (including me) just made them easier to keep control of whatever was left. Ever decreasing political or social opposition, less pressure of the shambles public services and so on and on...
The Natural Resources is just a part of their Income, it does not affects the hability to control or to even extract richness from the system.
I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange for the regime stability.
When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems
Czechoslovakia in that period had one party politics, justified because multiparty democracy was "bourgeois deviation". It was a state run centrally planned economy, because the left wing don't believe in capitalism or free markets. Officially unemployment didn't exist, because only imperialist capitalist right wing economies had unemployment. Party membership and associated ideological compliance was required for any important role. Culture was censored, people were imprisoned by ideology police.
It is bizarre to claim that the USSR was not ideological. It collapsed because it was pure ideology in defiance of reality.
The reason the USSR kept people behind a wall is because they were able to mentally justify it to themselves within the framework of their far left ideology. They viewed the west as corrupt and, more importantly, full of corrupting ideas. They were just much more committed to winning the propaganda war than a place like Venezuela is because their worldview was formed at the end of the Victorian era when travel and communication was much more easily restricted. Maduro's socialist worldview was formed much later, when the idea of preventing Venezuelans having access to capitalist ideas would have seemed much more ridiculous.
I have spent 13 years in Czech Republic, admittedly after the curtain fell, and I can tell you for a fact that they were “communist” because otherwise tanks.
You can see the relationship they had with the ideology in pretty much any sliver of cultural material from the period and after.
Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
The thing that makes this balloon escape story is so enthralling is that it actually worked.
To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
Vibe-coded an online calculator for future escapists: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site
Tbf they probably didn't do all these calculations, but should have. They risked their lives by getting some of these things wrong.
Thanks..
Ironic. Still quite an adventure. Thanks for sharing!
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources show higher figures for earlier years).
Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
Bahrain: Around 55%.
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
> You're still an immigrant even if you can't become a citizen.
Yes, like I said. My point is that these two scenarios are very different:
1. "I am +1 to the immigrant count because this is a great place for me and my family to live and I wish for us to move here permanently."
2. "I am +1 to the immigrant count temporarily because the wages here are so much more than I could earn at home, and I'm remitting that money back to my family who live somewhere else. As much as this is an opportunity for me, we could never move here because same wages would have my family homeless and starving, making this a terrible place to move permanently."
Both people are happily adding to the "immigrants inside" count, but they are very different judgements about the country.
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
The repressive state apparatus was moving too slow. Maybe they hoped there won't be a second attempt after the first one failed, maybe it wasn't promptly reported to the appartchikhs and handled internally by the Stasi to avoid backlash.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.
Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.
Wouldn't "registration" as used in the article mean the purchase details were sent to the authorities, so they could investigate/stop a potential escape attempt?
Even if the devices were registered, you might be up and away before they figure it out. But if another family flew away, that registration list would be handy door to door.
I think I saw the film in the late eighties/early nineties round about the time the Eastern Bloc was falling apart so it had less impact.
It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.
I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.
[1] https://store.bookbaby.com/book/time-zones
[2] Authors website: https://www.svensiekmann.com/bio
Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.
Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
But not that surprising when you look at Russian history.
You know there isn't an ideology called collectivism, right?
That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.
It’s astounding to me that this was a thing. The fact that it’s so rare now is one of the quiet ways we have in fact progressed.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
For example, "Don't Be a Sucker" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice. (Some people reapply that definition to the word "populism". No, it's real democracy to elect the people's choice.)
Censorship = intentionally suppress certain ideas and messages
Propaganda = choosing what to publish (or even publishing lies) to intentionally create or support a particular worldview or narrative, especially one that favors certain political people or groups (as opposed to simply publishing truth to keep those in power accountable)
Fascism = the state tells you what to do, not the other way around
Liberty = the people choose what to say and do with their own lives, without interference by the state (besides enforcement of laws written by democratically elected legislators)
Justice = everyone is equally accountable to the law regardless of who they are. This especially includes legislators and rich/powerful people.
That rather rules out what happens in, say, the USofA, where entrenched party politics limits the choice of the wider population to those few candidates that are backed.
> Some people reapply that definition to the word "populism". No, it's real democracy to elect the people's choice.
Populism isn't democracy, democracy isn't populism; it's generally used to describe a cynical political strategy of appeal to the broadest, lowest common denominator instincts, to gain support from a base who at best get little more than lip service toward addressing their real needs. Frequently associated with strawmen and strawissues as a focus of common manufacted enemy, etc.
In a well structured government for the people by the people such groups are as essential as military, as law enforcement, as health professionals, etc.
Politicians debate policy and advocate on behalf of representatives.
Unelected civil servants put policy into practice and need to be immune from the cycle of elected officials, just as the military needs to be.
All these groups, military, judges, civil service need to be held to high standards and subject to scrutiny with respect to professional conduct.
The USofA looks a bit off to outsiders in many respects, not simply tipping. So many elected positions that aren't merit based and seemingly immune to standards and termination for misconduct.
It’s also weird in that the candidate with the most votes might not win. The electoral system is weird.
In the EU, European Union, member countries are voting on EU positions .. whether it's weighted or unweighted, it's a collection of N countries voting, not a collection of N millions of people voting.
Similarly in the USofA, formed as a union of states to have a common government for those things that are agreed to superseded individual state interests.
I live in a country with mandatory voting - everybody (of age, save for those convicted of _serious_ crime) votes, and ranked proportional voting.
Compulsory voting offends the sensibilities of a number of USofA citizens, but there is a strong case to be made for it, ranked voting does a lot to avoid two party Hotelling's law quagmires where major parties barely represent anybody and yet MySportingTeam divisions dominate.
Then you've got the part where the US was never billed as a "democracy" to begin with but rather a "democratic republic".
What's weird to me is how quickly a group with an advantage will attempt to discard compromises and other agreements once they have what they wanted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson#:~:text=A%20month...
Git a little drunk
An' you lands in jail
Show a little grit
And you land in jailThere are fascists in the former DDR today.
So I guess it worked.
That was certainly the party line of the DDR at the time. Do you honestly believe it?
It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who served in East Germany, claims that his war in Ukraine is justified in the name of denazification. It’s an easy rhetorical trick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
In reality, a lot of careerists shifted their loyalties from the National Socialist government to the Communist one. There were several years in which the Communists, much like their western counterparts, tried to weed out all the Nazis, before realising many of them were experienced in administering things. (The Eastern Bloc had its own smaller version of Operation Paperclip, although the scientists tended to be less willing.)
And I take the definition of fascists as anyone who prioritizes their political system, State or political view to a point of depriving any other citizen of their basic freedom.
If you want to take a more Trotskyite view, many post-revolutionary states enter a so called "Bonapartist" phase, where militarism, ultranationalism and symbology combine to produce something which looks a lot like Fascism. Mao and Stalin were not above using ultranationalism and chauvinism to push their rule. North Korea has gone all the way with this with Juche which contains mystical, ultranationalist and even racial supremacist features.
Not officially although in reality the Stasi quite happily reused Gestapo files, and there were numerous National Socialists who ended up east of the border.
The GDR had a series of fake political parties, besides the Communist, in order to pretend they were a democracy. I believe they did have one that pretended to appeal to such people.
"There are fascists in the former DDR today."
Much more so than the west which did not have years of Communist rule.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
dystopia ?
Usually people who feel (or are) targeted are not 100% innocent.
It's not just my comments - you see something similar with headlines on the front page that contain certain names like El-n M-sk. They will accumulate hundreds of points and comments and then be cens-red.
That’s actually the point of libertarianism, anarchism: do what you want, but you will only do well if you get along with the rest of the society by providing something helpful to them, as no one is forced to help you. And that’s why free market capitalism works. Even the most selfish individuals have needed to cooperate, work for others or open businesses with useful products for society in order to be able to accumulate wealth.
Definitely a "character", even if medically sound enough to stand trial.
PS: He was dumb as hell too of course, and it was only due to incredible laxness of the air force that he was never shot down.
You're more likely to get hassled when you land like the Ethan Guo guy (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04rql923kdo)
PS: Don't forget the Soviets knowingly shot and killed an entire airliner full of people. I saw an interview with the fighter pilot later and he didn't even have remorse for what he was doing, "just following orders". What a monster. But that was pretty typical there. Anyone with a backbone questioning orders was already dying in a gulag.
However there is a spectrum between it. I don't think either extreme is great, neither American unrestricted capitalism nor full-on communism. A balance of both is needed. I was a lot happier in the 80s when Holland was a lot more socialist. Less things to worry about, a safety net, cheap housing and schooling, still the ability to run your own business if you really wanted to. We had a great combination.
However the VVD neoliberals (who idolize America) have destroyed it over the last decades and there are so many huge problems now because they always went for the quick fix.
With full-on capitalism you get lots of disenfranchised people angry at not having any upward mobility, corporations just dump all over the citizens, and differences in wealth get insanely high. With full-on communism you end up with a surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes. The secret sauce is in between IMO.
https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
Also an audio podcast available for the article, that's more thrilling.
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.
yawns
There were a lot of things in the USSR but leaving by "escape and defection" was not the only option.
- Make communism look good.
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality. - it needs to suppress any other political alternative - it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).
Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
As for the "flawed methodology": 66.2% of Romanians regret Nicolae Ceausescu in a study..."commissioned by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile" - I'd say if the "institute" of bad-mouthing communism had to admit that number... well it seems the russian bots are extremely efficient, maybe we should listen to them instead of useless Ursula bots ;)
Just on the face of it: extending the idea of company towns to an entire _nation_ seems bad to me on paper.
In the end there is an awkward question. What separates Communism from a bronze age god-king's palace economy where everyone is a slave of the ruler?
> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37
> Doris Strelzyk
> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15
> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11
> Günter Wetzel, aged 24
> Petra Wetzel
> Peter Wetzel, aged 5
> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2
Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
A gentleman does not ask a lady's age.
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
Too many morons. Too few balloons.
Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan. This is got me laughing out loud.
It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.
> This is got me laughing out loud.
I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.