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TacticalCoder

Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?

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Remember the GDR called the Berlin Wall the "Antifascist Protection Barrier"

I believe the USA-Mexico border wall was called something similar

That wall is to keep people out from another state, not in.

After all, they kept Paul Robeson in by simply pulling his passport, no wall needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson#:~:text=A%20month...

I don't need to go to Wikipedia to read about Robeson. Guy became a Stalin fan and crumbled mentally when he realised the USSR was not what it claimed. Great singer though.

I think part of what they didn't like was that in Old Man River, instead of singing:

  Git a little drunk
  An' you lands in jail

for Moscow audiences he sang:

  Show a little grit
  And you land in jail

That's how east berlin marketed it too, it still features bi-directional blocking abilities, like all walls.

There were no fascists in the DDR.

There are fascists in the former DDR today.

So I guess it worked.

> There were no fascists in the DDR.

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_...

I believe this about as much as the Chinese Communist official who claimed that there were no homosexuals in the PRC.

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.)

The fascists were everywhere in the DDR: just called members of the party or as part of the Stasi.

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.

Authoritarianism isn't the same thing as fascism.

Some ways, yes, some ways no. Communism and Fascism in practice had mutual influences on one another although they would be loathe to admit it. (By Communism here, I mean Communist party rule, not the future utopia which none of these countries ever achieved.)

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.

That is arguing a distinction which is a really bad look.

"There were no fascists in the DDR."

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.

A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.

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.

> Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia

dystopia ?

Communism is the idea of "can't we all just get along?" which is obviously not something you can actually implement, but is easily used as a buzzword by evil regimes. Remember, H-tl-r called his regime "socialist", much the same way N-rth K-rea calls itself "democratic"

You can spell out Hitler and North Korea here. Meta has no power here.

Incorrect. Users are running autoflag bots.

Every day you make comments that are downvoted (and probably flagged) by several people... I think it's quite possible that the real issue is not "other people."

Usually people who feel (or are) targeted are not 100% innocent.

There's a clear pattern where comments containing certain words are flagged much more often than comments containing mildly cens-red versions of those words. Could be HN itself but if we assume HN isn't lying about how its algorithm works (a big assumption) then it must be user flag bots.

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 not the idea of communism.

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.

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