I have often argued that Communism “froze” social attitudes in the socialist bloc relative to the West, which was strongly influenced by the US.
Here’s another recent article making this point:
- Matthew Carl (2018) – The Effect of Communism on People’s Attitudes Toward Immigration
Does living in a communist regime make a person more concerned about immigration? This paper argues conceptually and demonstrates empirically that people’s attitudes toward immigration are affected by their country’s politico-economic legacy. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment arising from the historic division of Germany into East and West, I show that former East Germans, because of their exposure to communism, are notably more likely to be very concerned about immigration than former West Germans. Opposite of what existing literature finds, higher educational attainment in East Germany actually increases concerns. Further, I find that the effect of living in East Germany is driven by former East Germans who were born during, and not before, the communist rule and that differences in attitudes persist even after Germany’s reunification. People’s trust in strangers and contact with foreigners represent two salient channels through which communism affects people’s preferences toward immigration.
In Russia, more education is also associated with marginally greater immigration skepticism.
Further, the results indicate that attitudes among former East and West Germans have not converged since reunification, a finding consistent with evidence in development psychology and the socialization theory that preferences developed early in life will persist. Also in line with this conceptual framework, I find that the effect of communism is most pronounced among individuals who were born in the regime, while former East Germans who were born before communist rule express considerably less concern about immigration than the generations that followed. Finally, I find that two conceptually and empirically salient channels for the observed effect of communism on attitudes toward immigration are people’s level of trust in strangers and contact with foreigners.
One wonders how long these lines will last. After all, the old imperial borders before WW1 can still be discerned in socio-economic outcomes across East-Central Europe.
In other news: The AfD has become the most popular party in the f.East Germany.
That sounds kind of dumb tbh, is this supposed to mean people socialized during Nazism (the relatively few who are still alive) are less “xenophobic” than those socialized in the GDR with all its “friendship of peoples” propaganda?
Anyway, people born before communist rule are at least 70, if one takes the founding of the GDR in 1949 as starting point (though one could just as well start already in 1945)…it’s not surprising that people of that age are less concerned about immigration. They’ll be mostly dead in 15-20 years, and they’re also more likely to use just traditional media (especially television) which are basically non-stop propaganda for Merkelism.
The real mystery imo isn’t the attitudes of East Germans which are just normal by global standards…the real question should be how West Germans got brainwashed into their present state.
In the long run, Russians have the last laugh.
Fast your minds back to 1989, when East Germans and Hungarians conspired together to destroy the Soviet Bloc, taking advantage of Gorbachev’s stupidity.
Whatever was wrong with East Germany, it was ethnically German, and likely to remain that way perpetually. In that context, considering thousands of years of German history, ‘communism’ , ‘living standards’, ‘freedom’ etc are pretty much meaningless.
Now fast forward to 2018. Merkel and the rest of the fuckwits think that turning the corner East Germany black and brown is the ‘highest morality’, and are doing so with aplumb.
And the EU is doing the same to Hungary.
So the ghosts of millions of German slaughtered Russian soldiers laugh HA HA HA.
Only if they keep out the muzzies from Central Asia and raise their own birthrate.
How wicked of them, conspiring to stop being Soviet vassal states
There is no point holding on to this grudge, whatever side one’s ancestors were on we all face the same horde now.
The Easterners learnt to be good socialists, the Westerners learnt to be good liberals.
For better or worse people in general are very dependent on their peers and, when exposed to no contrary worldview, will adopt the majority of the underlying beliefs, even if they reject some of the surface-level opinions.
Normal by global standards, but not by Western standards. Parsimony suggests communism is the theory, though there’s also the theory that East Elbian Germany was a fundamentally different society much more like Eastern Europe despite being German. I’ve also seen some stuff wrt haplogroups, but can’t get into it as haplogroups are far too boring.
Not really a mystery, since the same thing has happened in every other Western country.
Christianity was effectively killed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Three secular faiths (liberalism, communism, fascism) competed to replace it, and liberalism won. Various historical events (WW2, Cold War) and perhaps malicious Jewish influence transformed liberalism into an anti-white death cult. No one likes to admit to being wrong, so this goes on simply out of sheer inertia and doubling down. We must try harder comrades.
The effect is somewhat stronger in Germany owing to endless guilt over the war and the six gorillion (never forget), but isn’t fundamentally different from any other Western country.
I don’t like this idea for obvious reasons, but it’s possible that if Islamization happens then demographic replacement will end. If Germans suddenly become proud, pious Muslims, they’ll act more like Islamic states on border controls (not many, if any, refugees in Saudi Arabia). On the downside the Caliphate of Germany might find it necessary to launch another invasion of Russia in order to bring the religion of peace to the Russians.
I am guessing that in East Germany the holocaust religion was not rammed down the throats like it was in West Germany, that alone makes a huge difference in the way people see the world.
If it were as simple as that, they’d all be voting for the LINKE, which would like to turn Germany into an “antifascist” GDR 2.0 plus mass immigration. But that’s not what’s happening.
They might have been ‘vassals’, but they still would have been ethnic Germans living in the German Fatherland.
Now it’s going to be – thanks to Merkel, the EU and The Economist – the Unholy Trinity – Pakistanis, Nigerians and Bangladeshis taking over the Fatherland.
I don’t buy that, that sounds as if all of East Germany (actually Mitteldeutschland, the real East Germany was further east of course) was some backward rural region dominated by Junkers, which just wasn’t the case. Saxony was a centre of industry and the workers’ movement, certainly one of the more advanced and modern regions of Germany. I grew up in Franconia near the former border and even after 40 years of communism people from Thuringia seemed in some ways less alien there than North Germans.
Nor do I believe the “East Germans are really Slavs” explanation. There are no deeper historical reasons for East Germany’s distinctiveness than the 40 years of GDR.
The idea that European nationalists could somehow “take over” Islam is just silly, I don’t understand why this bizarre idea keeps coming up here.
Bingo.
Aside from nostalgia (http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-dictatorship-majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-a-634122.html), which might be perhaps be dismissed as superficial.
Looking at regional elections, although not exclusively so, a large part of the Die Linke’s base comes from the the East.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_(Germany)
I also think Die Linke also started to lose popularity in the East when it became clear that the New Left would dominate the party.
So if the Die Linke had stuck to KPRF-style socialism, they could probably have carved out a significant loyal base in the East.
https://m.dw.com/en/germany-new-aufstehen-movement-of-sahra-wagenknecht-is-shaking-up-leftists/a-45047762
Probably, but since they’ve adopted insane open borderism, they’ll lose many of their voters (in Thuringia, the only state where they’re leading a government, they’ve already dropped to 3rd place in polls, slightly behind the AfD).
And the LINKE (PDS until 2007) was never uncontroversial, there have always been many East Germans who hated it because of the GDR…because fundamentally they’re the Mauermörderpartei.
I knew a Nazi refugee from Danzig who settled in the USA (I was a friend of his son’s). This man was the real thing, not some sort of 21st century one. He had a copy of Mein Kampf on his coffee table, decorated the house with swastikas, embarrassed his son quite a bit….He hated Jews and talked about their influence on movies, politics, etc. incessantly . But he liked blacks (Leni Riefenstahl did too), viewing them as victims of the Jewish slave trade, and liked Arabs a lot, taking their side in conflicts with Americans whom he despised. He was an intelligent guy, older, had a successful one-man company involved in technology.
One probably doesn’t see such creatures in Germany itself.
“Fast your minds back to 1989, when East Germans and Hungarians conspired together to destroy the Soviet Bloc, taking advantage of Gorbachev’s stupidity.”
East Germany didn’t conspire to destroy the Soviet bloc. On the contrary, the old regime – which was very much interested in self-preservation – knew the GDR would be finished without Moscow backing it up and holding the bloc together.
East Germany’s Erich Honecker wanted the Soviets to rein in the Hungarians but Gorbachev threw him to the wolves.
I don’t think it has much to do with that. See http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ossies-are-east-europeans/
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/map-germany-elections-2017-afd.png
Saxony is the most Nazi state in Germany today, with the AfD getting 27% there in 2017. But they were the most industrialized and least Nazi friendly region (apart from metropolitan Berlin) in Prussia proper in the early 1930s.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/map-germany-elections-1933-march.png
Saxony also has the least Slavic admixture, the highest IQ, and the highest rate of historical accomplishment of all the regions of East Germany.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/germany-regional-iq-2011.jpg
Thorfinnsson is just desperate to test out his Germany vs. Russia war scenario with ten years preparation. 🙂
Of course. My original point was that there is still a non-negligible part of the East German population that has internalised the cultural values of the DDR.
AfD aren’t Nazis (except in the sense that anybody who’s opposed to endless Afro-Islamic immigration is a “Nazi”), and Saxony wasn’t part of Prussia, but one of Prussia’s antagonists before unification; it had its own king until 1918.
But yes, it was known as rotes Sachsen (red Saxony) before 1933.
https://i.imgur.com/xcfJQNH.jpg
Ah but the question then becomes “are the Linke good socialists or are they Americanised lifestyle liberals too?”. I’d guess they are, judging by what I’ve heard from them and every other post-68er lefty party in the West.
It is amusing, but the distinction between European Christianity and paganism is not always so clear.
https://books.google.com/books?id=y9Ysp4U4C_IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Germanization+of+Early+Medieval+Christianity:+A+Sociohistorical+Approach+to+Religious+Transformation&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTn9Or6YPeAhWRRMAKHc4aBsgQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_paganism
Celebrations like Walpurgis Night or Ivan Kupala manage to embody the spirit of European culture, regardless of people’s formal beliefs.
Incidentally, one of the reason I hate iconoclastic movements like the Puritans.
Agree and amplify. Same reason I like to call Putin, Putler.
The good thing about the East Bloc is that they had to work with the people they had, rather than become dependent on immigration to bring in new skills, replace the elderly and feed the labour market. West Germany only really switched over to the American “nation of immigrants” model in the early to mid-1970s, along with the French, Dutch, Brits, etc. That’s when they switched from allowing a limited number of guest workers to the system of family unification. This is the around same time that the “White Australia” policy was retired and Canada switched from the Two Nations model to official multiculturalism.
The liberal economic model can’t work without endless growth. Around the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, our managerial elite went off the gold standard and introduced our current ponzi scheme immigration model. To make it work, those of us in the American Zone got endless happy talk, bullying and social shaming to make sure we accepted the new realities. The East Bloc didn’t undergo this Ludovico treatment and so they see things differently.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/sahra-wagenknecht-aufstehen-die-linke-interview
That would be fatal as a political strategy in Germany. The establishment is already shamelessly playing the Nazi card anyway and would very much like to put AfD under surveillance by the Verfassungsschutz (the internal security service for the protection of the constitution), which might scare away the more bourgeois members with something to lose (if assaults by Antifa haven’t already intimidated them).
It’s probably not easy to get for people outside of Germany how crazy it is here and how absurdly demonized the AfD is…and not just by lefties, but also by supposed “conservatives”. The minister president of Bavaria Markus Söder from the CSU claimed a few weeks ago that AfD is part of an “international network with a lot of money and evil thoughts” (he didn’t elaborate what he meant with that…do they get money from Putin? Are they affiliated with Richard Spencer? Who knows)…and that AfD politicians call for a liberalization of gun laws because they want to create a party militia and erode the state’s monopoly of force.
I don’t know how one’s supposed to deal with such madness…but embracing the Nazi image would probably be a mistake.
I want to again stress that I do not support this, but indeed it would not go down like that.
A plausible scenario (not today of course) is that some ambitious but excluded elite faction converts to Islam for political purposes and seizes control of the state and Islamicizes the country and its institutions.
Such a country wouldn’t be nationalist in any sense, but if actual Islamic countries are anything to go by it wouldn’t be very friendly to immigrants or other Islamic states at all.
Perhaps the best choice for historical identification would be the Lützow Free Corps, Baron vom Stein, and other German patriots during the Napoleonic era.
And while historically this doesn’t seem like an actual good parallel, identifying with the early leadership of the federal republic is not a bad idea. They did at least pay lip service to recovering Germany’s lost eastern territories, even if Adenauer privately didn’t even care about Berlin. Gustav Stresemann another good choice, and he actually seems to have a lot in common with modern German nationalists.
It’s too bad the Greens are so demented, since there are very obvious environmentalist reasons for rejecting immigration.
Not necessarily…read this:
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/09/turkey-dramatic-demographic-changes-loom.html
Partly it’s of course just Turkey’s bad luck of being situated next to Syria, but Erdogan’s Islamist policies and his desire to play benefactor of Sunni Arabs have certainly contributed to that state of affairs (which would really piss me off if I were a Turk).
The idea that European nationalists could somehow “take over” Islam is just silly, I don’t understand why this bizarre idea keeps coming up here.
I first read about this idea about 15 years ago. I don’t recall where but it was based on this book – The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, by James Russell, a traditionalist (Roman-rite) Catholic.
The theory goes like this: Europeans turned a Middle Eastern religion into a European one, taking over the religion altogether, and adding Germanic pagan elements. If we become Muslims it’s only a matter of time before we re-make that religion from the inside in a way that suits our own needs, morality, etc. Conversion to a growing Islam is more likely than a return to weakling Christianity because, as a famous man once said, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse”. So, Islam will save us.
That’s a good counterpoint. There’s also the case of Bahrain, although they’re specifically trying to drown out the indigenous Shiite population.
Greens aren’t really about environmentalism imo, their main agenda has always been destroying Germany. And now it seems like the decadent bourgeoisie in Bavaria might vote for them in tomorrow’s elections in large numbers (almost 20% according to some polls)…if that happens and they’ll enter government, Bavaria will be ruined as well.
I’m not really fond of Adenauer tbh, the CDU was always kind of a shit party, it’s not just due to Merkel alone that it’s now selling out German interests wherever it can.
The empowerment of the victim explains the so call freezer phenomenon. Common people in DDR thought of themselves as victims. Both of Nazism and Communism and after the reunification they got the 2nd class citizen status treatment.
Victimhood empowers. Well know socio-technique since the biblical time. Kick us and cry that you were hurt. It can be called also the innocence project. Convince the population it is innocent. Obviously the rulers do otherwise. The guilty are easier to control. Which is a positive commentary on human nature that it rather be good than bad.
not many refugees but c. 30% of the population are immigrants, mostly cheap labor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Saudi_Arabia
culture is downstream of genetics
if this happened we wouldn’t be we any more – we’d be half-Turkish or half-Pakistani or half-Algerian etc
western media vs human nature (i.e. the majority of people having low to moderate levels of innate xenophobia)
Ya Islamic countries have done retarded things in the name of “Muslim solidarity”. The only reason Muslim countries care about the Palestinians is because they are Muslims. Iran threw its alliance with Israel, despite the fact they saved them in the Iran-Iraq war in the trash can because of “Islamic solidarity”(of course that may have had just as much to do with the fact that Israel was a strong supporter of their enemy the Shah?).
I would love to do a survey in eastern Germany now asking “knowing what you know now back in 1989, cough cough becoming Merkal’s refugee shitting ground, would you still be in favor of reunification?”
Based off of the last poll there is a small but improbable chance that the Greens could lead a freak show grand collation. If you add SPD ,FW, Grüne, FDP, Linke that is 50 percent in some cases(depends if the smaller parties get above the 5 percent threshold).
And learning to be good socialists is much less destructive than learning to be good liberals.
Communism tuned out to be by far the lesser of the two evils.
There are two things that might save Europe. One is Islamization, the other is a resurgence of communism. They’re the only two known antidotes to liberalism. I’d prefer communism but I think Islamization is more likely.
It may be partially Pagan, but Fully Pagan it is certainly not
Mass immigration is driven entirely by the demands of the corporate sector for cheap labour and ever bigger markets. An Islamic Europe isn’t going to be interested in such thing. Therefore Islamic regimes in Europe would have no reason to want immigration.
No, to save Europe we start up the right-wing death squads and we kill you all. Finland set a good example of counter-revolution in 1918. What you call “liberalism” is communism that just started hiding under another name when communism became a dirty word. The sexual revolution agenda, the multiculti agenda, this is exactly the same ideology of the communist revolutionaries that we had for a few months in 1918. We have plenty of those “good socialists” (no such thing) who have been promoting the same agenda for over 100 years.
There is absolutely zero difference between modern Western multiculti race mixing propaganda and Soviet multiculti race mixing propaganda. The differences are that the Soviet system failed to produce the wealth to throw into importing more than a small number of Third Worlders and that the communist regimes came to power through Civil War or conquest so they always had serious worries about stability and they imposed demographic controls even on their own populations.
Western Europe today is a hybrid regime where the Reds have complete control over the media, the justice system and academia while we still have a functional capitalism to produce wealth, hence we have a lot of wealth generation but the spending of that wealth is often controlled by Reds. The Reds have little fear of losing control over those sectors due to changing demographics so they’re free to promote immigration. The modern West resembles the dreams of 19th century Marxists more than the Soviet Union ever did: the industrial revolution was supposed to create so much surplus wealth that society could dedicate itself to social engineering and in the end it did, it’s just that the USSR managed to kill the golden goose.
There is no “capitalist business lobby” promoting the immigration of Somalis, Afghans and Syrians who for the most part go straight to welfare and never work at any business. There is a business lobby promoting the immigration of Indians, East Asians and Eastern Europeans who are actually useful laborers or professionals. They’ve allied with the Reds to suppress nationalism but handing all the power to the Reds would be a completely braindead response as all that would do is turn immigration into pure a Third World solidarity project with fewer Eastern Europeans but even more Somalis, Afghans and Syrians.
It wouldn’t even help if communists managed to kill Western wealth generation because there’s so much accumulated wealth to spend now that they could invite half of the Middle East and feed them for a while before they managed to spend it all.
Stresemann, yes.
The AfD considered naming their party foundation after him.
Adenauer, no.
The “gardener conservatism” of his CDU is an important source of German cuckservatism.
Paying lip service to recovering Germany’s lost eastern territories was a political necessity because a large number of the CDU/CSU voters were Germans from the lost eastern territories.
As the Saar Statute referendum showed, the federal CDU headed by Adenauer was not really patriotic.
Adenauer wasn’t even serious about reunification with the GDR, he didn’t even really consider the Stalin notes in 1952. iirc he had also been involved with pro-French Rhineland separatism after WW1. Total asshole imo, even the Social Democrats’ Kurt Schumacher was a bigger patriot than him.
More generally, he laid the foundation for the style of politics which the CDU embodies to this day…fetishization of “Europe” and rule by a self-satisfied, authoritarian political caste openly contemptous of their voters (because “You can’t really trust the people anyway, they voted for Hitler after all, we know what’s best”).
The CDU really needs to die, there’s nothing worth preserving there.
Saudi Arabia is 30% immigrant cheap labor
not so much Islam itself but close cousin marriage creates people who only care about their close relatives hence all the associated slavery – for example IIRC when Russia conquered the Islamic Tatars of the Crimea the population was 80% Russian/Polish/Ukrainian slaves.
I’m not sure that most communists would regard such a system as having even the remotest connection with communism. It’s capitalism, with stuff like identity politics being merely there to distract attention away from the fact that the system is in fact primarily capitalism.
The problem is the insistence on using terms like left and right and communist and red when those terms are at least half a century out of date. They either don’t mean what they used to mean or they don’t mean anything at all.
Our current system isn’t pure capitalism or pure communism. Maybe it’s closer to fascism, if you can imagine a mutant internationalist strain of fascism. It’s best to refer to it as globalism since that causes less confusion.
A return to Old School Communism would be horrible but probably less horrible than globalism.
It is perhaps unfortunate that so far efforts to rehabilitate fascism have not been successful. I’m talking about actual fascism, Mussolini’s fascism. Which was as close as you could get to a warm and friendly form of fascism. Mussolini strikes me as being one of the east evil political leaders of the 20th century.
But somehow I don’t think we’re going to be allowed to rehabilitate fascism. It’s one of history’s little ironies that Stalin is more highly thought of today than Mussolini.
Ossis are Russians who don’t know it yet.
Stalin was less of a failure than Mussolini.
The “capitalist business lobby” benefits by having more consumers as well. They socialize the costs but privatize the profits.
We pay their welfare in our taxes while the CEOs use tax havens.