I’ve had something of an education over the last few days.

I knew that a majority of Russians (and considerable percentages of older citizens of Belarus and Ukraine) want a restoration of the USSR. Russians, especially, have said over and over again that as long as they were Soviets, they were first-world citizens, respected, and listened to on the world stage. And it isn’t just Russian nobodies; in Vladimir Putin, there is surely a Soviet lurking, trying to get out.

What I did not realize before the last week or so is the depth of feeling that a lot of eastern Germans still have for their defunct country, the GDR (German Democratic Republic.) I became aware of that due to participating in discussions online about DHL’s maneuverings to turn their American air freight service over to UPS. For those who may not get my interest in this story, I should stop and provide a bit of background.

Wilmington, Ohio, is the home of ABX Air. ABX Air was formerly known as Airborne Express, and was a viable and profitable company when DHL (which is owned by the Postal Service of the Federal Republic of Germany) bought the company and then spun ATSG (parent company of ABX Air) off as a new business. Most of the air freight ABX Air handles comes from existing contracts with DHL. If the UPS deal goes through, Clinton County, which has a population of perhaps 30,000 people, will lose somewhere between 7,500 and 8,000 jobs immediately. Most of those unemployed will be ABX Air or DHL employees, but the Wilmington airport they operate from has several dozen businesses in the area specifically because of the access to the Wilmington air freight hub. It is a certainty that a lot of those businesses will also pack up and take off, which is going to cause a significant extra job loss in the area. Remember that we are talking about a rock-bottom job loss figure of 7,500 in a County that only has 30,000 residents, and the numbers will most certainly be higher than that. The loss of that air hub will absolutely destroy the employment and tax base of Clinton County, and it will most certainly dramatically impact the unemployment rate of any number of Counties in the area. The bleed-out from the closure of that hub will leave a 25% unemployment rate in at LEAST Clinton County, and who knows how many more businesses are going to fail just because of THAT.

I am a former employee of three different businesses in the industrial park that abuts the airport. I know a lot of the people working out there right now. In the 1990s, the place was red-hot; they could not put buildings up fast enough for the businesses that wanted to move into them. But thanks to The Bush Economic Miracle, the area is already in some difficulty, as several of the businesses that used to be in those buildings have folded, or been bought out. There is space aplenty available out there now where once there was none. A lot of former employees of air park businesses managed to save themselves by going to work for ABX Air, or DHL itself. And there are still viable businesses in that air park that have been there for a long time, with employees who have nearly 20 years of service in. An animal medicine distributor, a major catalog PC hardware and software retailer, and a film-restoration company are 3 examples of businesses that are still there, and still employing a lot of people. When that hub closes, those facilities will most certainly close with it.

How does that story tie in to my education of the last few days? I made a comment on an English-language page of a German newspaper that had an article about the DHL controversy. Almost immediately, a former citizen of the GDR commented in reply “now you americans are going to learn what we’ve been living with for 20 years.” A few more exchanges in the comments section between me and this gentleman drew in some more ex-GDR citizens, who informed me that the eastern provinces of Germany have yet to recover from the reunification of the country. Apparently, double-digit unemployment has been the norm through most of eastern Germany since 1990, and a measurable number of eastern German citizens have never returned to work at all. While the safety net provided by the Federal Republic of Germany is much better than anything we have here, it is also a fact that most of us would prefer to make our own way to a Government handout. The young are largely leaving the eastern portions of Germany, and the ones who stay behind have a considerable number among them who wax nostalgic for the country they lost.

How widespread is the sentiment? Among people who were adults in the GDR era, roughly 57% of them said in 2003 that they would have preferred that the GDR had survived, though most would have preferred a freer GDR than the one they lived in. However, roughly 1 in 3 former East Germans would have actually been happy with a return of the GDR as it existed prior to 1990. That figure stunned me. Nearly 2 in 3 former East Germans would have been pleased to see the country they once lived in restored-and half of THEM would have been content to see the Communists come back. As one of them responded in the commentary of the German paper, ” i was born and raised in that state , and it was the only working system on this planet.”

The GDR was, in a lot of ways, a despicable state. The Stasi recruitment of family members and neighbors to rat each other out is one of the more rotten chapters of human history, and the shooting of citizens for just the act of trying to leave the place is horrifying. But a lot of people were apparently comfortable with the socialist security net that the GDR provided, and from the early 1970s right up until its dissolution the GDR had a standard of living that was a lot higher than many places in the non-Communist world.

The conversations with the “ostalgics” got me to thinking about an issue that should be paramount on the minds of all Americans these days, the old Liberty vs. Security argument. I am definitely of the Ben Franklin school on this issue; you trade some freedom for some security, and you wind up with neither, deservedly so. The East Germans had the constant worry that anyone they talked to might be a Stasi member, reporting on them. People went to prison in the GDR for what we would think of as the flimsiest of reasons.

But many of those who had lived their whole lives inside that system were content with the pervasiveness of the security apparatus. They had their apartments, and their jobs, and their families, and they got their medical care and education for free, and they got nice vacations every summer. They were willing then, and are willing now, to live with an all-powerful Government apparatus in exchange for the perks the socialist state provided them. That quite a few innocent people would rot in jail because of the system they supported doesn’t seem to bother a lot of the former citizens of the GDR.

Here in this country, the wingtard segment of the population (Bush supporters, if you prefer) are convinced that the only “protection” we have from Osama is to let the moronic monkey’s thugz poke into every aspect of our lives. Hurricane Katrina should have shown anyone who was paying attention that Chimpy’s apparatus is not designed to protect Americans from anything, but to this very day they still insist that torture, eavesdropping, detention without charge, the seizure of one’s personal effects, and the emergence of a Stasi-like system in which citizens are encouraged to spy on and report each other are all tolerable in the name of “security.” They don’t seem bothered in the least that their monkey has used Osama as his excuse for what amounts to wholesale murder worldwide and the utter destruction of the Constitution (and of the economy) here at home. If one looks at this from a standpoint of day-to-day survival, the repressive totalitarian state Chimpy is setting up is going to be worse than the GDR ever was; at least in East Germany, you did get that healthcare, education, and employment. Here you get laid off, lose your mealth insurance, and wind up sleeping in a car in the Shruburbs for your unquestioning support of the moronic monkey’s incompetent fiscal, economic, and foreign policies.

So while I have a lot of disagreement with the ostalgics, thanks to the situation Chimpy has foisted on us all I have to say that I can understand how knowing you have a job and a place to live can be powerfully persuasive. Looking around the world today (especially in the Americas,) we see a lot of evidence that Chimpy’s policies have begun to do what was thought unthinkable 10 years ago; as in, sympathy for the old-style Communism of the defunct east bloc has actually become attractive again to a lot of people. In an era where a hell of a lot of us are living under the boot of authoritarian despots, how many of us would choose the despot who will starve us to death over the one who will throw us the bone of cradle-to-grave security? Put me in a situation where I have to choose to live under the policies of Ulbricht and Honecker, or those of Chimpy and McCavein, and I’ll probably latch onto the former. I think most people would.

Are we heading for a situation that will wind up making US long for a system like the one that existed in the GDR?

Tags: bush, gdr, poverty, security, socialism, totalitarianism

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 am and is filed under Analysis, Chimpy's Crimes and Cronies, NOLA, Our Constitution, The Republican Depression of 2008-?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.