The Berlin Wall

[Sam]

Should it have been built? Why or why not? Were there alternatives?

[celticfire84]

Reading Khruchshev's memior, he was a big fan of it. His argument was that the GDR was lagging in material wealth, which made people want to leave to the West - but the GDR under Soviet control would prosper and eventually people wouldn't want to leave, but the in the mean time, a wall should be built.

Should it have been built? NO.

It was a terrible idea from day one that showed the decay of socialism within the Soviet Union. My thinking is that if "everyone" wanted to leave, even if it is a poor country, than you aren't really practicing the mass line or democratic centralism.

Did the wall defend the GDR from imperialists? No - it was a crappy wall -- trucks would often ram trhough it with relative ease. This while the U.S. was ritualistically violating Soviet air space to "show off" how powerful they were.

If we have to lock the people up in their own country, we does that say about us?

What does it mean when the head of the revisionist clique in the Soviet Union thinks the wall was a terrific idea?

There is a pretty good movie called "Goodbye Lenin" (available on DVD Too) about a woman who is active in the East German government, and takes a lot of pride in her "socialist paradise" -- but ends up in a comma, and when she awakes the wall has been torn down and the east reunited with the west, so her son goes to great lengths to hide the truth from her, making fake tv shows, etc...

But she does eventually finally find out the truth, with a visually meaningful scene were she steips outside and there are advertisements everywhere and a large statue of Lenin is been flown away by a helicopter. Life has changed drastically - there are cars everywhere and satellite TV's, etc. etc.

Now this movie does portray communism as something old, authoritarian and bad -- which I reject, but this goes back to Bob Avakian's Conquer the World -- read his summations of the socialist experience. I also reccomend Michael Parenti's talks "On the Overthrow of Communism" which gets into more specifics than Avakians, which is a major work with the goal of actively summing up the socialist experience, while Parenti's is just general analysis.