Jammin' 'til the Break of Dawn

One can easily forget how it was not that long ago that transmitting honest news was a hard thing to do, and that people in oppressive states had to rely on word of mouth to find out what was going on in the world. One always had to suspect that there was falsehood in it as well.

Red Reed

Cheaply called “the Red Elvis”, American singer/actor Dean Reed pursued his beliefs in Marxism by moving to East Germany in 1973. Say what you will about him, he was sincere, but I could never quite understand how he managed to square away his passion for individualistic themes in his music, gazing a sympathetic eye to the lone, hard working cowboy, with the concept of collectivism, and thus on acute social dependency.

Personally, I think any fealty offered to Marxist-Leninism is misguided, requiring one to accept too many lies as a part of its’ stated virtues. Then again, I remember it first hand.



Here he is in an appearance in the DDR with a vieux copain, Phil Everly, who made what was in 1979, a historic visit. It was a sort of casually and quietly organized form of Ping Pong diplomacy, later to be tried by Bruce Springsteen in 1988.



While his voice was tender, and his craft good, in truth Reed was more of a curiosity to the world outside of the Warsaw Pact/Comecon/Soviet sphere than anything else. Within it, he grew to be a little like the Pepsi they sold in the eastern bloc: it was similarly packaged to the stuff they wanted, but slightly different in a way – only permitted to offer just so much, and no more.

Atmospherics from the Near Distant Ago

Management is not responsible for the aesthetics or content, time is.

The DDR's Manchurian Candidates

They have returned to Namibia, grown up, and some have moved on. They were GDR-Children of Namibia.

GDR-Children of Namibia are a group of approximately 400 black Namibian children that grew up in GDR. During the liberation struggle of SWAPO against South African occupation of Namibia they were relocated from 1979 onwards from various refugee camps to GDR and only came back in 1990 at the onset of Namibian independence. They were mostly unprepared for their return.

As recently as 2005, they have appeared on the German media radar. Where some would think that their fate in return would have been impossible, they overlook the nature of traditional German culture of faith and compassion: their transition back to Namibia as young adults was enabled by the ethnic Germans of Namibia.

In autumn 1989, as Germany rejoiced at the end of the country's 40-year division, many of the students at the "High-School of Friendship" in Stassfurt, near Magdeburg, felt their hearts sink.
For over 400 children and teenagers dispatched to East Germany from Namibia over the previous decade, the collapse of communism meant one thing: an uncertain future in a country they could barely remember.

What began as an airlift of refugees was exploited by the East German regime as an opportunity to construct the elite of what they hoped would be a nascent pre-Soviet Namibia colonized by Marxist-Leninism.

Erich Honecker's government earmarked what it called "Solidarity Funds" to support the Marxist movement with aid and military supplies, and also hatched a plan intended to be of political and military benefit to both countries. But 1990 marked an abrupt end to the Party-led project to take in and educate Namibian children, with the ultimate aim of creating an elite class to lead the SWAPO liberation movement.

Their fate, it seems was mixed.

The self-proclaimed "Ossi" Africans -- referring to the nickname for eastern Germans -- have experienced mixed fates. Some are now working as lawyers and businessmen, while Lucia herself is training as a journalist. Some, though, were less fortunate. And few returned to live in Germany.

Dystopia Then, Dystopia Now

Just as now, the wasteland of popular culture promoted a sort of "unilateral disarmament" against the world's evils. Otherwise we were to still enjoy the misery we were deserving.

Europa 1920, Europa 2010

Still Chasing the same straw men - that is, anything that reminds them of figures of authority as they think they understood them to be: military figures, business, and faith. A whole century of evidence, and they’re repeating the same infantile rants: make me free, feed me too, but give us authoritarian order, so long as it’s the type that suits my views.

Fables of the Deconstruction

It's a mashup, but it has the feeling of the time captured fairly well... and in living color.

An Empty World, Where you Highest Purpose is to be ‘Useful’

"There are no bigger donkeys than these workers.... Look at our "craftsmen"; Sad that world history should be be made with such people".

- From Carl Marx to Adolf Cluss in a letter dated 20 July, 1852

Look Ma, No Commies!

Spiegel Online has a gallery of before and after photos of buildings and places in the Former East Germany. Much as it is that the word “utopia” actually means nowhere, collectivism means “it’s no-ones’”.

Travel Ideas

For fans of the gloriously miserable, why not head out to Siberia to see the world's largest head of Lenin?



It only takes 5 days by train out of Moscow, after all.

Speak to us, oh huge brain bucket! Speak to your people!

Elephant! The Light Musical Comedy!

Compare and Contrast:

David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and implausible Basque terrorists They can't be serious, because they aren't, even though they're basically vanquished.



0 ourbursts of false conciousness