"Without identifying with the old leadership in the east - and I did not, but in contrary was active in leftist opposition before the end of east germany - I have to accept, that they were coming out of the same tradition, and that there is no clear line between the good and the bad guys in this case, and that a lot of mistakes they made are deeply rooted in the tradition of labor movement in west and east."
Whoa! Let's parse these passages before they melt back into the moronic inferno that is the interwebnet:
"Without indentifying with the old leadership in the east" writes Sebastian. But who would ever have to say such a thing? It is a bit of a giveaway. Anyway, let's see where this takes us.... "I have to accept that they were coming out of the same tradition"
Really, Sebastian? What tradition is that? The tradition of evil police state dictators, slaughtering opponents left right and centre? The tradition of the millions imprisoned in the Gulag or of the police spies in the Stasi - let's face it, it is not exactly the moral high ground.
So obviously, stinking of the corpses of tortured oppositionists, it is important for Sebastian to blur thelines between right and wrong "there is no clear line between the good and the bad guys in this case". Well, forgive me for stating the obvious, but as Harold Pinter said, when the electrodes are attached to your testicles, the lines between good and bad are pretty damned clear.
Sebastian says, dripping with irony, 'your socialism would be interesting, beautiful, with no harm to the people because every time you would try to do you best'. But why the irony? Why shouldn't socialism, be beautiful? And why, for christ's sake, should socialism be harmful to the people?
Did I try to do my best? Of course I did. When your fellow Communist Party members in France where bulldozing immigrnat hostels, me and my comrades campaigned against it. When your comrades in England rallied to the cause of British jobs for British workers, we pointed out the chauvinism implicit in what they were saying. And when they rallied to support the British occupation in Ireland, we campaigned against it.
"Sometimes the masses were anti-Semitic and the leadership not" says Sebastian. But here is the utter evasion of responsibility that is characteristic of Stalinism. How convenient to project your own insular, chauvinistic perspective onto the masses, so much easier than to face the truth that it was the Stalinist parties own chauvinistic programme of "national roads to socialism" that was the greatest single contribution to racialism in the labour movement.
You have a lot to say about anti-semitism in eastern Europe after the event. Some of us pointed out that the programme of socialism in one country would inevitably lead to national chauvinism and anti semitism at the the time. You are part of the problem, not of the solution.