[lbo-talk] more noxious crap

[Chris Doss]

Stalin was a lot nicer to East Germany that the average Soviet person probably would have been.  Buried somewhere on my shelves I have the diary (exerpts thereof, actually) of a peasant-cum-working class Ukrainian woman who lived through the war up to the late Brezhnev era. I don't think its contents are atypical. It's pretty clear that what she wants for Germay is absolute destruction and righteous vengeful heavenly fire. Her outrage when she sees Brezhnev shaking Hoeneker's hand on TV is something to behold.

--- On Fri, 10/2/09, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:


> From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] more noxious crap
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, October 2, 2009, 7:02 PM
> Chris, responding to the point that
> the Soviet authorities were a stabilizing force in East
> Europe "Dare I point out that Europe had just been
> destabilized by World War II, and so stabilization was
> rather important."
> 
> Yes, I think you are right to. Stability was indeed the
> basis for what authority the USSR and its allied regimes
> had. And compared to the disasters visited on them, that was
> indeed appealing. I have lost the quote, but I think it was
> Primo Levi who accounted for the authority of the Red Army
> in the disintegrating East Europe as simply a matter of
> their having the supply lines that could furnish the
> gasoline without which communities would starve for want of
> resources. And Paul Mattick described the victory of the SED
> in the East Berlin elections as much as a yearning for
> acceptance, and the restoration of order as anything
> else.  von Paulus returned to duty as a traffic
> policeman in East Germany after the war (while von Braun,
> who shot missiles at my parents, joined the US space
> programme).
> 
> It is true too that it was the US and allied authorities
> who raised up the Iron Curtain, because they could not allow
> the effects Marshall Aid to be spread too thin, but needed
> to restrict their aid to west Europe, and let the east go
> under. Whatever fantasies Patton had about carrying on
> eastwards, the west needed the Soviet Union and its allies
> to hold East Europe together, because one thing was certain,
> the US army was in no position to.
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