From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 21:00:23 -0800 (PST)
To: "Phillip M. Hallam-Baker" <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: East German Collapse (Was: Fighting the cybercensor
In-Reply-To: <199701282212.OAA04726@toad.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970128205620.00624060@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 12:59 PM 1/28/97 -0500, "Phillip M. Hallam-Baker" <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
wrote:
>>That's it?  The system collapsed because the guards left their posts?
>>And no mutiny charges?  Incredible.
>I was there.
>The collapse of East Germany was quite spectacular. There
>was at most three months of warning. First there was a series
>of sit ins at foreign embassies, then a migration of large 
>numbers of people in their twenties within the eastern block.

In particular, people started leaving East Germany by way of
still-somewhat-communist Hungary (where the Germans let them go)
and from there into Austria (where the Hungarians let them go),
and it was getting to be tens of thousands of people per month.
Once a system like that starts leaking, it's hard to contain.

(ObCypherpunksContent: if substantial amounts of tax money starts
escaping into Cypherspace, it's not easy to maintain a modern
CorporatistWelfare-for-Bureaucrats state either.....)

>Unfortunately US commentators tend to see everything in terms of
>US cultural norms, many of which were explicitly rejected by the
>protestors. The East Germans wanted West German affluence, they
>wanted to be part of Western Europe. They were certainly not 
>responding to US military spending as right wing theorists claim, 
>nor was the economy collapsing because of the arms race, it
>was collapsing because of the costs of a totalitarian state and
>the incompatibility of that state with modern industrial 
>organization.

The US right wing does argue that the Soviets couldn't afford to run
a military industrial complex big enough to outrace theirs,
and that it was a major contributor to the economic collapse
(which it probably was.)  Of course, they also consider that
Communism isn't an economically viable system, ignoring the similar
problems with the Good Old American Patriotic Military-Industrial-Complex,
and somehow think that now that there aren't any Russian Commies
to kick around any more that we need a bigger army, as well as a
supply of easily-kicked-around enemies.  Unfortunately, I suspect that
sometime soon they'll remember that there still are a billion 
Commies left, and that Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia.
Hopefully the Communist system in China will have fallen apart by then
to the extent that it can admit to being a semi-capitalist kleptocracy
instead of pretending to still be in charge of anything.


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)