Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The German film-maker Thomas Heise sets out to challenge the official script of events. He recalls that when the demonstrators, overshadowed by Tiananmen Square, shouted “we are one people”, they were speaking not to West Germans — as was later claimed — but to police surrounding the demonstration. “This is the reality they want to suppress”, he says, “this moment in time when ordinary people put themselves on the line to speak about themselves. We’re not meant to remember that. We celebrate the Wall falling but not the fact that a sovereign people took it upon itself to fill a power gap. Nor how, following that, it was more about annexation than reunification. Law and order was re-established by destroying utopia. The Federal Republic could not allow a sovereign people to exist in a part of Germany because it would not have itself survived. The Wall was opened to prevent revolution.” The myth of German reunification

An alternative analysis to the bourgeois media: an account by the last Premier of East Germany. The take over of the GDR by the Federal Republic of Germany "I have come to the conclusion that the economic difficulties in the GDR, as in the Soviet Union, were exacerbated by Perestroika, which was not an economic reform program, but stemmed from Gorbachev’s maxim that more democracy equals more socialism. He never really had an economic conception — he tinkered with democratic developments, the role of the Duma, or democracy within the economy, but did not focus much on the economy itself. It centered around what productive capability was needed to achieve certain social outcomes. My view is that the developments of the 1980s led to an implosion. That is, there was no revolution in the GDR or in any other Eastern European state. We collapsed in on ourselves, as the relationship between the party and the population was no longer stable. The party leadership did not understand...

"There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." —Stathis Kouvelakis, New Left Review, March-April 2018 Today, the same powers that preached "freedoms" and "democracy" for the Eastern Europeans, have erected more and longer walls and fences. Fortress Europe, the American-Mexican border, and the Apartheid Wall built by the Israeli state have killed thousands of people, "unwanted", ...

Walls The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain... In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them. Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast. Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be 15 times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is 60 times the length of the Berlin Wall. Why are some walls so loud and others mute? — Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors