love my Oma, she's turning 90 next week (born 1934!) and was the first person I came out as bi to. Defo hanging one or two of these up in my dorm
Whenever people imply communism = lack of incentive for human greatness, I think about how my grandparents had lower class parents and were extremely poor (even starving) in their post-war childhood, but ended up leading pretty impressive lives, despite knowing they wouldn't live much above the material reality of their neighbors for it.
My grandma was an interior architect and my grandpa an astrophysics professor and professional photographer. Both were gymnasts in their 20's (my grandpa has a couple medals below). They didn't do any of that shit for luxury, they figured they'd lead a modest life in the standard plattenblau housing block as the other working people of their town (small but cute and cozy apartment, I was there not too long ago), and that's what they wanted.
They never needed to drive a car in their lives, and often visited countries across the Eastern Bloc by bike/public transit. My grandma always had a thing for making fruit preserves and cool pottery (still killing it), and my grandpa for art from wood carving (he was also a mountain climber). They had a nice community garden they always tended to too. It's a beautiful town with a lot to see, honestly can't wait to visit again
My mom was 19 when the Berlin Wall fell. She studied english abroad when everything went to shit under capitalism. Ended up moving to the US just because she met my dad. Usually when she tells an American she grew up in the DDR, they look all shocked and ask some insane shit like if she was starving to death, or if she knew anyone who was shot and killed trying to climb the wall (💀⁉️). Certainly no one was starving by the 70s/80s. My mom and all her friends and acquaintances had great childhoods. She had a small town, middle of nowhere school system that pushed sports, music, art, multilingualism, sciences, etc. on her heavily (when I did track and field in high school she always told me how her school's facility was 10x better lmao). The DDR fostered genuine human greatness. But ig they didn't have bananas at grocery stores and a hundred car brands like the west 🤷♂️
Hey, thanks for the long and more nuanced answer. There are a lot of arguments you are adressing.
It's true that DDR always was in a state of emergency or (cold) war. I am shure that every other country in this state would limit the free expression of speech, but that does not mean that's always a good thing. On the one hand you want to stop influence from your enemies, but on the other hand it's also important to let people express themselves. I mean the workers have to stand behind the state/war/whatever to justify it's existence, don't they?
In the best case people who are against the governmet should be given the Chance to leave, but this also was not always the case in DDR. Especially high skilled, technical workers were imprisoned when they unsuccesfully tried to leave or helped (See: https://sci-hub.st/10.1017/s0007123420000216 , sorry for sci hub, but the article was not available to me otherwise). So why hinder people to leave?
Also, there were Not only a handful of imprisoned people. As you can see, there were a lot of people politically imprisoned. See also this Paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027221124247 (In Figure 1). The second paper even states: "The SED regime imprisoned between 200,000 and 250,000 individuals for political reasons". So a lot of people were affected.
Ngl, you seem dishonest with that calculation of political prisoners
First of all, that's from your WEST German parliament over there, using the number for political propaganda purposes
If you checked your first study, it'd be around 28,705 prisoners on average per year...
Unless you decided to stack the figures high, I don't think you'd get that amount...
That being said, other than that, I won't argue for or much for you, who has an ax to grind against the DDR.
Go back to your techbro stuff and play devil's advocate for another western country in lemmy.ml....
Okay techbro is doing a quick calculation: 28.000 per year. DDR existed for roughly 40 years 1949-1990. If you just multiply that, you would get 1.120.000 prisoners. Of course some of them had longer sentences than just a year. So 200.000 seems an okay-ish assumption.
Just to clarify, could you take a look back at the data and see if its labeled population inflow or input, or just simply the overall prison population of that year...
The source you are criticising just states the 200.000-250.000, unfortunately I do not have access to the original source but have to rely on this citation here.
My assumption is, that 200.000 was meant over the course of the DDR's existence.
The sci-hub source even states the ~28.000 per year. So without in- or output. Just total persons imprisoned. And as I already stated, this could fit the overall 200.000-250.000 over the existence of DDR if you assume that some of them stayed longer than a year or were imprisoned for a second or third time.
If you found a section, paragraph or other source with in- or output of prisoners this would certainly be interesting.
Weren’t many of those skilled workers educated by state institutions? Not justifying it, but the likely mindset, aside from whatever perception of making your citizens “impure,” is that you have spent decades of valuable resources to educate these folks to contribute to your society, and now they want to leave - for whatever reasons - and contribute to the enemy’s society who prays for your downfall.
This is happening in Puerto Rico. Students are getting educated by their schools and leaving to the US because there are no opportunities there. And real estate developers and investors swoop into the decaying island to enrich themselves. PR is not barring people from leaving, but they’re definitely frustrated that their investments are not paying off and perhaps even actively harming them.
Hey, yeah this is of course a Problem in many countries, "Brain-Drain" is no fun. I am also not shure on how to best address this. but I do not think that people should be imprisoned (okay, harsh term, but I am lacking better vocabulary here) by their native country. Everyone should ideally be able to roam freely. What would you suggest? Have them at least work some x years in their homecountry? Let them leave if they agree to pay back their education? Genuinley curious.