pickWhile I was in Berlin, I met a British tour guide who referenced this specific book as a great introduction to the advent and dissolution of East Germany or the German Democratic Republic. Funny enough, I was already reading it. Hoyer does a particularly nice job with the format relating individual experiences of citizens of various locales, backgrounds, industries, dissenters and true believers and builds the historical narrative off this device.
pickThe concise history of the GDR covers the time leading up to the building of the Wall and ending in 1990. Hoyer aims to show the reader what life in the GDR was like - including welfare state, home and family, popular culture and foreign relations -while also focusing on key figures such as Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and head of Stasi, Erich Mielke. When it comes to women‘s equality, the GDR was one step ahead of the west: women were working
“What happened to the U.S businesses that collaborated with fascism? Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in the enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on allied forces. After the war instead of being prosecuted for treason ITT collected 27 million from the U.S government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by allied bombings. G.M collected over 33 million
“What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura”
Sound familiar?
#Thewholethingithinkitssick
#gobacktosleep
“Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism‘s raison d‘être.“
The Cheeto and his minions co-opt nationalist rhetoric and militarism to channel discontent away from economic inequality and toward scapegoated groups. The Cheeto wants workers to remain divided and unable to organize effectively against exploitation.
#gobacktosleep
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, and that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege.
#Firstlinefridays @ShyBookOwl
I tag @MommyWantsToReadHerBook @Yuki_Onna @jen_the_scribe
Third World revolutionaries are branded as the enemies of stability.
“Stability” is a code word for a society in which privileged social
relations are securely entrenched. When popular forces mobilize
against privilege and wealth, this causes “instability,” which is judged
to be undesirable by U.S. policymakers and their faithful flacks in the
U.S. corporate media.
Recent acquisitions:
📖 Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin
📖 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
so-soIt's fine. At this point in history the Communist Manifesto is more of a novelty than anything else. Discovering that about a third of this plus-sized pamphlet is devoted to shit-talking other leftists really drove home that nothing in it was new or scary even at the time. The Communist Manifesto is, upon inspection, revealed as really nothing more than a single piece of a long running, much more widespread conversation.
“Sometimes, the hardest stories to tell are the ones that need to be told the most.”
