Remember the Marxism behind the Berlin Wall? Be Wary of the Obamas who promise paradise for your vote

The Berlin Wall sickness

that still lingers today

By Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin

The village of Klein-Glienicke was surrounded by the Wall – apart from the road in and out

It’s 50 years since the Berlin Wall went up, splitting the city in two, dividing families, and leaving some people plagued by a sense of imprisonment. Many still bear the psychological scars.

Even today Gitta Heinrich doesn’t have walls around her home in Berlin. Her fences are made of trees and bushes rather than bricks. Inside, she keeps the doors open between rooms. She avoids confined spaces with crowds of people.

Gitta was born 20 years before the Wall went up – and lived with it for the next 28 years

Gitta suffers from “Mauerkrankheit” – Wall Sickness – and it stems from her life right up against the Berlin Wall in the village of Klein-Glienicke on the edge of the city.

It’s a strange place, though not as strange as it must have seemed on August 13, 1961 when the barbed wire was rolled out to cut it off from the neighbouring houses only a street away – only a jump away for some, who went to their balconies and dropped over the wire.

When the Wall went up, Klein-Glienicke became an island of East Germany in West Berlin. The boundary between the Soviet Zone and the American Zone zigged and zagged in that part of Berlin near Potsdam.

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“The whole village was like a prison – wherever you went, you had to see the Wall” – Gitta Heinrich

Because of the quirks of the route, the village was surrounded by the Wall apart from the road in and out – the barrier came up one side of the entrance road, snaked around the village and then down the other side of the entrance road. Outside was West Germany – inside was East Germany.

Gitta was on a cycling holiday with her boyfriend on the Baltic when the barriers went up – rolls of barbed wire, initially, followed by the Wall and the watch-towers.

They heard the news and tried to come back by train, only to find the services across Berlin halted. They circled the city and finally got back to her home village. He was refused admittance by the guards because he was not registered as living in Klein-Glienicke.

And there she lived, passing in and out through the narrow road to the relative openness of the rest of the German Democratic Republic.

“The whole village was like a prison”, she says today. “Wherever you went, you had to see the Wall.”

When the Wall came down, she went to see a doctor because she felt anxious and uneasy. The doctor told her she had Wall sickness.

The “death strip” was on the eastern side of the Wall

“It was an illness with a deep impact on the psyche,” she says. “It was this real feeling of narrowness.”

The Wall remains inside her, affecting her attitude to space and crowds.

What might seem strange is that Mauerkrankheit was an illness of the East and not of the West.

It was, after all, West Berliners who seemed to be cooped up and isolated, on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.

When the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, ordered the building of the Wall, it was portrayed as a barrier to keep the fascist West out – what came to be known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.

But the accepted view now is that it was to keep East German migrants in. They were the ones constrained. After all, the “death strip” of mines and guards with fingers on triggers was in the German Democratic Republic.

West Berliners could get out if they really wanted to – there were three road corridors through East Germany to West Germany and flights were also available. But for East Berliners, the Wall was a block.

“Before 13 August, people from East Berlin could, after getting permission through a long procedure, come to West Berlin to visit relatives. But after the 13th, this possibility didn’t exist,” Klaus-Michael von Keussler, a West Berliner who helped those in the East to escape, told the BBC.

“Even people who were very close to the regime couldn’t travel easily.”

So Wall sickness was an East German syndrome. It was diagnosed by a psychiatrist in an East Berlin mental hospital, Dr Dietfried Mueller-Hegemann, who detected a listlessness and a lack of purpose in his patients.

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Find Out More

• BBC History explains why the Berlin Wall went up, and why it came down – in excerpts from BBC television documentaries

• The Berlin Wall

He coined the phrase in a short learned treatise in which he described, for example, a 31-year-old dentist who was found wandering round a port on the Baltic looking for a boat to China, a 40-year-old saleswoman who would just sit with her jaws two inches apart, or a seamstress who imagined she was being pursued by lesbians.

Dr Mueller-Hegemann noticed at least 100 cases in the 1,600-bed hospital where he worked, until he himself fled to the West in 1971. The symptoms included depression, delusions of persecution and repeated suicide attempts stemming from a “very depressing life situation after 13 August, 1961”.

And if that was the situation in the general population of East Berlin, imagine how much worse it must have been in Klein-Glienicke.

Here there were surreal, heart-breaking moments. In September 1962, there was a funeral in the village but some family members had moved to the West in 1958 – and would have been detained if they had returned.

The priest decided to hold much of the ceremony right up against the barbed wire and raised his voice for the benefit of two daughters who were looking through at their own mother’s funeral.

Ruth Hermann, the grand-daughter of the dead woman, said: “We could not come across – we had only fled to the West a short time before. My father, my mother and her oldest sister were in black mourning clothes under police protection on the West side.

Over the garden wall, another world

“Through the barbed wire fence, they could see the funeral procession with the coffin, the pastor and the family members from the East, all dressed in black.”

The scene was captured for posterity by a photographer for the Berliner Morgenpost.

Other pictures of Klein-Glienicke from that time reveal a surreal normality.

A garden with a child smiling, with a wall just beyond – or rather, the Wall.

A rather grand but empty building – and there’s the Wall extending from it. Ordinary suburban houses – divided from each other by a familiar-looking high wall. Another ordinary suburban house – overlooked by a watchtower. A vegetable patch, in unused land where the concrete-coloured Wall turns a corner.

It all looked so normal then. And so abnormal now.

 

Comment:    One of the most moving mornings of my life was my visit to the Berlin Wall museum at Check Point Charlie, shortly after the fall of the wall.

 

What a truly exciting  week  when the beginning of the fall of the wall  was stirring.    The swelling of the numbers of the East Germans gathering at strategic points in East Berlin having heard rumors that the Marxist government might open a gate or two to the  outside world.    After all Hungarians suddenly were able to enter Austria without bloodshed.

 

Television was gripping in the days, the months, and few years in which the old Soviet Marxist empire and its dominions in Eastern Europe were crumbling.  

 

Wat joy…….and now we are entertaining Marxism and its government dictatorship for our own America, depending upon the results of the November 6, 2012 election.

 

Think of it?

 

If you want to know the darkness of living under the yoke of  a Godless Marxist regime where the State decides right from wrong, please, for the sake of our American future,  view the outstanding German film of five or so years ago, “THE LIVES OF OTHERS”……. which so masterfully pictures the power of the state’s tentacles squeezing the soul out of  its underlings.

 

Beware of the Obama’s of the world who promise cake for those who vote for him.

Obama’s Thugs at Work at the Iowa State Fair

Paul Ryan Heckled At First Solo Campaign Event At Iowa State Fair

at realclearpolitics videos:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/08/13/paul_ryan_heckled_at_first_solo_campaign_event_at_iowa_state_fair.html

Victor Davis Hanson Sorts out America’s Modern Trash

Our Not So Best and Not So Brightest

by Victor Davis Hanson    at   Pajamas Media:

From Eliot Spitzer to Elizabeth Warren to Fareed Zakaria — what is wrong with our elites? Do they assume that because they are on record for the proverbial people, or because they have been branded with an Ivy League degree, or because they are habitués of the centers of power between New York and Washington, or because they write for the old (but now money-losing) blue-chip brands (Time magazine, the New York Times, etc.), or because we see them on public and cable TV, or because they rule us from the highest echelons of government that they are exempt from the sorts of common ethical constraints that the rest of us must adhere to — at least if a society as sophisticated as ours is to work?

I understand that there is a special genre of conservative Christian hypocrites — a Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, or Ted Haggard — who preach fire and brimstone about the very sins they indulge in.  The Republican primary was in some ways a circus as the media had a field day pointing out the ethical inconsistencies of the candidates. But here I am talking about secular elites across the cultural spectrum who simply do not live by their own rules, and yet are often granted exemption for their transgressions because of their own liberal piety — and a more calibrated assumption that the world of blue America (i.e., the media, the government, the arts, the foundations, the legal profession, and Hollywood) will not hold them to account.

Take affirmative action. Over-the-top and crude Ward Churchill at least bought the buckskin and beads to play out his con as an American Indian activist with various other associated academic frauds. But Elizabeth Warren’s “Cherokee”-constructed pedigree was far more subtle — and the sort of lie that Harvard could handle. She more wisely kept to the fast lane of tasteful liberal one-percenters, as she parlayed a false claim of Indian ancestry into a Harvard professorship. So whereas Churchill is now a much-lampooned figure, Warren may be headed to the U.S. Senate. To say that Elizabeth Warren is and was untruthful, and yet was a law professor who was supposed to inculcate respect for our jurisprudence, is to incur the charge of being a right-wing bigot.  But reflect: how can someone who faked an entire identity — and one aimed at providing an edge in hiring to the disadvantage of others — not be completely ostracized? Again, Warren was successful precisely because she wore no beads or headband and did not affect a tribal name — the sort of hocus-pocus that makes faculty lounge liberals uncomfortable. It was precisely because she looked exactly like a blond, pink Harvard progressive that Warren’s constructed minority fraud was so effective.

Why would a Fareed Zakaria lift the work of someone else? Time constraints? Carelessness? Amnesia over how and why he reached his present perch? Do such columnists farm out their research or outlines to assistants? Or do they think their liberal credentials outweigh reasonable audit of what they write? Steal from someone else and take a month off work? Even my copper wire thieves out here on the farm would have to pay a bit more if they were caught. Their last theft was about $70 worth of conduit, but I imagine Time pays lots more per Zakaria column.

Or why did Maureen Dowd think she could lift some sentences from someone else and then claim she got them from a friend’s email — especially given her hyper-criticism of less-liberal others? And did she not guess rightly that no one would really care? After all, do we remember the Pulitzer Prize winning Team of Rivals or the fact that far earlier Doris Kearns Goodwin was a confessed plagiarist? When I pick up the Selma Enterprise, I do not expect the cub reporter to steal her report of a DUI accident verbatim from the Fresno Bee. Should I?

Why did Barack Obama think, in Rigoberta Menchu or Greg Mortenson fashion, that he could more or less make up most of the key details in his own autobiography? Again, think of it: the current president of the United States fabricated much of the information about his own life, in ways designed to enhance his self-serving narrative of  America’s racial insensitivity. But then again, for over a decade the president allowed his literary biography to claim that he was born in Kenya. His political opponents who claimed just that were written off as unhinged; but are we to think of the president himself as a birther?

I think that I should have boasted that I was born in Lund, Sweden, and dated the insensitive daughter of an agribusiness magnate, to make my past account of small farm life more effective.  But then again, Vice President Joe Biden is likewise a plagiarist — who lifted an entire section of a speech from British Laborite Neil Kinnock, a “lapse” that recalled Biden’s earlier plagiarism in law school.

I thought Trent Lott should have stepped down for praising 100-year-old Strom Thurmond at his birthday fest in ways that could have suggested support for Thurmond’s earlier creed of racial segregation. But what does it take for his liberal counterpart — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — to quit? Declare the Iraq war lost in the midst of a surge to save it? Claim that Barack Obama is a light-skinned black who can turn on and off his black accent? Defame an African-American member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a “sh-t stirrer”? Or in McCarthyesque style fantasize that “someone” heard a rumor that Romney did not pay taxes, and hence Romney must release a decade of returns to “prove” that he is not a tax cheat — and this from a man who became a millionaire while in public office and has not released a single year of his own returns? The treatment of Lott versus the treatment of Reid reminds one of the quite different fates of Alberto Gonzales and Eric Holder; the former was grilled by Congress to the point of being forced out, while the latter simply called his accusers racists and ignored what followed.

Liberal penance explains why Timothy Geithner apparently thought that he need not pay his full income tax obligations — in a way a CEO of Chick-fil-A or Amway might never dare. If there is a problem with white redneck crime, will a mayor call in the racist Klan in the way Rahm Emanuel welcomed to Chicago Louis Farrakhan? Why worry whether Hilda Solis had a lien on the family business, when she issues a video invitation to illegal aliens to report their unfair employers to the Labor Department? And why did television host Eliot Spitzer, the white-collar crime fighter, think he could employ prostitutes with impunity while governor — and, if caught, expect to end up as a cable TV news host? Or why did John Edwards, of “two Americas” fame, preach populism while enjoying the one-percent lifestyle (well aside from the lies about his campaign-subsidized girlfriend)? Or why did John Kerry both advocate higher taxes and yet seek to avoid them by docking his luxury yacht in a different state?

Or why, more recently, did Obama campaign guru Stephanie Cutter assume that she could simply lie on national television by stating that she did not know the circumstances behind the Joe Soptic “Romney-cancer” ad? She knew that earlier she was on tape outlining the Soptic narrative, so did she think she could claim ignorance on TV, blast her critics in the days to come, and then go back on as usual, given her efforts to extend the Obama agenda? Stranger still, she is probably right about all of those assumptions. I expect her in a week to be on television accusing her opponents of lying, with a press aiding and abetting her. Why does wealthy Andrea Mitchell yell at us for being illiberal, when she could instead yell at her husband, who was far more embedded in Wall Street than any Tea-Party pizza store owner?

Did David Plouffe really think his mediocre speaking skills or so-so knowledge of communications would win $100,000 a pop on the international lecture circuit — on the eve of his assuming a key role in the White House? Hope and change? No revolving door? What sort of ad would Plouffe have run, had a top Romney aide been hired to speak by a company doing business with Iran? And isn’t $100,000 in an afternoon sort of one-percent-ish — the sort of unfair, Costa del Sol-like privilege that Obama is trying to rectify?

In most of these cases, the above are servants of the progressive cause. They operate on assumption that they are our self-appointed censors, vigilant to spot class, race, or gender bias and unfairness among those less well-branded. But as our morals police, they do not fear any policing of themselves. Never is there any assumption that John Edwards’s attacks on the wealthy mean that he should not live in a ridiculous, self-indulgent mansion or hire on a groupie with other people’s money. It made perfect sense that the green moralist Al Gore should have enjoyed one of the most energy-guzzling homes in Tennessee, or from time to time played boorish “crazed sex poodle” with his call-up masseuse. Elizabeth Warren is knee-deep in the world of the one-percent, in part because she knows how to work the system of exemption that assumes loud liberal credentials allow one to live a life quite differently from the one professed.

In short, our top pundits, our political elites, our very president all believe that they can blast the unfairness of high capitalism while doing everything in their power to enjoy its dividends — and demand an ethical standard from others that they habitually do not meet themselves. It is as if the more left-wing one sounds, the more anti-left-wing his tastes; the more the ethicist lectures on morality, the more he is likely to be unethical; the more green an advocate, the less likely the 800-square foot cottage replete with recycled water, a solar toilet, and 70-degree hot water. The only mystery here is whether there is some sort of logical connection. Does the profession of cosmic morality by design allow one to enjoy without guilt quite earthly sins? Why do super-rich liberals not like the Tea-Party upper-middle-class entrepreneurs? Are the latter in no need of liberal condescension? Do they not have quite enough money to show exquisite taste? Or are they grubby, too close to the struggle for a buck?

Two final notes on why all this matters. First, when the left-wing media ceases to scrutinize public figures, the latter are emboldened to fabricate, cheat, plagiarize, and flat out lie. It is not that there are not conservative hypocrites, just that the present system makes it far harder for them to get away with these failings. (Imagine the press reaction to a Romney autobiography full of untruths; a Paul Ryan with a yacht docked in a no-tax harbor; a Charles Krauthammer lifting entire paragraphs from the work of others).

Second, all of the above are part of an elite establishment that is supposed to set standards for emulation, but instead only coarsens civilization. Why tell the truth, hoi polloi, when everyone from Bill Clinton to Stephanie Cutter will not? Can we determine what is true and false, when we have no idea in Time magazine or in a presidential memoir whether the sentence is copied from someone else or simply made up? If the governor frequents prostitutes, how can there be a law against prostitution? After Elizabeth Warren, how can there exist such a thing as affirmative action? Cannot every white male in America assert that he has high cheek bones and so deserves a leg up on any other white male stupid enough not to claim his great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee?

Our civilization is under assault. Those who have taken upon themselves to direct it are instead doing their own part to destroy it.

Romney Describes the Slease of Obama’s Campaign with Distinction

 John Hinderaker in 2012 Presidential Election

Romney and Ryan Light Up Wisconsin

I am not one of those who obsessively add up electoral college numbers and calculate the implications of a shift in any given state–like, say, Wisconsin. But Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan held a rally tonight in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a Republican stronghold, that was attended by 10,000 or more screaming fans–a striking contrast to the Obama rally in Chicago today, where hardly anyone showed up. If Wisconsin goes Republican, can Obama win? Perhaps not. NBC reports.

Most interesting to me was Mitt Romney’s response to a Democratic Party heckler that infiltrated the rally:

The energy generated by Ryan seemed to inspire the man at the top of ticket, who took on a heckler midway through his own remarks, then turned the moment into an indictment of President Obama’s campaign, who’s [Sic: Do they have editors at NBC?] tactics have riled Romney in recent weeks.

“You see young man, this group here is respectful of other people’s rights to be heard,” Romney said as the heckler was removed. “And you ought to find yourself a different place to be disruptive, because here we believe in listening to people with dignity and respect.”

“There’s no question but if you follow the campaign of Barack Obama, he’s going to do everything in his power to make this the lowest, meanest negative campaign in history. We’re not going to let that happen,” Romney continued. “This is going to be a campaign about ideas about the future of America. This is a campaign about greatness, about America’s future for your children, for the world. Mr. President, take your campaign out of the gutter, let’s talk about the real issues that America faces.”

Barack Obama, of course, can’t take his campaign out of the gutter, because if he does so he will have to talk about his record, and then he will lose. But Romney has the right idea. This campaign will be all about substance vs. smear, and Romney and Ryan should constantly challenge the Democrats to talk about the issues.

The NBC article:

PAUL RYAN WELCOMED HOME WITH MASSIVE RALLY IN WISCONSIN

 

 

By NBC’s Garrett Haake & Alex Moe   at NBC

 

WAUKESHA, Wis.– The largest crowd of the campaign so far for a Mitt Romney event welcomed home favorite son Rep. Paul Ryan at a massive rally here in the congressman’s district Sunday night, pushing the GOP’s vice presidential nominee to tears as he took the stage, setting off cheers with two simple words:

“Hi mom.”

With that, voice cracking, Ryan showed his Wisconsin credentials to a crowd the Romney campaign hopes will be emblematic of the charismatic congressman’s support in the Badger state, a reliably Democratic enclave the Republican candidate hopes to turn red this fall. 

“My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, a little Spotted Cow, Leinie’s, and some Miller,” Ryan said, mentioning two well-known local beers. “I was raised on the Packers, Badgers, Bucks and Brewers. I like to hunt here, I like to fish here, I like to snowmobile here. I even think ice fishing is interesting.”

“I’m a Wisconsinite through and through,” Ryan said to cheers from a crowd which contained many members of Ryan’s extended family, and which the campaign estimated to be more than ten thousand strong, likely the largest turnout ever for a Romney event.

The energy generated by Ryan seemed to inspire the man at the top of ticket, who took on a heckler midway through his own remarks, then turned the moment into an indictment of President Obama’s campaign, who’s tactics have riled Romney in recent weeks.

Obama gives Ryan a double-edged welcome to the race

“You see young man, this group here is respectful of other people’s rights to be  heard,” Romney said as the heckler was removed. “And you ought to find yourself a different place to be disruptive, because here we believe in listening to people with dignity and respect.”

“There’s no question but if you follow the campaign of Barack Obama, he’s going to do everything in his power to make this the lowest, meanest negative campaign in history. We’re not going to let that happen,” Romney continued. “This is going to be a campaign about ideas about the future of America. This is a campaign about greatness, about America’s future for your children, for the world. Mr. President take you campaign out of the gutter, let’s talk about the real issues that America faces.”

Romney and Ryan were introduced by two other leading figures in the Republican party nationally, both born and raised here in Wisconsin: RNC Chairman Reince Preibus and Governor Scott Walker, who recently survived a recall election and has become a rallying point for Republicans nationwide.

 

“Isn’t it great to have a cheesehead on the ballot?” Walker asked the crowd.

 

On Monday, Ryan will campaign solo for the GOP ticket for the first time, attending the state fair in Iowa, setting up something of a showdown in the Hawkeye state, with President Obama hitting the stump in Western Iowa then as well.

What Vile Political Animals Hath Obama Wrought?

The following is a video of the dastardly moral mentality of Debbie Wasserman Shultz, Obama’s  shadow head of  his  present Democrat Chair:

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/12/video-dnc-chair-doesnt-know-party-affiliation-of-obama-super-pac/

Barack Hussein is reducing the presidency to that of a 3rd world THUG.