Meh. I don't know how overrated the totalitarianness of the DDR was, but I do know that the freeness of the Bundesrepublik was rather severely so.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

And the DDR is not the third reich.

And now that we know about western intelligence services and what they do to our communications, I'm not so sure the DDR was a bad state, comparatively. At least everyone had a job.

I think maybe people on the liberal left, social democrats and the like, need to take a deep breath and realise their ideology is bankrupt, the only thing giving them successes in the past veing the pressure from real existing socialism in state form and the fear that put into Capital. Now that fear is gone, and we see how bankrupt the liberal left in Europe really is.

Kudos to Munchau, an honest man if nothing else, for calling a spade a spade.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

What evidence can you give us that the DDR followed on directly from Nazi ideology?

Do you even have an idea of what you are talking about?

Well, there was no direct successor state of Nazi Germany, the allies arrested the Flensburg governemtn and declared the lack of government as reason for prolonged occupation. As though the German question remained not quite settled until reunification I think I have seen both Germanies and post-war Austria has been treated as successor states, at leat until the Austrian rehabilitation in 1955.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

I thought the moral successor of the Stasi was the CDU (Schäuble).

Finance is the brain [tumour] of the economy

You're sort of making my point here: It's quite instructive to compare those lists - both in terms of length and in terms of what sort of offices we're talking about.

And if you're going to start on Gestapo agents that were turned, then we're going to be here all night, what with Paperclip and Doublecross and Gladio. Recruiting from the other side's spy agencies is standard practice in the cloak-and-dagger community. One may question the wisdom of this, but then one may question the wisdom of a lot of what goes on in that particular subculture.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Aha, three links that prove that some nazis actually were in positions of power in the GDR. To prove your weird little offensive theory you would now have to look at the equivalent in "free" West Germany. I recommend you take a very close look not only at military and spooks, but at the judiciary too.

Really, this sub-thread is unbelievable. A time-warp to cold war propaganda of the free west vs poor oppressed slaves in the "zone".