I remember when 4chan made fun of Handmaids Tale as some insane liberal fever dream. Turns out there are influential Americans who really want to turn back the clock a thousand years...
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
+1 to this!
I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
The havoc that finding out your family and friends spied on you for benefits, can not be overstated. How deeply anti social and lonely such a divided and conquered socialist utopian society is can not be expressed in words, and yet it can.
This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.
You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Yes, was noticing the same. It was easy for them to sell the car and get a new one, so this meant a lot of connections and underground "jobs" for the extra revenue.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
I mean, their escape was quite complex and did actually "work", it's just they didn't get very far beyond that. Any dramatization would clearly need some comedic element
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
Downvoters: The story is about the terrible politics, and should be a cautionary tale that's immediately very relevant. Unless you were only interested in the ballooning "maker" angle?
I think a lot of that programming and political action was because at the time there was genuine fear of communism taking over in the US and other western nations (like it already had in Eastern Europe).
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.
What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
It's a hard one. I can tell you something which doesn't work because the Americans have tried it twice so far. It won't work to say "Well, that was naughty, please don't do it again".
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
> The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later.
The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
You need "a little bit" of politician/judge/enforcer lynching to keep the government in line the same way they make a big show of "a little bit" of kicking in people's doors at 4am to keep the peasants in line.
I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
>I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
>Strelzyk and Wetzel began research into balloons. Their plan was to escape with their wives and a total of four children (aged 2 to 15). They calculated the weight of the eight passengers and the craft itself to be around 750 kilograms (1,650 lb).
That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.
> That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
The Wikipedia page references Günter Wetzel's website. Reading https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/missverstaendnis.html , he's written down more information - apparently they came to a disagreement about the story, and on that page there's more detail, from his point of view: for the first attempt they did everything in Wetzel's house (whose oldest kid was 4), because of concerns the Strelzyks' children (who were 10 and 14) could blurt something out. After some disagreements (Strelzyks told some relatives about the balloon, Wetzel thinks the balloon was too small) Wetzel gave Strelzyks all they've built (he was also worried about getting caught with the stuff, especially since now the relatives have heard about it) and decided to follow the concept of a ultralight airplane.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
After they found the remains of the balloon from the first escape attempt, the Stasi put out a reward for information, I think everyone would take the story seriously at that point. It was why they decided they had to go through with the second attempt, because they were convinced the Stasi was going to catch them soon. But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt.
I would assume they did not tell them anything at all, until the time was there. And after the first failed attempt, they were probably shocked enough for real to understand the situation and keep their mouths shut.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
For me, this is the maxim that governs speaking with someone defending a totalitarian regime.
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources show higher figures for earlier years).
Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
Bahrain: Around 55%.
Singapore not far behind (~40% from memory), a one party state but with voting, sometimes described as essentially an elected recallable monarchy. Also note most of those countries have relatively low emigration rates of native citizens.
I think "immigrants" is the wrong statistic here, since it includes workers with no path to citizenship. (In some cases, they can't leave because their employer stole their passport.)
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
I'm not sure it is wrong. I'd have no path to UAE citizenship, nor do I particularly want one, I'd likely have lower wages. And I'd still like to live there more than most places.
That's a good point. Perhaps a better statistic would be people who want to emigrate or immigrate. We're introducing a bias by measuring only those who actually do.
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
Communism is the idea of "can't we all just get along?" which is obviously not something you can actually implement, but is easily used as a buzzword by evil regimes. Remember, H-tl-r called his regime "socialist", much the same way N-rth K-rea calls itself "democratic"
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.
The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.
The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.
(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c
I remember when 4chan made fun of Handmaids Tale as some insane liberal fever dream. Turns out there are influential Americans who really want to turn back the clock a thousand years...
The text in the link is nice to read. I did a Google Translate on it which you can read here: https://pastebin.com/SdkKQkC6
>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
I enjoyed learning about the town of Bad Kissingen
The private mechanics and electrical hacking culture that is the base for German engineering . Tûftler in jedem Schuppen..
I keep on thinking it was a lot smaller! Wow!
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!
+1 to this! I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
Probably this is an also big component in the notorious German preference for cash over cards.
That was caused by interchange fees, and it has disappeared now.
The havoc that finding out your family and friends spied on you for benefits, can not be overstated. How deeply anti social and lonely such a divided and conquered socialist utopian society is can not be expressed in words, and yet it can.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesbeauftragter_f%C3%BCr_di...
+1, really well-done movie!
I watched Night Crossing in my german class in high school. I remember it being intense.
This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...
The Damn Interesting podcast (no affiliation, just a huge fan) had an episode on this topic if you prefer to listen to this story: https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting
I felt so tense and anxious listening to that.
In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story
Yeah I'd be curious into how they acquired so much money
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Likely black market deals/work I think. Also just getting a replacement car was not really easy for normal people.
Yes, was noticing the same. It was easy for them to sell the car and get a new one, so this meant a lot of connections and underground "jobs" for the extra revenue.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
Meanwhile in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli
One of favorite escapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Papago_Escape
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
I don't think the Great Papago Escape was that great - "Over the next few weeks, all of the escapees were eventually recaptured without bloodshed."
The thing that makes this balloon escape story is so enthralling is that it actually worked.
I mean, their escape was quite complex and did actually "work", it's just they didn't get very far beyond that. Any dramatization would clearly need some comedic element
Interesting story. The lack of dramatization might have something to do with making Nazis sympathetic characters. Hogans Heroes aside.
The investment, planning, danger, and dogged persistence… incredible story.
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
I first read about this in Reader's Digest back in the eighties.
> Propane gas tanks became registered products
Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.
Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.
Poor family members though
My elementary school showed the Disney movie about this at least once a year.
That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
Downvoters: The story is about the terrible politics, and should be a cautionary tale that's immediately very relevant. Unless you were only interested in the ballooning "maker" angle?
I think a lot of that programming and political action was because at the time there was genuine fear of communism taking over in the US and other western nations (like it already had in Eastern Europe).
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
For example, "Don't Be a Sucker" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
> Propane gas tanks became registered products
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
This was in the late 80s.
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was
Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.
What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
Aren't those just plain old tax havens?
Dustpile of history, sure, but gallows first. Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable.
Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
A peaceful transition of power is nothing to sneer at. After a revolutionary change, they are rare.
1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
Look at Unit 731 as an example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ).
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
It's a hard one. I can tell you something which doesn't work because the Americans have tried it twice so far. It won't work to say "Well, that was naughty, please don't do it again".
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
> The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later.
The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
You need "a little bit" of politician/judge/enforcer lynching to keep the government in line the same way they make a big show of "a little bit" of kicking in people's doors at 4am to keep the peasants in line.
I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
"I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?"
Maybe because of your language?
"Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable."
>I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
>Strelzyk and Wetzel began research into balloons. Their plan was to escape with their wives and a total of four children (aged 2 to 15). They calculated the weight of the eight passengers and the craft itself to be around 750 kilograms (1,650 lb).
That feat would be impossible for the average US family
They could each have their own balloon. Your mom would be trapped in East Germany, however.
I loled
Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.
Basic food was really cheap in eastern germany as well.
But cheap food is not everything.
> That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
The Wikipedia page references Günter Wetzel's website. Reading https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/missverstaendnis.html , he's written down more information - apparently they came to a disagreement about the story, and on that page there's more detail, from his point of view: for the first attempt they did everything in Wetzel's house (whose oldest kid was 4), because of concerns the Strelzyks' children (who were 10 and 14) could blurt something out. After some disagreements (Strelzyks told some relatives about the balloon, Wetzel thinks the balloon was too small) Wetzel gave Strelzyks all they've built (he was also worried about getting caught with the stuff, especially since now the relatives have heard about it) and decided to follow the concept of a ultralight airplane.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
I think it's such a crazy idea, even if a 5 year old tell a teacher about it or something, who's going to take the story seriously?
After they found the remains of the balloon from the first escape attempt, the Stasi put out a reward for information, I think everyone would take the story seriously at that point. It was why they decided they had to go through with the second attempt, because they were convinced the Stasi was going to catch them soon. But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt.
I would assume they did not tell them anything at all, until the time was there. And after the first failed attempt, they were probably shocked enough for real to understand the situation and keep their mouths shut.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
>hey needed just ten minutes to inflate the balloon and an additional three minutes to heat the air.
That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.
It amazes me that some people will somehow still have the audacity to defend communism...
Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servi%C3%A7os_A%C3%A9reos_Cruz...
One guy did use a plane to land in Red Square. Remember him?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
Not to live there though, just as a "symbol of peace".
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
For me, this is the maxim that governs speaking with someone defending a totalitarian regime.
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Singapore not far behind (~40% from memory), a one party state but with voting, sometimes described as essentially an elected recallable monarchy. Also note most of those countries have relatively low emigration rates of native citizens.I think "immigrants" is the wrong statistic here, since it includes workers with no path to citizenship. (In some cases, they can't leave because their employer stole their passport.)
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
I'm not sure it is wrong. I'd have no path to UAE citizenship, nor do I particularly want one, I'd likely have lower wages. And I'd still like to live there more than most places.
That's a good point. Perhaps a better statistic would be people who want to emigrate or immigrate. We're introducing a bias by measuring only those who actually do.
>The family members included:
> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37
> Doris Strelzyk
> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15
> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11
> Günter Wetzel, aged 24
> Petra Wetzel
> Peter Wetzel, aged 5
> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2
Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
Not as of my knowledge. Coincidence I suppose, or desire by them to keep it private.
Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?
Remember the GDR called the Berlin Wall the "Antifascist Protection Barrier"
I believe the USA-Mexico border wall was called something similar
That wall is to keep people out from another state, not in.
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
> Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia
dystopia ?
Communism is the idea of "can't we all just get along?" which is obviously not something you can actually implement, but is easily used as a buzzword by evil regimes. Remember, H-tl-r called his regime "socialist", much the same way N-rth K-rea calls itself "democratic"
You can spell out Hitler and North Korea here. Meta has no power here.
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.