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Rikard's avatar

There's a woman living near here, who grew up in DDR, and she is the perfect example of how the cleft between Ostalgie for everyone haing a job, childcare, medical care/medicines, housing and so on - and having all media be controlled, restricted, not having freedom of speech or expression, fear of being reported, and so on.

She is quite open about it too, recognising the dichotomy, but more crucially also recognising how the current EU-regime (most obviously in Germany) more and more takes after all the bad sides of the DDR, while not having any of the good ones.

For a Swede of my generation, and older ones too, this hits home as we very much share that mental divide, even though the situation here never came close to that in DDR, oppression-wise.

And a frighteningly high percentage seem to feel that if the oppressive society and the total state is the price for the Folkhem (Volksheim, I think it's in German?), then they're willing to pay it. While also being pro-homo, pro-climate cult, pro-migration and so on. Which does not compute since the idea of the Folkhem is based in 1920s nationalism, and is very much a blood & soil-thing.

The thing neoliberalism, all its other ills aside, got completely wrong was and is that it did away with the idea of the Other or the Enemy being a necessary component of keeping any kind of group functioning as such. And that Enemy cannot be an abstraction: it must be something or someone real, tangible and visible. If not for Fukuyama, the globalists of the late 1980s/early 1990s and such, the West might havve - quite logically - have picked Islam as the Enemy to rally together against.

That's all it would have taken, to make neoliberalism actually work: a real, outside and credible Enemy that's [not-us]. Wouldn't have meant war (we got those anyway) or anything like that; just something to compare, contrast and define oneself to, that's the Other.

Now instead, this process is happening between Europe and Russia, and Europe and the USA, while the hordes of islam are supposedly part of "us". Very very stupid, in my book.

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