A Forgotten Catastrophe, No Doubt

While Le Monde has for several years made smug references to “the real tragedy of September 11th”, which they always imply to be the anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende, they overlook mourning over another tragic event in their beloved world view: 11-September-1989. Ouai, quelle misère!

What the present day hard left are sentimental about: a grim autocracy
that they never lived under, and don’t understand.

The Hungarian government decided that they would open their border to Austria, taking down their barbed wire section of the Iron Curtain . It permitted east block citizens to simply “walk off the rez” to freedom and away from Marxist-Leninism. Never mind the Marxist-Leninist sympathies they were stepping straight into, and how the failure of Communism would undercut their control fantasies about man, or delusions that in Socialism there is freedom. Morons.

Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city's opinion-makers were often blase or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners' longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism.

- ”Berlin”, David Clay Large

And if the ideology of the present day “peace camp”, Palestinian “Solidarity” movement, and their sympathists who pretend to be on the sign of human decency and freedom doesn’t sound familiar, this kind of thing might make them feel warm and right at home in the paradise of ”the workers’ and peasants’ state”

East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the "reeducation" process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as "SS-Gestapo" and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: "You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive.... We'll finish the job."

Obviously they travelled through time, since all of it must have been inspired by Gitmo. After all, mankind knew no cruelty before 2002.