On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Fred complained that:
We don't present all main views or even the
predominant
view. We censor views we feel are incorrect and substitute
euphemisms; so East Germany becomes a "socialist country",
not a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist government imposed by
fiat on the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany.
One way to solve this problem is to identify the term "socialist" as
Marxist terminology. I finally managed to wedge into the [[Communist
state]] article the FACT that Marxists classify societies by their
economic system, while the West generally classify societies by the
political system.
So Marxists call various nations "Capitalist countries" or "Socialist
countries" (that's their main division, anyway).
Meanwhile, people like Fred and me call various nations "Democratic
countries" or "dictatorships" or "Totalitarian countries".
Note that the categories overlap but do not entirely coincide!
There are two crucially different spectrums being used as classification
schemes here.
So, an article can say that:
* Marxists called East Germany a "socialist country", because its
economic system was blah blah blah.
* Prof. John Doe of XYZ University (or PDQ Thinktank) called East
Germany a "totalitarian country" because its political system was yadda
yadda yadda.
I think you miss the point here, Ed. From what I know of East Germany,
the citizens *believed* (whether or not correctly) that they lived in
a socialist country. I'm basing this on a couple of data:
*Back in 1997, I happened to be in Berlin, where I had the chance to
visit many of the museums. (The Pergamon Museum is definitely not to be
missed.) At a museum on Under den Linden Strasse (the name escapes me,
& I can't find my notes) there was an exhibit on the iconography used
in the propaganda of the former DDR. One aspect that still stays with me
from that exhibit concerned the commentary on the various items of the
exhibit: the English text was clearly not a complete translation of the
German text! Intregued, & although my German at the time was still
rusty, I compared the two versions from display to display to find out
what was omitted -- & perhaps why.
The upshot of my comparisons was that the German text spent far more
time wrestling with the problem that a centrally planned economy did not
work. And when discussing the major crisis of the history of the DDR --
a Five Year Plan in the late 1950s that caused massive damage to the
economy, famine, & led to massive emigration to the West & the Berlin
Wall -- the German text blamed Soviet interference with the German economy.
Evidently, the German people expect their government not only to
be efficient, but paternal in its functions. (A conclusion I hold
only unless corrected by my fellow Wikipedians from Germany.)
*In 1976, when I was a camp counselor for the YMCA, there was an exchange
student from Yugoslavia, who sincerely believed that Communism was the best
form of government. Whether he still holds this belief now is another
matter.
It must needs be noted that even socialists still debate whether or not
the Soviet Union, China, et alia, are or were truly socialist economies;
as a frined of mine who is far more versed in this political theory once
told me, when I asked him whether the Open Source development model was
an example of "socialism that works" -- "There's no truly commonly
accepted definition of what socialism actually is. Socialism is whatever
someone says it is."
Geoff