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Gdr Quotes

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Gdr Quotes

“She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honorable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.”

PhilosophyVirtueHumilityHonorMoralityEthicsHonourShantaramGregory David RobertsGdr
Book:Shantaram
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“To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.”

BetrayalSurveillanceDictatorshipsInformersGdrStasi
Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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“The last diplomatic crisis had been all too recent. A month earlier, a West German man, who had travelled through the GDR, had died of a heart attack when questioned by border guards in a barrack in Drewitz, Saxony-Anhalt. As such, this was nothing out of the ordinary. The psychological pressure that East German border guards deliberately built up during questioning proved too much for an estimated 350 people in total who died of heart failure at inner-German checkpoints.”

East GermanyGdr
Book:Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
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“Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.”

PunkCold WarBerlinBerlin WallEast GermanyDdrGdrEast Berlin
Book:Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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“And as the Stasi began to pay more and more attention to the new network, they made the same mistake they had when trying to break up the punk scene a few years before: they sought to identify leaders and focus on undermining them. The Stasi assumed every organisation had a top-down structure like the Stasi, like the Party, like the dictatorship.”

PunkBerlinEast GermanyDdrGdrEast BerlinStasi
Book:Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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“This project was hugely successful, perhaps one of the most effective aid projects ever conducted. Vietnam is now the world’s second largest producer of coffee, producing around 30 million 60-kilogram bags every year, and its industry employs 2.6 million people. Its Robusta beans have a high caffeine content and are ideal for granular and instant coffee, which is drunk in large quantities around the world. Only 6 percent of the produce is used internationally, while the rest is exported at an estimated annual worth of $3 billion.”

CoffeeVietnamBerlinEast GermanyGdr
Book:Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
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“I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped 'Approved': the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: 'Five new and different ways to break a heart'?”

OppressionSurveillanceBlackmailGdrBanality Of EvilStasi
Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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“I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.”

IronyProtestSurveillanceInfiltrationGdrStasi
Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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“What in essence happened under the Treuhand was a complete transfer without compensation of property and assets accumulated over forty years through hard work and effort by GDR citizens, as well as the land they owned (which in the GDR had no monetary value as such) to, in the main, West German owners. This transfer of a country's assets — unprecedented anywhere in the world during peacetime — amounted to billions of Euros: a robbing of ordinary people for the enrichment of a few. Of those companies and individuals who bought GDR property, 80 per cent were West Germans, only 10 per cent were from other countries, and a mere 5 per cent went to GDR citizens.”

Political EconomyReunificationDdrGdrExpropriationGerman ReunificationGerman Democratic RepublicTreuhand
Book:Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It
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“What followed was the largest and most rapid privatisation ever seen in any country in the world (except perhaps in the Soviet Union under Yeltsin). Never in the history of civilisation has a state's total assets and infrastructure been disposed of so rapidly and in such a criminal fashion. Its machinations make Al Capone look like a paragon of capitalist virtue.”

PrivatizationDdrGdrExpropriationGerman ReunificationGerman Democratic RepublicTreuhand
Book:Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It
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“In hindsight, it's seen as inevitable that the two Germany's would reunite. But none of the people who had laid the groundwork for the fall-those who had started the tremors and endured the security forces' brutality-envisioned a unified Germany. Those people had sacrificed their places in society for the chance to form a new one, something different and distinct, an independent East Germany built form scratch. The hadn't looked to the West for inspiration before, and none of them looked to the West for salvation now that the border was open.”

PunkBerlinBerlin WallCounter CultureDdrGdrEast Berlin
Book:Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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“You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”

MistakesInequalitySurveillanceHelplessnessPolitical SystemsSystemsEast GermanyGdr
Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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