Gladys and the Pipsqueaks

Now here's an interesting snippet of 20C history to ponder, the visit of the Chilean Communist leader Gladys Marin to East Germany in the aftermath of the Pinochet coup.  At that time Marin was busy organising "Solidarity with Chile" campaigns around the world;  later she would return to Chile to participate in the clandestine struggle against the dictatorship and - a telling point this - become the only woman ever to act as general secretary of a major Communist party.

I wonder what our Welsh socialist bloggers think of this?  No doubt many would have a great deal of sympathy with Gladys, a true working-class hero - as the hundreds of thousands who attended her funeral in Santiago in 2005 clearly testified.  But what about some of the others in the video, the well-groomed Erich Honecker perhaps, or Egon Krenz - so obviously enjoying rubbing shoulders with a revolutionary untainted by power?  Suddenly we see that sympathy draining away.  Socialism yes, but East Germany, heaven forbid.

For most of us East Germany is the Stasi and the Berlin Wall.  The likes of Honecker and Krenz may have been trying to build socialism - full employment, health care, educational opportunities, housing, the equality for women from which the scientist Angela Merkel so obviously benefited.  They also stretched out the hand of solidarity to oppressed peoples, hence the large number of Chilean exiles in the crowd.  These party apparatchiks awarded themselves special privileges, that's true, but hardly on the scale of our present day Western elites.  The Stasi?  It could be argued that East Germany was indeed subject to a great deal of CIA, MI6 and BND inspired sabotage and dirty tricks, not all their enemies were imaginary.  The Berlin Wall?  How do you subsidize basic foodstuffs without preventing cross-border exploitation of that cheap resource?  And if you create a wage structure that narrows the gap between the manual worker and the highly trained specialists, how do you keep those specialists at home?  How do you build a socialism that respects individual liberty in a world with very powerful forces intent on its destruction?

I'll leave that for the socialists to answer, but as the memory of countries like East Germany fades away and a younger generation emerges who never knew that any alternative to capitalism could exist, we need to be careful.  Already in certain EU countries it's a crime to deny that Communist persecutions were qualitatively different from those of the Nazis. You can get five years jail-time for propagating such a viewpoint in Lithuania for example.  Communism is equated with Nazism and demands are made at an EU level that the history taught in schools reflect this new reality.  Will the history of the South Wales Miners or our politicians favourite, the International Brigade fall foul of these diktats?

Honecker and Krenz may have been responsible for their fair share of human misery but surely less than Clinton, Bush and Obama.  Less even than America's little British puppets.  Compared to the likes of the brazen cleptocrats currently destroying both Main Street and democracy, their crimes were smaller-beer, their virtues greater. Compared to them I say Hurrah for the Pipsqueaks!