The Dredge Tank

It's intentional and this is the collective neurosis that the West's victor's justice deliberately has strived to impose onto the peoples of European formerly existing socialism as punishment for having once made the choice of socialism. Because it is quite telling that this is something that only really occurs in the former socialist states. It's something I've also thought about for quite some time and I've written some thoughts about it before:

The aim is to ensure that only the history of the west is worth being proud of. In the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the educational curriculum drills in the historical shame of the socialist half-century, ensuring that the people will always feel wretched about their socialist past while the west still gets to parade around Cold War war criminal Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors as their heroes "with flaws." The end result is that the past of former socialist states today is a blank nihilistic void with nothing of dignity to draw upon except going back centuries to fawn over inbred royalty or those Nazi-collaborationist freaks who terrorized their forefathers for their choice of socialism or just outright Westanbetung - "West worship."

In the former DDR, it's no surprise that the choice has become the far-right AfD. In this societal self-flagellation where the "Stasi" past is denounced, there's not even some "post-Nazism redemption story" to grasp, like the fiction which the BRD parades around, because the socialist past is consigned to oblivion, equated almost on par with Hitler-fascism. Consequently, the only source of historical self-worth for many then can only inevitably come from LARPing as generic white people and importing American far-right and neo-Nazism as mimicry, vicariously associating with "Europe" and "the West" for that sense of post-socialist Europe pride that comes from being patted on the shoulder as being "semi-white" and "semi-European," which has become the principal aspiration for those people.

In the last months of the DDR, the BRD's wannabe Reagan-in-lederhosen Kohl once shouted during a CDU election rally: "Nie wieder Sozialismus" - "Never again socialism." In retrospect, it was not just some campaign slogan, but a promise for each and every person who onced lived on the lands where actual socialism in Europe once existed. Every waking day since capitalist restoration, they've sought to fulfill that promise chiefly through the suppression of the memory that once upon a time, European soil - which has now become the bedrock for renewed fascism and white supremacist lackey-ism towards the US - on that soil, socialism once stood.

There was once an alternative for Europe beyond the pathetic vicarious imperialist nostalgia of every successive generation spending their entire time just endless fantasizing about having once enslaved the rest of the planet and turning its guns against our own species. That choice was the actually existing existence of (actual) European socialism.

For the DDR, when the real "alternative for Germany"—which will always be socialism—is pushed out of collective memory and condemned, it creates an inevitable spiral towards fascism. When people are deeply dissatisfied yet led to believe that a genuine leftward shift isn’t just unlikely but unimaginable—thanks to the forced forgetting of Germany’s socialist history and the DDR—they don’t realize that there are actually two paths. Instead, they can only see the right path, making it seem like their only option is to move right. In truth, it's no wonder they start leaning toward fascism in the form of the AfD. This phenomenon was evident in the past with the suppression of the KPD during Hitler-fascism, and it has reemerged once again today.

When you humiliate and degrade the "Ossi" by portraying them as a people without dignity and claiming their history is entirely one of shame and repression, it inevitably fosters a kind of collective neurosis. If the DDR is dismissed as irrelevant, then the values of human dignity, fraternity, and internationalism that it promoted are also erased from memory. This induced disconnect is the real source of both the rise of "far-right East Germany" today and the plain outright servility towards the West that characterizes formerly socialist Europe today.

If your own contemporary history has nothing of "value" then it's obvious that the best you can do is to worm yourself into vicariously associating with the West, ingratiating yourself in the club by volunteering to debase your own culture and history on their behalf, and hoping this association with the West rubs off on you by having the definitions of the West "extend" to your former East, like all those Slovenes, Croats, Poles and whatnot who spend their entire day giving geography lessons on how "they're actually Western/Central Europe."