Re: Mass murder, jokes and immigration [WAS: Re: Massive Starvation

On Sat, 10 May 2008, Bert Byfield wrote:

>> Except that crossing a border without permission violates the rights
>> of the state, and should only be objectionable to Marxists if the
>> state is one that Marxists sup****t, whereas a union is by definition a
>> working class organization. -jh-
>
> So when someone tried to flee the old Soviet Union and the guards
machine-
> gunned them to death, bodies hanging from the barbed wire, it was okay.
But
> when someone tried to flee the United States to go to the Soviet Union,
and
> they were machine-gunned to death, it was a bad thing. Is that it?
>

Me, I don't believe in giving Uncle Joe a blank check. He doesn't seem 
to have done a great job at defending the Soviet state in 1941, when 
it needed it.

If somebody tries to flee the Soviet state to carry secret do***ents 
to Nazi Germany in 1941, or for that matter to the USA at the height 
of the Cold War, that's one thing. The fanatical Soviet restrictions 
on emigration seem to me to have had a lot more to do with the defense 
of Stalinism vs. the Soviet people than with the defense of the Soviet 
Union.

The Berlin Wall, OTOH, was another case. East Germany had a serious 
brain drain problem, though that was a rather bureaucratic way of 
dealing with it. Taking down the Wall seemed like a good idea at the 
time, hey, I was in favor of it, it clearly was what the workers of 
East Germany wanted. But then East Germany got swallowed by the Fourth 
Reich, not a good thing at all. I hear there's a popular T-****rt in 
East Germany these days reading "I want my wall back."

-jh-