Trump's done another u-turn and threatens to cut Ukraine aid quickly if reelected:
Source
@PEMM &
@PegAsus
A lot of the more socially mobile people and most of those who'd suffered under the system pre-1989 have left East Germany. What remains is a concentrated mess of deplorableness, resentment and nostalgia (which is made easier by the passage of time, as
@Mike1976 rightly said).
But there's also a deep-seated historic component to this issue.
I can't find the link right now, but a while ago I posted some declassified CIA papers from the 1980's in which Warsaw Pact planners stated East Germany was the only country of the Eastern Bloc which Moscow believed would be fully dependable in the event of a war. Most Russian client peoples (like the Poles) felt Russia was denying them their statehood and independence; but East Germans felt they owed theirs to Moscow.
What's more, Moscow ruled those parts along the lines of "divide and conquer", harnessing existing ressentiments against the other half of Germany (a similar thing explains the current political divide between Czechia and Slovakia, me thinks). We're talking fourty years of propaganda about West Germans being cold-hearted capitalists and the heirs in spirit to Hitler – in contrast to the cooperative bliss that was anti-fascist East Germany. In other words, on a psychological level East Germans received their ability to be proud as a gift from Russia.
They felt they were the superior one of the two Germanies, a delusion that came crashing down all the harder in 1990. Revisionism is gaining traction. More and more East Germans deny that the GDR collapsed, the myth of of a hostile takeover by West Germany is becoming popular.
Needless to say, it doesn't help that Berlin with its policies for cosmopolitan yuppies cares F***-all about the issues of the countryside. At least some of that being pro-Russian is just childish contrarianism: The loathed government in Berlin says Russia is evil, hence Russia must be good.
www.telegraph.co.uk
