Hot Commy Chick BUMP
Posted on 09/19/2003 10:55:51 AM PDT by knighthawk
Last May, Katarina Witt lost a court battle to keep her Stasi file a secret. Witt, the figure skater who won Olympic gold for East Germany in the 1980s, co-operated with her country's dreaded secret police, the heirs to the Nazi Gestapo.
Few Communist countries had a secret police as brutal as the Stasi. They were the ones who killed more than 1,000 of their own countrymen who tried to cross the Berlin Wall to freedom in the West; they were the ones who kept a bizarre warehouse of jars filled with the body odor of political dissidents -- so that attack dogs could quickly acquire their scent; they were the ones with the state-run torture chambers.
Of course, Witt wasn't involved with anything so brutal. Her deal with the Stasi was simple: If they gave her a Volkswagen Golf, renovated her parents' apartment and let her skate in the West, she would gather information for the Stasi, promise not to defect, and use her beautiful image to obscure the reality of her country's gruesome regime.
Such an arrangement shouldn't have been surprising. After all, 100,000 East Germans worked for the Stasi, and at least 400,000 more were their informants -- out of a country of just 16-million people. Witt never really had a chance; the Stasi first started tracking her when she was just nine-years-old, when she showed promise as an athlete. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, her Stasi file was 1,354 pages long.
Witt was a Communist agent of convenience. It was her ticket to fame and a few creature comforts in an austere dystopia.
The East German regime fell more than a decade ago. Witt can now buy any car she likes, travel wherever she wants to, and the government no longer plants listening devices in her apartment. She's free. So why is Katarina Witt still shilling for the old dictatorship?
Recently, Witt hosted the first of a German television series called the "GDR Show," the Communist name for East Germany, the Germany Democratic Republic. But the GDR Show isn't a critical review of a half-century of oppression. Witt doesn't use the opportunity to come to grips with her own complicity with a murderous regime. There is no "truth and reconciliation" as there was after the fall of South Africa's apartheid. Instead, Witt has turned her show into a revisionist white-wash -- a light-hearted nostalgia show, pining for the old days.
"It is an entertainment show," she says. "It is time to show we also had fun in the German Democratic Republic." There was never any doubt that Witt had fun. But what about the German school girl who spent years in prison for drawing with lipstick on a poster of Josef Stalin?
Witt isn't just omitting Communism's horrors. She is actively trying to rehabilitate its murderous image. On the show, Witt sports a blue communist "Free German Youth" shirt, the Communist successor to the Hitler Youth.
The Free German Youth was modeled after the Soviet Young Pioneers -- where the highest ideal was to place the state ahead of one's own family. The poster boy of the Young Pioneers was Pavlik Morozov, known as "Informer 001." Morozov became the role model for all Communist youth when he denounced his own father and had him sent to prison for speaking out against Stalin's nationalization of farmland. This is the philosophy behind the jacket that Witt wears.
Today Witt says "life under communism wasn't so bad." The Stasi were just "doing their duty." Fifteen years ago she called them her "partner" and "the only people one can rely on." She actually misses them.
It is trite to suggest that if Witt showed such tenderness for Nazism, she would be utterly marginalized -- arrested, actually, in Germany. Alberto VO5 would no longer invite her for lucrative appearances at their "Divas on Ice" shows. Her vanity line of cosmetics would be yanked off of store shelves.
Communism -- a strain of totalitarianism that has murdered more souls than Nazism ever did -- is still acceptable in polite company. This is not just an affliction of Europe: How many university professors in Canada wear their Marxism as a badge of intellectual pride, more than a decade after the depth of its inhumanity has been exposed?
By suing to stop the release of her Stasi files, Witt showed that she was embarrassed by her collaboration with a dictatorship in the past. But that co-operation was done under duress. Shouldn't she -- and her fans -- be more embarrassed about why is she still acting as Communism's pretty apologist today?
I'm serious! I am not making this up.
Hot Commy Chick BUMP
That sounds good in theory, but what did the hundreds of hormonally and genetically modified brutish female weight lifters etc., do for their gruesome regime? She must have been doing more.
Kinda makes me wish I knew a secret that she wanted........
Hope all is well with you.
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