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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #eastern
And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. ↗
#camus #communism #czechoslovakia #david-szmulevski #east-germany
I stepped away to find out more about myself, which I was having difficulty doing as a football player. I got a chance to travel the world. I studied Eastern philosophy, and I've grown as a person so much. ↗
#away #ball player #chance #difficulty #doing
Sometimes I even now feel like a stranger in my country. But I knew there would be problems because I had seen the world as a skater. And now? A lot of people in eastern Germany have lost jobs, rents went up, food costs went up, unemployment went to 20 percent. Freedom is good, but it is not easy. ↗
