Thuringia: Seeing Red.

Tom Gill (h/t MNE), for Counterpunch, writes that:

"25 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
"Return of the German Reds?

"The radical Die Linke looks set to take charge of a regional government in Germany for the first time, in alliance with the social democrats (SPD) and Greens."

That's good, I guess. Apparently the SPD finally got tired of having its already devalued brand name entirely soiled by its association to Merkel's CDU, and decided to join Bodo Ramelow, Die Linke's leader in Thuringia in a coalition government.

Let's just hope for once a pact with the devil does not end like all pacts with the devil: Die Linke being betrayed by Labor, Fabians, Democrats, progressives, social-democrats. You know, the Left -- or Die Linke, as they say in German -- betrayed by the pseudo-Left -- or liberals, as we say in Oztralian.

But there's more. Philip Oltermann, writing from Berlin for The Guardian, also chronicles the event. According to Oltermann,

"Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Left party's ascendancy in Thuringia is the clearest sign yet that German views on the GDR legacy are becoming more pragmatic and less ideological."

Oltermann reckons that the reunified Germany has slowly incorporated the good things (yes, there were those, even if you never heard of them from our free press) from the former East Germany. This has been a difficult process, though, as Oltermann explains with seemingly trivial examples:

"When Germany introduced a bottle deposit system to encourage recycling in 2002, it pointed towards Scandinavia, even though East Germany had a sophisticated recycling infrastructure since the 1960s."

Oltermann calls that denial "ideological"; perhaps he is right. Maybe you could say German mainstream opinion-makers are "doctrinaire". You, too, could be right; after all, that's what mainstream opinion-makers, all over the world, do for a living: being doctrinaire.

I call it a bit differently: it's the pettiness and mediocrity that characterizes the defenders of capitalism, liberal and conservative, alike (pretty much the same crap, really, but from different piles). See also.