Kultur 11

I found the readings for this kultur post to be incredibly interesting, especially now with the situation in Ukraine. I'm not an expert in history or economics but I do remember that when the cold war ended it was found that the USSR was essentially starving. This is what made that some Ukrainians want to rejoin Russia in a new soviet state so bizarre to me. Why would you ever want to join a system that created Gulags, the KGB, the Stasi, and fourteen year waits for cars? I assumed it was because Ukraine itself was still quite poor, but it turns out even in prosperous Germany people wish to return to the soviet style DDR. I have been to the east side of Berlin and seen how poor it looks even now, and I'm just amazed that people still want to go back to system that created it. I kind of understand the argument that poor people in Germany are not as free as they would like to be, but still, I've seen the Stasi prisons. This is probably a good time to acknowledge that we in the west have really only seen the bad parts of the soviet system so we assume it is all bad.
The other article about the northern/southern divide in Germany was actually pretty amusing because the divide matches the north/south divide so perfectly. I mean the stereotypes are exactly the same, southerners are fat, redneck, racist farmers while  the north is full of intellectual, educated people and is far more industrialized. Only the religions are flipped, the US south is mainly christian while the US north has more Catholics.