The German leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, has made quite clear that not only is she in favor of Western neutrality on the Ukraine-Russia stand-off, she’s made it abundantly clear she’s even against sending the Kiev government defensive military hardware.
Never mind that’s she’s a huge supporter of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that stretches 750 miles from Vyborg, Russia through the Baltic Sea to Lubmin, Germany (bypassing both Poland and Ukraine), her ties to the Communist Party of East Germany are, at least, a cause for concern.
Thankfully, Gerald Warner of the British-based news site Reaction.com has some quite interesting revelations (emphasis mine);
Horst Kasner, a Protestant pastor of strongly leftist convictions, voluntarily moved from capitalist Hamburg to East Germany, taking with him his wife and weeks-old daughter Angela. Today that infant is the embattled acting Chancellor of Germany.
To come anywhere near understanding the enigma that is Angela Merkel it is necessary to explore her early life as a Communist activist in East Germany. Among the photo-shopped images of her displayed online, satirically portraying her in Nazi uniform, there is one genuine photograph.
It shows her wearing the uniform of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), the East German Communist equivalent of the Hitler Youth or Soviet Young Pioneers, in company with other members of the GDR nomenklatura.
Merkel was seldom interrogated about her Communist past for most of her political career: in Germany, too many people have sensitive histories involving personal or family service of one form of totalitarianism or another for such questioning to be considered good form. Merkel admitted to her former FDJ involvement, but insisted her activities were purely “cultural”, involving mainly the purchase of theatre tickets.
In 2013, however, a new biography, “The First Life of Angela M”, exposed her as the former FDJ Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda (“Agitprop”) at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin.
Agitprop was at the sharp end of the ideological war, involving the aggressive inculcation of Marxism-Leninism among her colleagues. It would never have been entrusted to a lukewarm Communist. Theatre tickets, anyone?
As a schoolgirl, Merkel took pains to learn fluent Russian – she could be seen learning vocabulary even while waiting at the bus stop – and at age 15 won the local Russian language “Olympics”.
This was an obvious indication of her ambition: learning the language of East Germany’s Soviet masters would be of considerable advantage in pursuing a career in the Communist hierarchy.