Matters of Propaganda...Or: how was the West portrayed in Poland?

The worst kind, okay that is interesting.

southern

Wasn't Greece part of the "Cow-deal" between Stalin and Churchill? "You get Greece, but then we want Poland?"

But indeed, the Greek Civil War was a pretty nasty story, yes.

SeanBM

The Dutch viewed Ireland as a place to make hols, the "recreational area" of Western Europe. This was in stark contrast with the situation in Northern Ireland, which made the headlines nearly every week in NL. Nearly every Dutch felt truly sorry and deeply sympathized with the ppl in the area.

I have to hand it to the Irish, they were the only country in Europe where fascism or Nazism never got a hold. The Blueshirts, the Irish Nazi movement, never got more members than about 100.

>^..^<

M-G (made some more coffee)

Too busy, I think we had our own internal extremes which did not involve people from outside the Celtic Islands.
I remember being shocked at seeing a spray paint of a black guy with a cross hairs (from a gun) over his head in Norway. I had never seen anything like it before.

We were very insular in many respects and always sided with the underdogs, so communism would not have been such an 'evil' thing for us.

i think most Irish people knew that the rich are okay and the poor get shafted, okay that is a bit too simplistic but you know what I mean.

The only Jew I knew about as a kid was Jesus.

this one is hilarious

One instruction in my Soldier's Handbook that I got when I was conscripted for the army was following: "Pay attention: Russians and other inhabitants of the Eastern Bloc may look like us, but in fact they are very different. They will deceive you where they can in order to fulfill their goal: a communist Europe and throwing us into submission. I order to achieve this goal, they will lie, steal and even murder. These ppl are highly recognisable (enter pictures of a peasant in a uniform and of a obviously deranged individual) by their general signs of low intelligence (signs: low fore head, dark and gloomy eyes, monobraw, abundance of bodyhair, and a general bad mooded look on their face) and threatcherousness (did I write that correctly?). They will try to seduce you either with alcohol or with female beauty, but remember, giving in to those temptation is an act of treason and if it doesn't cause your death, it will be dealt with in Militairy Court!

Note: since it's been a while since I was in the army, I don't exactly remember everything the book said, but I remember this part very clearly.

In hindsight it's ridiculous of course. I think the book was written in the 50's or early 60's.

>^..^<

M-G (next I will post what I was supposed to do when I would spot a soviet car running around freely in the Netherlands or Western Germany, should I happen to be on manoevres there)

We were told that if war broke out then it was expected that most of the satellite warsaw pact countries would switch sides to break free from the commies (Poland ,Hungary,Czech)

How true this was who knows.

I think most of the NVA soldiers would had deserted to the Bundeswehr once they would had gotten the chance...;)

(That's why so many russian troops where stationed there...just in case...)

time means

Yeah, we heard something like that too. But of course this was due to the fact that these were "unreliable" ppl in general, according to the official sources.

I just have to remark that the Soldier's Handbook I got was different than the ones the normal drafted Soldiers got, because I got the officer's version (I as drafted to become a Sergeant) and I guess this version tended to be a bit harsher as officer's were expected to follow the rules more diligently than soldiers.

Unfortunately I couldn't get a picture of it, but the next chapter contained a picture of a white license plate with in the upper left corner (of course, left) a small image of the USSR flag. I always thought this was the true Soviet license plate, until I learned that license plates in the USSR were black with white letters and numbers. I guess they just made it up back then. After all, a black and white license plate wouldn't attract that much attention; a white one with a USSR flag on it definitively would!

So, what was I supposed to do in the (highly unlikely) event that I spotted a car with such license plates on a Dutch road? I was allowed to stop the car by all means. If I was driving a vehicle myself, I was allowed to drive it off the road and if I wasn't driving, but carrying a weapon, I was allowed to flatten the right-front wheel (it mentioned very specifically the right front-wheel, don't know why, but they did) by shooting ONE bullet from my weapon (if I needed more bullets to do so, I had to fill in a certain form), flattening the tire, hence causing it to stop. Alternatively, if the car was approaching, I had to go stand on the road to stop the vehicle. Once the vehicle stopped, I then had to approach the car with the utmost caution and, depending on the number of ppl in the car, was allowed to hold my weapon with the safety off. I think it was if there were more than two ppl seated in the car, I was allowed to do that. In case of two or one person, I was not allowed to bear my weapon. I then had to ask the ppl for their papers, what they were doing here, where they were going and what they intended to do. In case they planned something mischievous, I was to arrest them and bring them to the nearest army base. As it was most likely they were up to no good, it basically came down that I was supposed to arrest them. However, in case of a friendly visit, I was to let them go (gee, they would get far with a flat tire or with their car broken down along the side of the road), but immediately inform the commander of the nearest army camp. Also I was supposed to follow them and intervene should the intentions not be so harmless as they claimed. And this was usually the case with these ppl. So in short, some shots or arrests were always taking place, should it so happen that a soviet car, with no efforts to disguise the fact that it was in fact a soviet car, managed to break through checkpoint charly, proceeded unknowningly through the entire widt of Western Germany and ended up being stopped by me on a back road of rural Holland.

You may laugh about this now (and in fact I do now too), but at the time I had to study this by heart and I got a test about it. If I would've failed, this would mean storm-training for two days and after that a new test. And if you know what a storm training is, then you darn made sure you knew this by heart :S

>^..^<

M-G (two days of crawling for miles through mud and water, not being allowed to lift your head higher than 40 or 50 cm)

Lol good story M-G (one shot , one kill)

Some US anti-commie movie from the 50's

Herbert A Philbricks hosts this. Read the description:

Herbert A. Philbrick hosts this amazing anti-Commie propaganda film from the 1950s. Philbrick was a salesman who was recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the Communist Party and report back to J. Edgar Hoover. After the FBI pulled him out in the late '40s so he could testify in a Smith Act trial (the verdicts of many of which were later deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court), Philbrick wrote a book about his experiences hunting Commies.

>^..^<

M-G (it is comprehensable to be immoral, but it's horrible to be unmoral - Herbert, Herbert, told you this would happen when you drink too much of that Wodka)

I think Greece was exchanged for Romania but greek civil war helped chinese communists immensely to come to power because it deprived the West of the moral advantage to intervene in China.


All marshall plan investment went to tanks and planes to kill the communists.But the latter were not better.You got a rifle and an order to kill your neighbour because he was right wing or your brother because he was ''fascist''.Of course the hitlerites on the other side were even more brutal.Everyone knew what expected him if the opposite side prevailed.

I didn't say Germans didn't want to live in freedom.
East Germans, however, did sweet squat about it. And then, when it was perfectly safe they started demolishing the wall.


Oh, I believe you.
See, Poles made no secrets about their hatred to communism.
And that was the difference I wrote about.

I am loving the propaganda :)

You don't know much, don't you...
How many Poles died at the wall or got murdered leaving the country?
You had just a tiny part of those russian troops in the country that the GDR had. The Russians must have quite trusted you to not doing anything "wrong"...

Ever heard of the monday-demonstrations in Leipzig? And how could the "wall-demolishers" had known they wouldn't end up like the students at the Tiananmen place?


Yeah...that's why the commies stayed as long in power in Poland as in the GDR...so much hatred! Or not so much at all?

Next you say Poland alone broke the Iron Curtain...
You are an idiot!

Rather than getting annoyed, perhaps you could enlighten us.
I don't know how Eastern Germans felt and how they helped to undermine and get rid of communism.


Interesting in the second video you posted they talk about Katyn (about minute 1:20).

As I'm not "The" East-Germans I can't tell you how "They" felt.
But surely not much different than all the others in the eastern bloc..

On the other hand I firmly believe that the end of the cold war and the fall of the Iron Curtain is thanked to the perestroika and Gorbatschow. He brought the change in which wake all this could happen.

Another hardliner in Gorbatschovs place and it would just had been some more bloodily destroyed uprisings been.

Do you think it was a coincidence that 1989 became the hallmark date, Seanny? There were forces at work that wanted to wipe the scourge out. Some in Berlin lived in relative poverty and that couldn't continue.

I am not havin a go at you.


That varies quite a bit, are there people in East Germany that miss communism?

(that would be do you)
My girl friend at the time was a girl from Zwickau. I know a little.


Sh!loads or soviet troops in Poland.
You clearly have no idea.


You can't be not serious :)
USSR was done then already.


So you speculate what I might say (but haven't said it) and then you call me an idiot based on your imagination. Interesting.

There are commies everywhere, but quite marginal and if then they dream of an illusion, not the dreary reality the GDR proved to be.


Well...Poland had not many of them there.
If Poles hated communism so much, what took you so long???

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Soviet_Forces_in_Germany
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_forces_in_Poland

Indeed, forgot to mention that. Also interesting when Herbert reads out loud the statement of the US government concerning Katyn...


Well, the DDR was an artificial state and it's sole raison d'être was communism. Plus, they were Germans, the former enemy AND they formed the direct border to Western Germany. And just about everybody agreed that should it come to a clash, it would most likely be in Germany. So it's quite logical that the Soviets kept more troops there than anywhere else...

>^..^<

M-G (relaxed)

Youz know on here when two people argue, it is us ( the third person) the readers, that win.
Get some figure out, how many Soviet soldiers in each country?

Why are you telling me all that? I LIVED THERE!


Group of Soviet Forces in Germany

First a little story...

I moved to Norway when I was 3 years old, (why do I start my threads with that...), and I remember some things from back then, when I would go back to Poland with my father. (My parents split up, me living with my mother in Norway, and my father in Germany). During summer I would go to Germany to stay with my father for summer vacation. We would fill up the car with food and gifts and head for the East German border. There my father would give the guard a box of sigarettes, maybe some dollars, and we would be on our way faster than if he wouldn't have given them to him. My first memory is standing at the border crossing between West and East and seeing the kids from the neighbourhood standing up against the fence on their bikes. I remember the grey buildings, the uncut grass and how skinny the kids looked. Myself, I sat there with my comic book, my walk-man and my violet milka chocolade and look at them, and they would look back at me. I would wonder what they thought of me. I also asked my dad if i could go up to them and talk, but he said no. (Maybe the guard with the kalashnikov and the German sheperd dog had something to do with it).

In Poland my father would give everybody gifts and presents and I would eventually give my friends on the street in the town were we lived all my comics and whatever I brought. It made me quite popular, but also made me feel good. The thing is, I would say I had just as good time, maybe even a little better time with my polish friends, than I would have with my norwegian friends back home in Oslo. There was a real good atmosphere among us kids in the street that I really liked. I have to say that my family on the Polish side were above average income-wise and had a nice house and a western made car. (Woooo). But they still had to stand in line like everyone else in the morning for milk and bread. I remember I asked what my cousin got up so early for, and he told me because of food for breakfast. One day, waiting in line, he passed out and hit his head on the floor and lost all his front teeth, so to this day he has dentures. (he's only 36).

There were many stories like this, and all of you who have family in Poland, or had can ask them about all of this.

Coming back from this vacation (Usually a whole month in Poland), I would get back to school and we would all get the assignement to write what we did on our vacations that summer. I remember I had to read out my eassay to the rest of the norwegian school class. In it I wrote that Poland was not such a bad place, that my family lived in a big house, had a western made car and had bikes and games just like us. But I also remember the feeling of trying to defend it, because the general atmosphere was that eastern europe was backward and communist. I had to try to persuade my classmates that I didn't came from a backward country. Yes it was poorer, but somehow it was still ok.

Today, however, it is another story. When you go to eastern european countries you see beautiful architecture, you see clean streets, you get nice food. As for Poland, it has become so "modern", I am actually planning to move there within the next 5 years. I would never have thought about this if Poland could not give me an my family the life that we have gotten used to here in Norway. I even met a Nowegian firefighter here in my city, who met a Polish woman. They are in the process of buying a house in the town where she comes from and eventually moving there. And this is a settled norwegian with a good job doing this. He would't have if Poland was such a bad place.

I think Poland was the country closest to "the west", under communism. We weren't real communists, just living under their rule. Life went along normally, and money and western goods could be had for money or the right connections. As was with my family. I remember I would drink Pepsi and watch Robocop in my uncles house. Or play on the Atari at their neighbours house. Not much different form my life in Norway. But for my classmates, I had to tell them, convince them, that it wasn't as bad a sometimes portrayed in articles and movies.

Dariusz

I think he was agreeing with you.

BB needs a nice cup of tea, me thinks :)


Thanks for the info.

He was just spelling out the logic, BB, nothing else. Plenty of Russians in Berlin before 1989, spreading communistic BS. That must've been a bitter pill to swallow.

Ik know, but I wasn't telling you, but the other readers ;) I was trying to help you, tsk!

>^..^<

M-G (grumpy Bratwurst)

According to the 1956 treaty (which was developed by later, more precise amendments), the Soviet military in Poland was limited to 66,000 troops, although the Soviets never fully disclosed the actual number of personnel of the Northern Group to the Polish government. and the Polish government had no right to inspect the Soviet bases.The treaty also limited the number of Soviet bases in Poland to 39, while the actual number of bases reached 79

....
After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, and with the signs of the fall of the Soviet Union, the new Polish government wanted the Soviet troops to leave Poland.[3] By that time the Northern Group had already shrunk to 58,000 troops

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Group_of_Forces

East Germany: 338,000 in 1991.

Uh...now compare that with Poland:

globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/gsfp.htm

Group of Soviet Forces in Poland
Northern Group of Forces (NGF)


whoa! ;)

Not even 60.000 in the whole country but telling how much they "hated" communism and claiming East Germans did nothing compared to them...what a people!

Did you at least had an uprising as in East Germany 1953? Or in other Warsaw bloc countries like in Hungary or Prague? No? Oh wait...you "commie-hating-Poles" helped out with Panzers, didn't you!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uprising_of_1953_in_East_Germany

BBoy, you need to read up on those. You obviously have no idea.