On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

Fred complained that:

...

We don't present all main views or even the predominant view. We censor views we feel are incorrect and substitute euphemisms; so East Germany becomes a "socialist country", not a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist government imposed by fiat on the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany.

One way to solve this problem is to identify the term "socialist" as Marxist terminology. I finally managed to wedge into the [[Communist state]] article the FACT that Marxists classify societies by their economic system, while the West generally classify societies by the political system.

So Marxists call various nations "Capitalist countries" or "Socialist countries" (that's their main division, anyway).

Meanwhile, people like Fred and me call various nations "Democratic countries" or "dictatorships" or "Totalitarian countries".

Note that the categories overlap but do not entirely coincide!

There are two crucially different spectrums being used as classification schemes here.

So, an article can say that:

• Marxists called East Germany a "socialist country", because its

economic system was blah blah blah.

• Prof. John Doe of XYZ University (or PDQ Thinktank) called East

Germany a "totalitarian country" because its political system was yadda yadda yadda.

I think you miss the point here, Ed. From what I know of East Germany, the citizens *believed* (whether or not correctly) that they lived in a socialist country. I'm basing this on a couple of data:

*Back in 1997, I happened to be in Berlin, where I had the chance to visit many of the museums. (The Pergamon Museum is definitely not to be missed.) At a museum on Under den Linden Strasse (the name escapes me, & I can't find my notes) there was an exhibit on the iconography used in the propaganda of the former DDR. One aspect that still stays with me from that exhibit concerned the commentary on the various items of the exhibit: the English text was clearly not a complete translation of the German text! Intregued, & although my German at the time was still rusty, I compared the two versions from display to display to find out what was omitted -- & perhaps why.

The upshot of my comparisons was that the German text spent far more time wrestling with the problem that a centrally planned economy did not work. And when discussing the major crisis of the history of the DDR -- a Five Year Plan in the late 1950s that caused massive damage to the economy, famine, & led to massive emigration to the West & the Berlin Wall -- the German text blamed Soviet interference with the German economy. Evidently, the German people expect their government not only to be efficient, but paternal in its functions. (A conclusion I hold only unless corrected by my fellow Wikipedians from Germany.)

*In 1976, when I was a camp counselor for the YMCA, there was an exchange student from Yugoslavia, who sincerely believed that Communism was the best form of government. Whether he still holds this belief now is another matter.

It must needs be noted that even socialists still debate whether or not the Soviet Union, China, et alia, are or were truly socialist economies; as a frined of mine who is far more versed in this political theory once told me, when I asked him whether the Open Source development model was an example of "socialism that works" -- "There's no truly commonly accepted definition of what socialism actually is. Socialism is whatever someone says it is."

Geoff