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‘We Cannot Win’ Says Top Russian Commander
(www.kyivpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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I'm not sure why you think that's damning, there's some proportional amount of canned fish which is worth as much as a car, right?
In principle yes. But that ignores that the GDR built those cars to use, and has no need for the fish. Nor had it any say in whether to do the trade. The USSR messed up their own planning so they pressured the GDR. Inside the GDR it was a meme that you bought a car for your kid no later than when it got born so it'd get delivered on the 18th birthday but frankly speaking the GDR did produce a fuckton of cars -- but couldn't keep them. Which is why they stopped investing into developing the thing which is how you ended up with the same Trabants being built in 1990 as in 1958.
Other trades were more equitable, including the steady stream of raw materials coming in from the USSR in exchange for industrial machinery. The GDR also traded a fuckton with the west, more or less washing machines, fridges, textiles and industrial machinery, against the Prussian necessity: Coffee. Until they kick-started the Vietnamese coffee industry to be able to afford bananas better but that investment didn't pan out because 1990 came along, coffee plants take something like 10 years to start bearing fruit. The Vietnamese produce excellent coffee, btw.
Main point though is that yes the USSR was treating all the other bloc states as vassals: If they wanted to do a trade, they got it, no matter how insanely lop-sided it was.
Do Germans not eat canned fish?
They ultimately did, though state TV needed to include it in their cooking show as otherwise the fish would've rotted on the shelves -- the cans had Russian labels and while people learned Russian in school that doesn't mean that you know the name of a random fish. People didn't know what it was, what to do with it, so they didn't buy it.
Also you might've noticed that the GDR had a coastline.
In any case, and you seem to be trying hard to not address it: The point is not the fish. And it wasn't always fish, but other random shit. The point is that the GDR didn't have a choice. And the Russians didn't even have the decency to ship the cans with German labels. Probably were sitting in some warehouse collecting dust in Russia in the fist place.
I guess I'm just hard time what point you want me to take away from this when everything you've told me is unsourced and anecdotal. Random stories from random people on the internet don't really mean much to me.
My source is German TV documentaries if that helps.
And details actually are unimportant there's a multitude of ways to establish that the likes of Poland and the GDR were vassals of the USSR. How about Hungary? Yugoslavia wasn't, insert Tito quote about sending a single assassin to Stalin if Stalin doesn't stop sending dozens to Tito.
Well, that's not what the person you were responding to was disputing, was it? Vassal state relations are not necessarily imperialism, by the standard he laid out.
Lmfao