I read with some amusement this article in The Guardian about German politician Sahra Wagenknecht's predicament. It seems that Frau Wagenknecht, a member of the Left MEP (communist) party, was caught on camera eating an expensive (€22 - around $32) and bourgeois lobster dinner when Feleknas Uca, a fellow member of her party, took some pictures of the event. Frau (or should I say "Comrade") Wagenknecht then had one of her assistants arrange to borrow the digital camera to take some pictures, and when it was returned to Frau Uca, the offending lobster pictures had been deleted, leading to a protest by Uca that brought the whole situation to light.
As so many American politicians have learned, it's not criminal acts (even against political correctness) that get you into big trouble, but trying to cover them up. As the article notes, Comrade Wagenknecht freely admits both to eating the lobster and to deleting the pictures, but feels that she did nothing wrong, saying that she is "fighting for a society in which everyone can afford to eat lobster." Some claim that the disappearing lobster pictures are a tactic of which Stalin would be proud.
But come on, folks! If you elect people who are steeped in the ideology of a discredited system like communism, what do you expect? The article tells us that the 38-year-old Comrade Wagenknecht was "brought up on the works of Marx and Engels, joined the East German communists in 1989, and allegedly mourned the fall of the Berlin Wall." That would have made her 20 years old at the time that East Germany became defunct. There's an old saying that if you aren't a communist at age 20, you have no heart, but if you are still a communist at age 40, you have no brain. Time's running out for Comrade Wagenknecht to show evidence of the latter.
I can't imagine why anyone in Germany would vote for an openly communist politician. Communism in East Germany was a total failure. The only way that they kept their citizens from fleeing to West Germany was by building a wall all along the border and shooting anyone who tried to escape. As an economic system, communism failed to provide a decent standard of living to the people. I know this for a fact, because I visited East Berlin back in 1985. The stores had very little in the way of consumer goods, and the products that were on the shelves were of shoddy quality. I would guess that the only people who got lobster in East Germany at that time were high-level Communist Party members.
