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From: Gerhard Weinberg
List Editor: Paul Steege <paul.steege@VILLANOVA.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: REV: Bruce on Port, _Conflict and Stability_
Author's Subject: Re: REV: Bruce on Port, _Conflict and Stability_
Date Written: Wed, 10 Oct 2007
Date Posted: Fri, 11 Oct 2007 11:45:46 -0400

If I may be permitted to put a word into this highly informative discussion of
the book by Port, it is to suggest that regimes of all sorts do make efforts to
retain and hopefully increase compliance.  It might be useful to compare the
Third Reich's efforts to keep privations and dissent at home to a minimum
because of belief that World War I had been lost in large part because of the
collapse of the home front as a result of privations on the one hand with the
DDR's periodic efforts at appeasing portions of its population for fear of
another June 1953. As for "Ostalgie;" that can be taken seriously only when
there are lines outside the embassies in Germany of Cuba, North Korea, and
Vietnam for those who so relish their lost state that they desperately want to
move to one that retains its main features.

Gerhard L. Weinberg
University of North Carolina

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