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> would you prefer DDR to be crushed militarily as well, instead of just giving up the ghost in 1989?

Why are you assuming I wouldn't have prefered the Nazis to have "given up the ghost" as well? Are there any signs of the CCP "giving up the ghost" anytime soon? Given the choices that actually existed, I prefer, as the White Rose put it in one of their leaflets, an end with terror rather than terror without end. Human mortality is a given either way, the dignity that comes with agency and intellectual integrity is what the struggle is about. I don't ask for how long someone lived, but as who they lived.. or as Hannah Arendt put it:

> Once upon a time, there was a happy time when people were free to choose; better to die dead than to be a slave, better to die standing than to live on one's knees. Once upon a time there was a wicked time when imbecile intellectuals declared that life was the highest of goods. Today the terrible time has come, when it is proved every day that death begins its reign of terror exactly when life has become the highest good; that he who prefers to live on his knees dies on his knees; that no one is easier to murder than a slave. We the living have to learn that one cannot even live on one's knees, that one does not become immortal by chasing life, and that when one no longer wants to die for anything, one dies even though one has done nothing.

-- Hannah Arendt via DeepL

> As a fellow European, I can see that communists are somehow still considered better than the Nazis

That's still like saying something with a lethal dose of 50g is better food than something with a lethal dose of 5g. I don't see the point of even ranking them.




well you can get trace amounts of the 50g poison in your food and maybe not even get sick.




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