Am 06.01.2012 20:23, schrieb Wolfgang Schwanke:

The West German governement positively denied immigration to any number
of foreigners, and they may well have asked East Germany to help them
doing so.

I welcome that you finally accept the facts!

I'm not disputing it,

You have constantly claimed the opposite.

I'm saying that's fine.

Sure, you follow like a slave the politics of your master. If they
want the Berlin Wall to be closed completely, you are in favor of it,
while at the same time denying that anybody ever had wanted it.

But they never locked any person into the country -
convicted criminals excepted of course -,

Wrong again. They have set up Black Lists of people who must not
leave the country, and they put into prison other people for the sole
crime of being in the country.

or asked another government to do so.

But they did. They collaborated with the neighboring countries
lifting the Schengen agreements, the last big time four years ago at the
occasion of this commercial event of the UEFA in Austria and Switzerland.

They positively never asked the East German government
to lock foreign asylum seakers into the Eastern bloc,

Maybe not, but they strongly demanded the GDR government to close the
Berlin Wall completely. Not to let people to leave the GDR to Westberlin
without a valid visa for Westberlin, so effectively demanding that the
GDR acts as a auxiliary police for the capitalist parts of Germany.

like they did with their own citizens.

See above, the Bonn government did it with their own citizens quite
frequently.

Please remember also that the Bonn government hastened to organize a
conference of the new governments of the East European countries after
the rebellions of 1989/90 with the purpose of ordering them to strictly
apply the travel restrictions of the FRG. The demand of "free travel"
being only for propaganda, but not for reality. They were happy to make
a big propaganda for "freedom of travel", as long as they could condemn
other governments for hindering it, but that propaganda stopped
immediately as they had to close the borders themselves. Today the
outside border of Fortress Europe is as strongly guarded as the GDR-FRG
border was before, but with more deaths caused than in the four decades
of the division of Germany (organised by the capitalist class and their
foreign allies).

On the deportation prisons in the FRG:

Because they tried to immigrate illegally. But that is not a breach of
the freedom of travel.

Sure. Freedom of travel is freedom. What you describe is not freedom,
but limited breaches of a general denial of travel. Making the passport,
as Bert Brecht noted so well in his "Flüchtlingsgespräche" the most
valuable part of a human being, actually degrading the human being to a
mere carrier of the passport, since the passport cannot move by himself.
Birds and other animals have more freedom of movement and travel than
humans, the supposedly "crown of creation".

Freedom of movement includes the right to _emigrate_ from any country,
including one's home country.

Which is and was often denied by refusing to issue a passport, as
e.g. a number of US-american socialists have experienced. As all
US-american citizens experience today who get a big fine or even prison
for travelling into neighboring Cuba.

But it does not include the right to _immigrate_ into any country,
except one's home country.

You see, you argue against real freedom of movement.

Therefore, denying immigration to non-residents is not a
violation of their freedom.

Blah blah blah.

"Denying freedom is not a violation of freedom"


L.W.