Fall of the Berlin Wall

Today's news has been dominated by the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago.

Of course, there is something repulsive about political leaders from around the world triumphally marking the occasion as though it proves the superiority of their blessed capitalist system. Superior perhaps in terms of longevity, but there is little to celebrate about capitalist poverty, inequality, exploitation and war.

But socialists should celebrate the fall of the Wall - albeit in our own celebrations, not alongside Angela Merkel et al. Those, such as Gorgeous George Galloway, who consider it some terrible tragedy, do socialism a great disservice by continuing to wrongly associate socialism with dictatorship and state repression.

Galloway et al might like to explain why the vast majority of people who tried to cross the Wall - a thousand of whom died in the process - were going from East to West.

Anyways, when I heard the news, I was DJing at Salford Tech (as was) Students' Union, and played this record, which deserves another airing now: