User talk:200.85.114.227

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Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! You clearly already know our ways, as you are already using our shorthand terms (POV, for instance). You've been removing categories from certain articles, describing them as "stupid POV".

Firstly, please don't use words like "stupid" in your edit summaries. It's a personal attack on the person who added what you removed. Also, inclusion in a category is rarely a POV; and inclusion in a category where the subject of the category is clearly discussed in the text of the article really can't be POV.

If it helps you, I am a socialist and have certain sympathies with the former communist countries. However, Broadcasting in East Germany is clearly best included in Category:Censorship, as the Rundfunks der DDR not only actively censored broadcasts but also broadcast Der schwarze Kanal - a kind of positive-censorship that may be unique in world history.

Therefore, expect your edits to be reverted as expressing your POV in and of themselves. If you've a real neutral argument to make, you can do it on the article talk page and you'll have a very receptive ear in this particular admin.

Just drop the personal attacks implied in your edit summaries, yeah? ➨ ❝REDVERS❞ 21:46, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I am disappointed. I thought you might have a real debate in you, with persuasive arguments. Instead you give me the usual old CPGB rubbish arguments on the subject that didn't hold water then and don't hold water now.
For a start, you put up a straw man argument, claiming a position for me (It's very naive to believe that one would say the plain truth and other one pure lies) that I do not hold. That's a shame, as you'd find my actual position to be well thought out, provable and compelling. IMHO.
You ask would the BBC broadcast something against its own interest? The answer there is clearly and repeatedly "yes". In fact, they've done themselves no end of harm by reporting fairly and neutrally on themselves. If you'd asked flat out "does the BBC censor in favour of the government", I'd say, yes, sometimes, but generally not and quite often it can be over-critical of a government in order to prove it is not in a government's pocket. If you'd asked "does the BBC censor", then, again, the answer is yes, but generally on the grounds of taste and decency. I've heard arguments that the Mohammed cartoons should have been shown by the BBC; that the BBC should be the ones showing the type of "filth" (as Mary Whitehouse would put it) that Channel 4 show. No-one ever makes a good argument why, other than from an obscene capitalist POV that commercial companies would face a loss in profits if they showed such material (and I say, so what? Let them. In fact, make them).
But if you'd asked "does the BBC routinely censor itself and others everyday in order to provide only one voice on the air", then the answer is firmly no. It does not. Ever. But Rundfunk der DDR did. Every day.
You also removed the word "totalitarian" from the DDR article, calling it again a stupid POV. Rather than removing it, can you come up with a different word to describe a government that held files on over a quarter of its own citizens, that paid schoolteachers to inform on schoolchildren, that was directly responsible for the deaths of several thousand citizens for just protesting, that built a wall around a city in order to prevent its own citizens leaving for what they saw as a better life rather than improving the life in their own nation? There must be a single word that describes this state of affairs. To me, totalitarianism is that word. Yes, you can accuse the UK and the US of it at various times in their histories (with some justification, now, for instance). But you can't accuse either government of following that type of policy comprehensively and continually for 40 years.
Conversely, you can easily accuse the DDR of that and not be wrong; there's a big difference between a state policy of repression and a state that is repressing people. Failure to acknowledge the difference actually makes it easier for states to slide from one to the other; and failure to acknowledge the difference allows facism to slip into a democratic system with no-one noticing. It's always a terrible shame when someone is so desperate to apologise for the excesses of communism that they apologise for the policies of fascism at the same time. ➨ ❝REDVERS❞ 22:41, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
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