Press Release
For Immediate Release
The Cold War

State Radio Glosses Over Communist Atrocities

Libertarianz Party leader Richard McGrath acknowledged the two decades that have passed since the Berlin Wall was torn down, and said those who died trying to escape the East European slave pens during the Cold War should be remembered.

“Communism relied on watchtowers, snarling dogs, machine guns, and brick edifices topped with barbed wire,” he said “The Berlin Wall was the embodiment of this determination to rule by force. Today, twenty years since the wall was torn down, we should remember those East Germans who perished attempting to reach freedom in the West.”

“The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.”

“The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989.”

“Perhaps those who frequent the Lenin Bar in Auckland or Fidel’s Café in Wellington, or wear a red star cap or a Che Guevara T-shirt, should consider how long the authorities behind the Iron Curtain would have tolerated displays of dissent during the era of the Cold War.”

“I find it obscene that National Radio broadcasters Geoff Robinson and Lloyd Scott this morning recalled the Berlin Wall, its twenty-eight years of bloodshed and the 1200 slaughtered East Germans, with wistful nostalgia. They even appeared to excuse the East German secret police, the Stasi, as people just doing their jobs.”

“My party takes a different view of the Communist period in Eastern Europe. We remember with great sadness the countless millions who died for an unworkable cause that reduced humans to the level of sacrificial animals.”

“The callous attitudes of National Radio employees Messrs Robinson and Scott to the deaths of East Germans provide just one more reason to cease taxpayer funding for National Radio forthwith.”

ENDS

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