Mimetic Desire, PsyOps, and Rock-N-Roll in the GDR
How Rene Girard might have helped the West take down communism
With Germany’s reunification, we were lucky to leave behind the stale, comatose mindset of government control in the East German Democratic Republic, GDR. People were governed by apparatchiks who contributed little but omnipresent, mediocre rulership and technocrats who lined their own meager pockets.
Despite or because of this government control, there was art, storytelling, and imagination, like light looming through concrete cracks.
Under the loving supervision of space titans
Sunlight broke through the classroom window, slanted silver stripes of sparkling dust. The scent of spring awakened my senses. The sun’s warmth lightly brushed my elbow as I dutifully wrote in my school diary.
The back of our classroom featured photos of the first astronauts — we called them cosmonauts in those years: Gagarin and Tereshkova. Our energetic teacher must have decided to use cosmonauts instead of the portraits of Lenin, Marx, and Honecker.
