Born in 1960 and growing up in the 1970s, I was obsessed with World War 2 and with its political legacy. How could one of the most civilised societies in the world, Weimar Germany, descend to the barbarism and industrialised mass murder of Treblinka? And what was life like for those Germans caught on the wrong side of the fence and forced to live in East Germany or, to give it its official title, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Today I fear that Ireland, and other western democracies, are in danger of copying the errors of the GDR and of being a form of GDR-light.
In the mid-1970s, an edition of Time magazine gave me the killer argument that I, a pragmatic and empirical liberal conservative, had been looking for to prove that democracy and free markets were not just morally superior to communism: they were also materially superior.
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