The Economist on the Berlin Wall

The Economist is, no competition, the best magazine there is. Of course, I have my criticisms and complain. The tendency of the Editor to use and over use the word "reckon" in every article is really annoying. In the section on the US in the new issue, I counted two articles with that word. You need to stop that. But there are topics in which the Economist and its editors and writers lose their marbles, completely. One such issue is communism. When the Economist talk about communism it is like reading that propaganda book by J.Edgar Hoover on communism: "Master of Deceit", he called it. They don't even try to be a bit more detached or professional when they speak about communism. Look at this: "The third big achievement, alongside democracy and prosperity, is the partial restoration of public-spiritedness, trust, decency and kindness." I would say that decency and kindness has been particularly abundant in the former Yugoslavia and also in the treatment of the Roma people by the disciples of Vaclav Havel. By the way, there is no European figure who bothers me more than Havel. He really does. He is poseur par excellence, more so than even Wiesel. Havel has nothing to say, so he mentions Hegel, without really citing him at all, in order to sound (in his head) profound. He would say something lame and then add Hegel as in: And as Hegel reminded us more than a century ago, we need to eat dinner now.