How is a "Gen Lee High School" any different from a "Heinrik Himmler High School"?

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52. Here's my take on that.

My knowledge of post-war Germany and de-Nazification is based upon reading and long conversations with my Father-in-Law who was an agent handler with an alphabet agency who operated under NOC in Germany. With few exceptions, De-Nazification under McCloy and Clay skimmed only the top off the most prominent figures in West Germany. Even Adeneur was more concerned with the threat of Spartakists than the Nazis when he was purged from office in 1933. He was someone whom the Dulles Brothers could work easily with. As for the East and the Stasi, as I read the autobiography of Markus Wolf, the fanatical paranoia of the SED and DKP was not without its origins in a sense that the Soviet sphere offered the only reliable bullwark against Fascism. I think Fassbinder and the new wave of German Cinema later captured the ambivalence and underlying violence of Post-War politics in "Germany in Autumn."

As a Left of Center American growing up during that era in the New York area, I had plenty of contact with Red Diaper babies without being one myself. As someone involved with anti-war and related political organizations, I also has uncomfortable run-ins with the FBI and its infiltration agents. When the CIA tried to recruit me in college, I had to tell the recruiter no thank you, as the methods aren't sufficiently different from the other side. I was perhaps the only person I know who was approached by the FBI and the CIA for recruitment in the same year, and turned them both down. Howard Zinn, with whom I studied, thought that was a remarkable personal statistic.

As for political opportunists in both Parties, I've met too many, and have to again say, they aren't different enough.