October 19, 2010 10:25 AM

Joe Miller: Communist East Germany a Model for Border Security

By
Stephanie Condon
Topics
Republicans ,
Campaign 2010
Joe Miller (Credit: AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

The United States should borrow ideas from Communist East Germany to keep its borders secure, Alaska's Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller suggested at a town hall Sunday night.

"The first thing that has to be done is secure the border," Miller said when asked about illegal immigration into the United States, Alaskan blogger Steve Aufrecht first reported.

Miller continued, "East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could."

The Tea Party-backed candidate, who is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, explained that he once served at the Fulda Gap, a point on the former East-West German border. East Germany's border troops were given orders to shoot anyone trying to flee East Germany.

Following the same town hall meeting, a reporter for the Alaska Dispatch was handcuffed and detained by private security guards working for Miller while trying to ask Miller a question.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Campaign 2010
Stephanie Condon is a political reporter for CBSNews.com. You can read more of her posts here. Follow Hotsheet on Facebook and Twitter.

Add a Comment See all 39 Comments
by kohseimfri October 23, 2010 2:37 PM EDT
I am West German and went to East Germany after the fall of the iron curtain, I made friends with victims of the communist stasi state. I learnt that the same regime even did not shy away from imprisoning non-communist members of the resistance against the fascist Nazi state of Hitler. And put them into the reopened same camps that had only recently been run by Nazis.
I saw fotos of men and women killed at the inner German wall , heard about families disrupted, children hijacked by the regime and taken away from their parents, who were in prison. Reading about Joe Miller is like a slap in the face for me, my friends and colleagues in what was once the former communist Stasi state of the GDR. It is a disgrace to the USA and to what once was a respected Republican Party. It is a disgrace also against the Great Generation of those who fought for the values of freedom against a totalitarian system during WWII. Joe Miller is toeing the line together with the dictators and oppressors of freedom. He is slapping into faces of the victims of the communist system, and is by no way in any historical line with the real members of the Boston Tea Party. If people like Joe Miller are becoming electable, it would only make clear that significant parts of the voters are no longer in sync with the great democratic tradition and attitude of their grandfathers and great grandfathers. And that the Republican Party has stopped to act in their tradition. America you can do better, you must, even if you are in opposition. You owe that to those who ve lost their lives, be it during WWII or at the wall, Mr Miller has apparently never experienced like those who had to live behind it.
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by hb091666 October 28, 2010 12:40 AM EDT
Thank you!
by Mike A. October 22, 2010 4:11 AM EDT
You're obviously not from Alaska, know nothing about Sarah "Quitter" Palin, and in this case Joe Miller. Please feel free to study up...
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by Darr247 October 22, 2010 8:42 AM EDT
On first mention, use the full name: "Sarah 'death panels' Palin"; subsequent uses in the same story can be shortened to "Quitter Palin," or "Drill Baby Drill Palin" if the story mentions an oil spill (see the NPR/PBS style book).
by Mike A. October 21, 2010 4:56 PM EDT
Oh, Alaska's having a field day with it, too. One of the many acts of cranial flatulence that the Miller campaign has had. Check out www.adn.com and www.ktuu.com. Then again, he's Quitter Palin's boy toy, even back when Sarah was our Gov, and bunch of out of state Tea Baggers trying to buy Alaska a Senator they can control.
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by Mike A. October 20, 2010 9:51 PM EDT
Being part German, part Canadian, and a resident of Alaska I can rightfully saw that Joe Miller is a complete fool. We can now add this to the fiasco of the gestapo tactics of his unlicensed Down Under Security agency (which has ties to a paramilitary group), and all of his other muscues. Quitter Palin's boy toy has embarrassed the state enough during this campaign. Wishing maybe he would just quietly pack up and go back to Kansas.
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by irreverent1-2009 October 20, 2010 9:35 AM EDT
Being a West Point grad doesn't mean your automatically anointed to be a great leader. He may have been to the Fulda gap but I have both sides of the wall between East and West Berlin when it still stood. I can guarantee the you wouldn't have wanted to live on the east side of it.
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by nitella40 October 20, 2010 3:45 AM EDT
Wow, this idea is so complimentary to Paladino's prison camps for the homeless. Maybe we have to get those guard towers up to keep people from escaping after all.
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by Coffe-or-tea October 20, 2010 1:52 AM EDT
Poor choice of words? Perhaps, but ...
1) East Germany border patrols shot their own people to prevent them from fleeing the country - East-Germany that is. West-Germans helped people wanting to get out of East Germany as much as they could.
2) The border was called the anti-imperialistic protection wall. Some people referred to East Germany as the world-largest zoo. You had to pay an entrance fee and everything was fenced in.
3) Landmines and self-shooting devices were present and working. Mr. Miller claims he was stationed in Fulda - he should know and was shown for sure on a trip to the near-by border between East and West Germany. The border which was in that region a couple of fences with landmines in between and self shooting devices visibly installed.

Mr. Miller - my grandparents risked their lives to get out of East Germany. They did not run because of a possible wealthier life in West Germany. My grandfather was an English teacher who was not allowed to work in Nazi-Germany, because he gave up his aristocratic title (he didn't want to get mixed up with the Nazi elite which had many aristrcrats in their line) and studied in England - the country of the enemy. He served his military time at the "Russian Front" as a grunt as a punishment for not playing along with the Nazis. He survived the war wounded, but he survived to find himself in a Siberian prisoner of war camp for a couple of years, just to find an totalitarian system in his home country East Germany, where he was not allowed to work. Because he was not communist enough, because he studied English in England.
Mr. Miller my grandparents couldn't tell their own children about their plan, they were not sure if they will ever see each other when they separated in the hope that at least one part of the family makes it out of East Germany.
Mr. Miller despite all that and tough border controls they made it out without the help of anybody else. They would have not starved to death.
But I am thankful that they made that step and risked their lives, just as much as I am thankful for the allied forces to free Germany and the rest of Europe from the Nazis.
Now you think, you could hold millions of people willing to risk to die in the Arizona desert in July just to have a better life for themselves and their children back with a fence? Don't you think people south of the border have time and energy to get around (over/under) the fence?

And did your ancestors not immigrate to the US as well at one point?

Are you really scared of people crossing the southern border into the US? I mean, Alaska will most likely not be the prime location for settlement.

Mr. Miller, I went to your website and all I could see was finger pointing at your political rivals and your request for donations.
What about getting elected based on facts and ideas for the future? Improvement?
Mr. Miller, you are a very narrow-minded person with poor choice of words.
For your information, I grew up in Fulda actually very close to the military facilities and chances are our pathes crossed many years ago. I went to the boyscouts (actually in Germany it is Boys and Girls Scouts together) and at camp we heard a landmine going off in the middle of the night. We - as teenagers - grabbed our flashlights in the hope we could find and rescue a person in need, a person who tried to flee East Germany. Even as teenagers we were well aware of the deadly fence, you present so nicely as one of East Germany's greatest ideas.
Mr. Miller, if I found a person close to death in the Arizona desert who just entered the US, I would not let him die, but try to help that person just as much. That's what humans do.
Mr. Miller I feel sorry for you, because shouldn't run for any political office with such a bad choice of words and lack of information, especially when you were stationed in the "Fulda Gap".
To make it clear, I agree that there should be some regulation in regards to immigration laws of the US. But fences won't do the trick.
Fences only last for some years. Mr. Miller your East Germany fence was built on August 1961 and came down peacefully on November 3, 1989, it lasted only 28 years. What will you do in 30 years from now?
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by AJF81 October 21, 2010 10:05 AM EDT
This is an absolutely amazing reality check kind of comment and should be forwarded to Mr Miller's office, as well as the newspaper editorial pages in Alaska. Stories like these remind us all what real people go through when conservative regimes and heartless fearmongers are in power. Thank you for sharing this.
by jfb100 October 19, 2010 8:46 PM EDT
It appears that there is one primary reason for Joe Miller's bid for Congress: to solve his personal debt. The Christian Science Monitor reports about Joe Miller: "Financial disclosure forms submitted six months late present a portrait of someone mired in debt ? a jarring note in a campaign that has railed against the federal debt." This is the Tea Party's idea of politics ... elect a guy mired in personal debt, and who uses hired thugs to keep reporters from asking questions about that debt. Another "winner" brought to you by the Tea Party.
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by nazario gonzales October 19, 2010 8:08 PM EDT
Joe Miller's comments will cause many to gasp, fret, and accuse Tea Party candidates of extreme ideas and proposals. Of course, there is a great difference between East Germany which tried to keep its citizens from leaving the worker's paradise and illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central America and other countries trying to enter the US. Allowing the free influx of illegals taxes our system and is very expensive to support.

That said, I don't believe walls work effectively without being willing to shoot people either leaving or entering a country. Circumstances must be really severe to support such a policy. I don't believe shooting illegals entering the US is or would be justified unless they pose a direct and substantial threat to those enforcing the law. To date, not even cartel members have declared war on US law enforcement agents monitoring the border.

"Securing the border" has become a mantra that won't work in today's reality. No matter how much we spend, how high or deep we build the wall, people intent on entering the US will enter. We need a strong comprehensive immigration policy to identify those already here, a means, not amnesty, to enable these people to participate in everyday life, contribute support for the government, and eventually earn their way toward citizenship. My experience with California's drug court law and procedure offers such a way.

In California, we have a drug offense deferral statute. A first time drug offender is charged, pleads guilty, and then judgment is deferred for a period of 18 months. The drug offender completes drug classes, enters rehab if needed, and when the offender successfully completes the program the conviction is set aside, charges are dismissed and the offender stands as never having been convicted. If the offender fails, then the offender is sentenced accordingly. A similar policy toward illegal immigrants is workable and it is not amnesty. Let them plead guilty to being in the US illegally, defer judgment for 5 years, and if they are gainfully employed, don't commit crimes, pay taxes, and take classes that promote assimilation, then they should be issued "green" cards and allowed to remain in the US.

I have other thoughts on the subject, but this is not the forum to discuss them. We need to frankly discuss the issue of illegal immigration and Joe Miller's comments are a start of the hard job ahead which most politicians fear.
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by Amusedbyitall October 19, 2010 8:08 PM EDT
Here's what East Germany taught us, Joe Miller. You can build fences. You can put a one hundred foot kill zone between two fences. If life is better on the other side of the fence, people will risk death by cave-in of tunnels. falling from the fence and bullets to get to the other side. Joe Miller and the Tea Party, Wasting Your Dollars On Failed Ideas.
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