Robert J. Hutchinson defends his M.Phil dissertation, What is Faith, on October 21, 2025, at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Why do some people live with a deep confidence in life and in their ultimate destinies? Why do others struggle with doubt and anxiety about the future?

The Philosophy of Religion may provide an answer: I propose that faith comes in two forms, what I like to call Metaphysical and Religious.

What Faith Really Means

Most people think faith means accepting religious doctrines without evidence.

But this misses something crucial about how faith actually works.

Faith, at its core, simply means trust.

When you sit in a chair, you have faith, that is, you trust, that it won’t collapse.

When you drive on the freeway, you have faith that other drivers will follow the rules of the road.

When you marry someone, you have faith in them despite incomplete knowledge of their character.

All these involve the same basic elements:

• Making a decision based on partial information
• Taking calculated risks
• Trusting despite uncertainty
• Building habits of reliance over time

Faith works in the same way.

It’s about trusting in God and what God has revealed, not blind belief in propositions.

Two Different Sources of Trust

Here’s where it gets interesting. People develop trust in God from two very different sources of evidence – what philosophers call impartialist and partialist.

Metaphysical Faith (MF) comes primarily from “impartialist” evidence and experiences most people can access.

The wonder you feel looking at a starry night sky.

Your sense that moral “facts” exist: for example, that torturing babies is always wrong regardless of what people think about it.

The intuition that effects must have causes.

The feeling that life has meaning and purpose.

These experiences cross religious boundaries. Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even many non-religious people all share them.

They point toward something greater than ourselves.

Religious Faith (RF) is trust in God based on the partialist evidence and experiences of particular religious communities and their teachings.

The testimony of prophets like Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. Sacred texts like the Bible, Torah, or Quran. The authority of religious institutions and their interpretations. Private mystical experiences within specific traditions.

These sources are limited to particular groups. They’re not accessible to everyone in the same way.

Why This Distinction Matters

Understanding these two types of faith, Metaphysical and Religious, helps explain several puzzles about how people view God and their own lives.

First, why do people from different religions often seem to share similar outlooks?

They may disagree about specific doctrines. But they often share a deep trust in life’s ultimate goodness and in the divine source of that goodness.

This reflects, I believe, their shared Metaphysical Faith.

Second, why do some people lose their faith, their trust in God, when they question religious teachings?

The answer is that they are confusing their Metaphysical Faith with their Religious Faith.

When particular religious beliefs are challenged, some people mistakenly think that means all trust in God must go.

But questioning specific religious claims doesn’t require abandoning all hope. Quite the opposite.

Third, why do some supposedly “non-religious people” still live their lives with confidence, joy and an overwhelming sense of purpose?

They may reject organized religion while maintaining a Metaphysical Faith.

They do trust in God, however they conceive God to be, while questioning the teachings of a given religion.

The Complexity of Real Belief

Most believers actually combine both types of faith.

For example, a Christian might trust in God because of:

… wonder at the universe’s complexity (Metaphysical Faith)

… belief in Jesus’s resurrection (Religious Faith)

… moral intuitions about love and justice (Metaphysical Faith), and

… the authority of their church’s teaching (Religious Faith)

These different sources of faith complement and reinforce one another.

Yet they’re logically separate. You can have one without the other.

What This Means for Our Divided World

This framework helps explain religious disagreement without dismissing anyone’s experience.

People can reasonably disagree about the specifics of Religious Faith.

The historical evidence for a particular religious claim is often contested.

Religious institutions sometimes conflict with one another.

Sacred texts often require interpretation that reasonable people dispute.

But Metaphysical Faith operates differently.

It’s based on widely shared human experiences.

It doesn’t require accepting anyone’s authority.

And it’s compatible with scientific investigation and rational inquiry (as are many forms of Religious Faith).

A More Honest Conversation

Perhaps our public discussions about religion would improve if we recognized this distinction.

Instead of asking, “Do you believe in God?” we might first ask:

“Do you trust that existence has ultimate meaning?”

“Do you feel wonder that points beyond the material world?”

“Do you sense moral truths that transcend human opinion?”

These questions get at what underlies Metaphysical Faith.

They’re less divisive than arguments about specific religions – whether God spoke to Mohammed or Joseph Smith received golden tablets.

They acknowledge the spiritual dimension of human experience.

And they don’t require accepting contested historical claims.

The Risk of Trust

Both types of faith, Metaphysical and Religious, involve genuine risk.

Metaphysical Faith could be mistaken.

The awe someone feels in the face of the cosmos could mean nothing special.

Religious Faith could be based on false claims about the founders of a religion.

But risk is unavoidable in human life.

We make countless decisions based on incomplete information.

We trust people who might betray us.

We commit to values that might prove hollow.

The question isn’t whether to take risks. The question is which risks are worth taking.

Living with Uncertainty

Perhaps the most honest position is to acknowledge that both types of faith involve uncertainty.

We don’t have complete mathematical proofs for God’s existence based on premises everyone accepts.

Yet in the face of uncertainty, it is still rational to base one’s life choices on the best evidence at someone’s disposal.

Faith, trust in God, is itself part of that evidence.

It allows people to live with confidence, hope, and a sense of purpose. It grounds their commitment to love, justice, and truth.

Whether that trust is justified remains an open question.

But it’s a risk many thoughtful people choose to take.

And understanding the two forms of faith helps explain why.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com

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Sometimes I’m even able to overhear entire conversations.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but it’s true.

I’ve been able to see New York City in 1911 as people and cars dart about… and Paris in the 1890s when horse-drawn carriages were everywhere.

I’ve watched in horror as thousands of French soldiers marched back home after the worst battles of World War I.

Once I was even able to see what San Francisco looked like right after the earthquake of 1906.

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In the process, they are urging the sort of insane escalations – no fly zones, providing fighter jets to Ukraine — that, in August 1914, turned a minor act of terrorism in the Balkans into a global conflagration that killed 20 million people.

And that was before the invention of nuclear weapons.

Now, just months after America’s newly woke military fled Afghanistan in disgrace, the country’s elderly foreign policy elites are just itching for another foreign war. 

“History may look back on this as a failure of nerve equal to the appeasement of the 1930s,” The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead writes, referring to the lack of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine fight.

Not to be outdone, Matthew Koenig, writing in Foreign Policy just as the Ukraine War erupted, insists that America must prepare for war with both Russia and China – including nuclear war.  “If necessary, Washington could always take a page from its Cold War playbook and rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to offset the local, conventional advantages of its rivals,” he explains.

Dr Strangelove and the Russians

Listening to the war-hungry neocon pundits on CNN and in Washington, DC, you can just hear the voice of General “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott) from the 1964 nuclear satire, Dr Strangelove, urging the US president to go to war with Russia.

  “Mr President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” the fictional general tells the president. “But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”

To his credit, so far Joe Biden has ignored calls for direct American or NATO involvement in the Ukraine war. 

But over the weekend, there were worrisome signs that the elderly Biden is weakening — and giving in to the hawks pushing for war, ratcheting up the rhetoric against Putin and even calling overtly for his overthrow.

On March 25 during a visit to Warsaw, Poland, Biden called Putin a “war criminal” and a “butcher,” even declaring that “this man cannot remain in power.”

Because this is a direct violation of America’s longstanding policy not to call for regime change or the assassination of foreign leaders, the White House quickly backtracked on Biden’s statement.  

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” an anonymous White House official clarified for news outlets.  “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

Biden Appears to Imply U.S. Soldiers Will Be in Ukraine Soon

Earlier, when addressing the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at a base in Poland, Biden made another gaffe that had senior aides scrambling to “clarify.”  Biden told the U.S. fighters they would see the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers first-hand “when you’re there” – a remark that seemed to indicate plans for direct U.S. involvement. 

On March 24 in Belgium, Biden had said that the U.S. would respond “in kind” if Russia used chemical weapons – a remark that forced U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan to say that “the United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstance.”

No doubt, the Ukraine war is a humanitarian crisis of the first order.  An estimated 3.8 million innocent Ukrainians are now homeless, their cities burning ruins.

And it goes without saying that the Ukrainian people don’t deserve any of this.  They don’t deserve what Russia is doing, or what their owhttps://www.disputedquestions.com/p/coming-soonn government has done, or what America’s corrupt ruling class has done and is about to do. 

However, a little perspective is in order. 

According the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as of late March Putin’s invasion has caused 977 civilian deaths and 1,594 serious injuries– a horrible tragedy for which Putin should be held accountable.  Other human rights organizations and the UNHCR suspect the real death toll will be far, far higher.

Yet the U.S. invasion of Iraq – an invasion that America’s national security elite claimed was necessary due to weapons of mass destruction that, it turned out, didn’t exist – killed between 184,382 and 207,156 innocent civilians. 

That’s between 188 and 205 times more deaths than Putin has so far caused.  In other words, by any measure Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been far less lethal than America’s invasion of Iraq. 

And Iraq is just one of the senseless foreign wars that America’s ruling class has unleashed upon the world.   

During the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an effort to stop atrocities being committed during the Yugoslav War, it’s estimated that between 489 and as many as 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed.

In 2015-2016 alone, Barack Obama’s administration dropped 26,171 bombs in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – including bombing the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz that killed 42 civilians and wounded 37.

If I were Joe Biden, I would be careful about whom I was calling a “butcher” and a “war criminal.”

Putin may well be a cold-blooded killer, but so are some of the members of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion — and so are the Saudi and Venezuelan dictators to whom Biden is now begging for oil. 

As for China’s ruling communist establishment, with whom the Biden’s relatives have arranged deals worth an estimated $31 million since 2009, they are responsible for up to 82 million deaths since 1949.

The goal of statesmanship should be to de-escalate this conflict, secure a cease-fire, and avoid drawing NATO into a war that could easily blow up into a full-blown nuclear conflict. 

That isn’t what Ukraine’s heroic president Volodymyr Zelensky and his millions of supporters worldwide want.  He and they want NATO in the fight no matter the cost, and for obvious reasons. 

Yet it would be a tragedy of the highest order if Joe Biden’s legacy, in addition to record-high inflation and global food shortages, turns out to be World War III.  Up until now, he has tried to avoid it.  Let’s hope he continues to do so.  

To see future articles via email, subscribe to my Substack here.

This article originally appeared in Mercatornet.com.

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I can see the colorful Astronomical Clock about thirty feet away, built by Master Mikuláš Kadan in the early 1400s, with the Church of Our Lady of Týn looming above Old Town Square. 

Across the narrow cobblestone street stands the ornate house, dubbed the Minute House, where the influential writer Franz Kafka spent his early childhood. 

As always, there is a constant flow of people bustling about, wrapped in parkas and earmuffs, moving into and out of the beautiful square.  Many people stop every hour to watch the Twelve Apostles appear at the top of the Astronomical Clock. 

It’s busy but not too crowded, yet more proof that the best time to travel is in the winter, when prices are low, tourists scarce and you can appreciate what a place has to offer. 

Escaping the Covid madness

I’ve come to Prague to escape the Covid madness still gripping much of the United States and the West – and the increasingly aggressive propaganda of the corporate media. 

My grandchildren needed someone to take them back to London after their annual Christmas visit, and I instantly volunteered.

With my American Express travel points, I could get a ticket almost for free – and prices for a week-long visit in Prague were too good to pass up.  My hotel right on the Old Town Square, with its large ornate bedrooms and funky statues of angels with swords, cost me just $83 per night, breakfast included. I couldn’t afford to stay home.

I did have to take not one but five separate Covid tests and demonstrate a near-professional knowledge of computers to clear the bureaucratic hurdles, but I sailed through Czech Immigration with hardly a glance.

After breakfast, I work in the mornings on my laptop and then spend the afternoons exploring the city – Prague Castle and the magnificent St. Vitus Cathedral on the hill, the medieval Charles Street bridge, the Museum of Communism, the shape-shifting steel statue of Kafka’s head by the artist David ?erný, the National Museum near Wenceslas Square, the Jewish Quarter. 

I pay the obligatory visit to an Absentherie, tasting the once-forbidden Green Fairy, and take a cruise out on the Moldau River. 

What cities are supposed to be like

What strikes me the most is the upbeat, freer atmosphere in Prague.    

As much as the US prides itself on its love of liberty, the truth is that there is more freedom now in Eastern Europe than in many countries in the West or in places like Australia. 

Some tourists wear face masks but most of the Czechs do not.  Life has returned to normal here in Central Europe, and the smiling faces and friendly greetings of dobrý den on the street stand in marked contrast to what you see in locked-down Los Angeles, New York or Chicago.

After nearly a week, I have been asked only once for my digital Covid Passport, and, when the scanner couldn’t read the QR Code from the U.S., the waitress just shrugged her shoulders and let me in anyway.

The thing about the Czech Republic is that its people had more than 40 years’ experience dealing with Communist governments and their insane bureaucratic demands, from 1948 up until the Velvet Revolution threw the dictators out of power in 1989.  Once you’ve dealt with Soviet tanks rolling down your streets, as happened in Prague in 1968, Covid insanity is small beer.

The other aspect to Prague that both delights and unsettles me is how safe and clean the city is. The streets are spotless, the centuries-old architecture magnificent and the buildings freshly painted. 

There are no homeless visible on the streets at all, although you do occasionally see a beggar kneeling with his forehead touching the ground, hat or cup obsequiously raised upward for a donation.  Young women walk the dark alleyways and cobblestone streets late at night, seemingly unafraid.  

In contrast, on the car trip to Los Angeles for my flight here, there were entire tent cities tucked underneath the freeway overpasses, mounds of garbage piled ten feet high.  Violent crime in American cities is skyrocketing, thanks to the “defund the police” movement and the election of “decriminalize everything” leftist prosecutors. 

In other words:  Prague shows you that cities don’t have to be cesspools of crime, violence and uncollected garbage.  Instead, they can be havens of culture, beauty and neighborliness.  The ethnic hatreds and identity politics that are tearing America and countries like the UK apart are absent here.

In the end, this trip is restoring my faith in humanity – and in the possibility, at least, that big cities can be livable again. 

If the relatively poor Czech Republic can afford cities of unparalleled beauty and serenity, surely the vastly more affluent United States can do the same. 

The lesson I take from Prague, therefore, is that there is hope for the future. 

If the Czech people were able to remove authoritarian, surveillance-obsessed bureaucrats from power in a peaceful, nonviolent revolution, so, too, can liberty-loving Americans. Hopefully, it won’t take us 40 years.

To see future articles via email, subscribe to my Substack here.

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I am here in one of the premier fresh water locales in the world, near the Oregon border, to do a little fly fishing – and to escape the madness of the Covid Panic and urban riots that currently afflict a good portion of the U.S.

This is an activity that would drive any right-thinking progressive, purple hair in knots, to begin sputtering in rage. 

There is no way you can escape the Covid, he/she or they would screech at me, speed-dialing the local contact-tracing health agency. 

The only thing to do is to seal shut every business, office, church and medical clinic until at least 2025 – or until Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC certify that the world is 100% safe and that nothing bad can ever happen again anywhere.  

If I cared about my fellow sentient beings of all or no genders, I would lock myself in my house and never leave.

To be fair, out on the “lower Sac” – the rushing Sacramento River downstream from Shasta Dam — you can see why the Democrats, in their current obsession with identity politics, might decry fly fishing.

After all, isn’t it a fact that Tucker Carlson – Fox News’s hugely popular anchor and notorious advocate for a colorblind society, who famously declared white supremacy a “hoax” – is an avid fly fisherman who even ties his own flies? 

And that Donald Trump, Jr., spends a good portion of his free time out on rivers in Montana and Alaska?

What’s more, rainbow trout clearly discriminate against People of Color. 

Although Americans of all shades and creeds enjoy casting their lures upon the rushing waters of the country’s still magnificent rivers, it does appear that fly fishing, like downhill skiing and billiards, is not as diverse as it could be.  It attracts a large proportion of middle-aged white males clearly out of tune with the current Marxist Zeitgeist.

According to the Outdoor Industry Association, 38 million Americans engage in some form of freshwater fishing annually – yet only 2.3%, or about 6.8 million people, take on the more challenging task of tricking trout into swallowing fake flies.  An estimated 78.3% of all fisherfolk are white, 8.6% Hispanic, 7.6% black and only 3.6% Asian.

You can see them along the river in this famously “progressive” state – standing up in their metal flat-bottom boats, casting and recasting their lines, hoping to catch one more trout before the thunderstorms, that will soon trigger massive wildfires all across the state, force them to call it a day.

I am always amazed by how much time, trouble and money fly fisherpersons expend just for the thrill of holding a slippery trout for 10 seconds. 

Out on the Lower Sac, “catch and release” is the norm.  While my friend who fishes California’s coastlines brags about the massive Bluefin tuna he inevitably brings in from his expensive private charters, fly fishermen often bring back nothing but smiles on their faces. 

They get up early, hike to their favorite river or launch their boats, spend the entire day flicking their lines back and forth to entice their underwater victims — to the point that they get repetitive stress injuries in their wrists — and then, after 8 or 10 hours, return empty-handed.     

It is not all for naught, however.

A day out on a rushing river, away from the kaleidoscopic lies of the fake news media, is wonderfully restorative. 

It’s like a cognitive laxative that drains out of your mind and body all of the collected toxins of our increasingly deranged society. 

Standing in the pouring rain, your eyes focused on the bobbing “indicator” that lets you know if a trout is sniffing at your flies, you can see again what is real — and what is merely pretend.  

That, alone, is reason enough to fish the Covid away!

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I travel to Germany on business quite a lot, and after five years of visits wanted a thorough understanding of German grammar and basic vocabulary. It was an astonishingly good course, difficult and thorough.

My teacher prepared weekly videos that went over the topics of that week. I had about 15 to 20 separate assignments to finish every week, including video dialogues, quizzes and tests. I also interacted with my fellow students through Skype and telephone calls. I was quizzed regularly by my professor to see how well my conversation practice with fellow students was progressing.

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It was mid-April 1865. The Civil War was almost over, after more than 600,000 deaths.

Just five days earlier, on April 9, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant following the last major battle of the war, at Appomattox Court House, in Virginia.  

Defeated southerners, their hearts broken, were returning to their families at last. 

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Around 10:20 p.m. on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Booth snuck up behind Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.  

The actor fired a.44 caliber derringer into the back of Lincoln’s head, then jumped onto the stage and fled out the back door.

Although countless books and films have depicted the deed over the decades, many details are still unknown.

For example, who was behind Lincoln’s assassination – and what purpose did it serve?

What happened to Lincoln’s bodyguard? 

Did Booth break his leg when he jumped onto the stage as he claimed in his diary – or did he break it later? 

What did Booth say on stage?  And how was the pampered actor able to elude the largest manhunt in U.S. history for eleven days despite being unable to walk?

Fanatical Hatred for the President

Like celebrities today, Booth had contempt for the Republican president. 

Yet in real life, Booth was a lover, not a fighter.  How could such an untrained amateur pull off one of history’s greatest acts of terrorism?

After a Union soldier called him a coward for not being in uniform, Booth spent the previous year organizing a plot to kidnap Lincoln.  His plan had been to waylay Lincoln on one of his rides around Washington, then

transport him south as a hostage for the exchange of prisoners.

But was this Booth’s idea – or did he have help Confederate leaders? 

Assassination expert Edward Steers, Jr., points out that Booth promised his accomplices huge financial rewards from the South.

Yet Booth’s kidnapping attempts were so inept other historians doubt the Confederate government was involved. 

Disputed Details of the Assassination

No one really knows what happened with Lincoln’s bodyguard, during the assassination.  He was last seen with audience members drinking at the next-door Star Saloon. 

Lincoln’s personal assistant, Charles Forbes, who was sitting outside the presidential box, initially stopped Booth from entering.  But the actor simply handed Forbes a calling card and said he needed to speak with the president – and was allowed in.

In his diary, Booth claimed he yelled Sic Semper Tyrannis – Thus Always to Tyrants — before he fired.  The actor was responding to newspaper denunciations of him as a coward who shot an Lincoln from behind.

Yet two eyewitnesses reported that Booth yelled Sic Semper from the stage, not the box. 

Booth also wrote that he broke his leg during the jump to the stage and that, as he rode away, he could feel “the bones of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump.”

However, no contemporary witness reported seeing Booth limp at all.  Booth’s biographer Michael Kaufmann believes the actor broke his leg later, during a fall from his horse.

Finally, the nation only learned twenty years after the assassination how Booth was able to evade capture for so long.

As recounted by Confederate smuggler Thomas Jones, Booth and an accomplice appeared hiding near Jones’s Maryland farm on the night of April 15. 

Although he could have expected a $50,000 reward if he turned Booth in and possible execution if he did not, Jones agreed to help the fugitives escape.  Jones advised Booth simply to stay hidden in plain sight – in a dense pine thicket near the Potomac River. 

Jones would bring food if the men agreed to lie quietly on the ground, without a fire, until search parties gave up and moved on.

That is precisely what Booth did, for five long, cold, wet days.  The strategy worked.  For the nation’s desperate leaders, it appeared Lincoln’s killer had simply vanished.

On April 23, eight days after the shooting, Booth crossed the Potomac River to Virginia. 

Over the next three days, a series of coincidences would lead detectives to the Virginia farmhouse where Booth spent his last day.  Trapped in a locked barn that was deliberately set on fire, Booth was shot in the neck by a soldier through an opening in the barn wall.

A showman to the end, Booth repeatedly whispered what he hoped would be his final words for the history books, “Tell mother, I die for my country.”

Despite decades of obsessive research, the full truth of assassination may never be known.  We know what happened – but not all the details of how and why.

Click here to order a copy of my brand-new book, What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination.

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On a recent business trip to Berlin, I stopped by the Berlin Wall Memorial on the corner of Bernauerstrasse and Ackerstrasse.[1]

It’s the longest stretch of the wall (1.4 kilometers) in its actual historical setting, a chilling reminder of what life was like in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR).

With an Orwellian flourish, the Wall’s creators called it an “anti-fascist protective rampart.”

Nearly 27 miles long, the Wall snaked its way through the heart of Berlin.  

Many of the city’s iconic landmarks – including the Brandenburg Gate, the museums of Museum Island, the broad avenue known as the Unter den Linden, Potsdamer Platz, and the Berlin Cathedral – were all locked inside, off limits to tourists and West Germans alike.

Crossing the No Man’s Land

The Wall was actually made up of two concrete barriers up to 15-feet high and often topped by razor-sharp concertina wire. 

Between the two barriers lay a vast “no man’s land,” carefully raked to detect footprints, with 302 guard towers, 256 dog runs, thousands of mines, anti-vehicle trenches, floodlights and trip-wire machine guns. 

More than 11,000 soldiers constantly patrolled the length of the Wall to keep citizens from escaping the socialist paradise.

Between 1961 (when the wall was first built) and 1989 (when it was torn down following the collapse of the Soviet Union), 139 East German citizens – from grandmothers to high school kids — were shot trying to cross this “death strip.”

Their names, pictures and stories are featured on a special monument located in the preserved “no man’s land” off Bernauerstrasse.

Debating Socialism

Thus, as westerners in general and Americans in particular debate the costs and benefits of socialism, it’s a good time to remember what socialism in practice actually looks like — and why, to the disappointment of his many fans, Bernie Sanders will never be president. 

Berlin is a good place to do that. 

After World War II, half of the city’s population was left free to pursue its own self-interest in the wild frenzy of postwar capitalism. 

The other half, occupied by the Soviet Union and relentlessly hectored about its collective duties to the common good, was provided with all the benefits that socialism promises. 

Like the “democratic socialists” today, Erich Honecker, general secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the de facto dictator of East Germany for nearly 20 years, insisted that socialism is simply a more moral path than the grubby striving of the capitalist west.

The Many Promises of Socialism

“The GDR will cross the threshold to the year 2000 with the certainty that the future belongs to socialism,” Honecker said in October 1989, less than one month before his authoritarian regime collapsed. “Mass unemployment, homelessness, lack of social protection – all of which accompany modern technology in [West Germany] – do not exist here now and won’t in the future.”

In the GDR, socialism meant free health care, free child care, free education, government-subsidized housing, guaranteed employment, the liberation of women from the home, and legal abortion.

In exchange, all the citizens of the GDR had to give up was their freedom of choice.

You can get a glimpse of what this meant by visiting the DDR Museum (DDR being the German abbreviation for the GDR) on the bank of the River Spree, behind the Berlin Cathedral.

Everyone Treated the Same

There you can see why some East Germans have a touch of nostalgia for the shared misery of their old way of life – what they call in Germany “Ostalgie.”

There was one car model to choose from – the box-shaped Trabant — not thirty. 

There was one health care plan for everyone.  

There were no fewer than 39 national newspapers, two television channels and four radio stations – but only one authorized point of view. 

Newspapers under socialism could print whatever they wanted – so long as they didn’t contradict the positions taken by Socialist Unity Party.

Everyone was treated the same, paid between 1,000 and 1,500 East German marks monthly whether you were an engineer or a janitor. (Black market conversion was between 5 and 17 East German marks for every West German mark.)   

Everyone had the same grim apartment, in identical concrete apartment blocks 30-storeys high, with the same identical living room TV cabinet.

With luck and after a 15-year waiting period, you might even be able to acquire your own car – the box-shaped Trabant.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

State planning – even with private companies – meant that often there was too much of one commodity and too little of another.

One of the most common expressions in the GDR was printed on signs that often appeared in store windows:  Heute keine Ware, no goods today.

But what you didn’t do under socialism was complain. 

The GDR’s omnipresent secret police, the Stasi, monitored citizens’ private conservations through a vast network of secret microphones, listening devices and hidden video cameras. 

The Stasi employed 90,000 fulltime workers and an estimated 170,000 informers. 

The penalties for holding unauthorized political opinions were severe, up to and including solitary confinement.

Of course, today’s democratic socialists, like Bernie Sanders, insist that what they have in mind has nothing to do with the socialist dictatorship that was the GDR.    

They have in mind something else, something more like, say, the social welfare safety net in united Germany or Denmark.

Perhaps so. 

But it’s good to remember that the East Germans gave their citizens everything today’s socialists promise – from free education to free abortions – yet they had to build a 27-mile-long wall, and shoot people in the back, to keep people from leaving.

Just something to consider as Bernie Sanders makes his final case in the few remaining debates. 

Socialism, today as in the past, makes many promises.  But the reality looks a lot like the Berlin Wall.

Robert J. Hutchinson writes on the intersection of politics and ideas.  He is the author of the upcoming book, What Really Happened:  The Lincoln Assassination.

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About once a minute, I hit the pause button on the TV remote, just long enough so I could catch the French word scrolling across the bottom of the screen in the subtitles.

I was watching Zone Blanche, a new French TV thriller on “Netflix.” 

My family watches a lot of foreign films and television – everything from Finnish crime dramas to Australian soap operas about obstetricians.  Usually, we use English subtitles for the Finnish and Australian TV shows so we know what they’re saying. 

The great thing about Netflix is that you can set the subtitles in many different languages.  Now I was using the French ones. 

One of my latest schemes to keep up my high school and college French has been to watch French television but with French subtitles, not English ones.

Despite a lifetime of studying French, I still only understand about half of what is being said in French movies and on TV shows.  The actors speak too quickly, use slang, and tend to mumble or abbreviate many words.

However, when I use the French subtitles, my comprehension goes up to maybe 80, sometimes 90 percent.  The only drawback is my having to pause now and then to re-read the subtitles.  Hence my frustrated progeny.

I have no idea why I have this obsessive curiosity about foreign languages, but I do.

My first French lesson was when I was in first grade.  Someone gave me an LP record with basic phrases in French (I still have the liner notes), and I was hooked.  My Catholic elementary school offered French classes in seventh grade (I still have that textbook as well), and I continued on in high school and then throughout college. 

Then, during and after college, I lived in Israel for almost two years, during which time I took two six-month-long courses in Hebrew. 

I got pretty good with Hebrew (since, unlike with French, I learned the language while living in the country) and enjoyed it tremendously.  

Over the years, I tried to keep that up as well, subscribing to so-called “Easy Hebrew” newspapers like the now-defunct Sha’ar Laymathil and watching Mabat newscasts on the Internet.   Recently, Netflix has begun to broadcast Israeli TV series as well – such as Fauda, Bnei Aruba and  Shtisel — and this helps. 

My latest language to mangle is German. 

About six years ago, relatively late in life, I began to visit Germany once a year on business and was entranced by the people and the language.  

Before that, I had only passed through Germany a few times as a tourist, and I didn’t realize just how much fun Germans and Germany can be.   Last year, I took a course in college German at my local community college and am about to enroll in the second year course.  Now I am watching German TV shows, like the popular sci-fi thriller Dark, with German subtitles (albeit with much less success).

So, I now speak a little bit of three foreign languages. 

I live in the United States so the opportunity to speak French, Hebrew or German is fairly limited.  I do travel more than most so I’ve visited Europe and Israel in recent years, but mostly I am confined to online Skype tutors and Netflix TV series.

And the question everyone asks me is:  why do it?

Why bother learning foreign languages you’ll never really need? 

Even German friends think I’m a bit daft and say they would never have stuck with German if they didn’t have to.  All those case endings and separable verbs are enough to drive anyone crazy.

And I don’t really have a good answer. 

I guess I enjoy the “wider world” and the variety of cultures and peoples found in it.  By studying foreign languages, you learn a lot more about a culture than you can just watching from the outside, as a tourist.

Plus, it beats playing those “cognitive enhancement” video games I see on Instagram.  I tell myself that conjugating German verbs will stave off dementia for a few years.

I also take comfort from the fact that there are others like me, people who enjoy learning foreign languages even if they’re not very good at them.  To my surprise, many of the students in my German class were older people who discovered Germany later in life and just wanted to learn more about the culture.

In addition there are entire Youtube channels dedicated to us linguaphiles.  One of my favorites is Langfocus, hosted by a linguist named Paul Jorgensen who teaches in Japan.   

Paul has fascinating videos about how and why Norwegian is different from Danish and Swedish, the difference between creole and pidgin, Greek vocabulary in English, tips on learning multiple languages at once, the ins and outs of Tagalog, and so on.  His videos are addictive.

In Paul’s videos and in my own meagre efforts to become multilingual, I’ve discovered both the complexity and wonderful simplicity of human communication.  There is a built-in structure to any language – German especially! – and by comparing and contrasting these structures you begin to see how different groups solve common communication problems.

But in the end, for me at least, learning languages is simply fun. 

I still get a thrill whenever I walk into a shop in a foreign country, do my best to order a donut or coffee in the local language, and then stand in amazement when the clerk behind the counter actually understands what I am requesting. 

My gosh, I tell myself, it actually works!  

And that, more than anything, is what keeps me going – keeps me watching French TV shows in slow motion, pausing every couple of seconds so I can read the French subtitles. 

Even if it does drive my children to distraction. 

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Robert J. Hutchinson writes frequently on the intersection of politics and ideas.  He is the author of the upcoming book, What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination.

The post How Netflix boosted my life-long love affair with foreign languages first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.