When the wall fell, in 1989, I was 17.

A very chaotic year later, my English class did a trip to England. My classmates behaved exactly the way they had been taught to for the last 17 years — they did what they were told to. They took part in everything that had been planned by the West German travel agency. I'd been abroad before, and among "world traveling" East Germans, it was understood that you did not leave your group ever — a mindset that you still can find in places like North Korea.

As a Bowie fan, I wanted to go see Brixton, and a few other places that had been relevant to David Bowie. So I asked the tour guide if I would be allowed to skip the sightseeing tour, and go explore London on my own?

Both the bus driver and the tour guide looked at me as if I had just asked them if I had their permission to breathe. It took them a while to process my request. It dawned to me that there was something severely wrong about asking such a question — or rather, the mindset that had made me a slave who needed permission.

And so I did go see Brixton, while everybody got shipped around Buckingham Palace and Piccadilly Square. (By the way, I generally found London disappointing, the same way Paris was disappointing, in that London wasn't English, and Paris wasn't French.)

A year later I found the book by in a library (the book is available online for free , and both my brother and I read and discussed it — specifically the passage about how it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

One other book that helped me overcome socialist character deformation was by I read and discussed this book with my cousin Bia, and I remember how flabberghasted I was that an evil capitalist American would write a book like this. I wasn't aware that Dale Carnegie wasn't related to Andrew Carnegie, but again, this is besides the point.

The mindboggling thing about Dale Carnegie's books is that this poor farmer's boy wrote books that are more helpful in achieving your human potential than anything done in the name of communism, socialism, or social justice ever will. Despite all the propaganda, you were not free to make friends and influence people — as enough East German victims of the Stasi and their specialty, "operational psychology", with its scientific methods of "Zersetzung" (decomposition) of the human soul, found out.

Looking back, I was a bit jealous of my little brother, whose soul got less mangled and crippled by communism than mine, and who avoided the Frankfurt School brainwashing that I fell for at university. God, how I wish I had been able to read books by Guy Kawasaki and Dale Carnegie — instead of all that worthless and damaging communist stuff.

But given that America is currently in a very precarious situation, a life-or-death-struggle for this republic, I strongly recommend everybody familiarize themselves not only with the best books of Western Civilization, like Dale Carnegie's works, but also with the poisons of communism, like by .

Compare the ideas of Carnegie and Alinsky: "Be a Leader — How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment"

— Dale Carnegie "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It's hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."

— Saul Alinsky