Are you antifascist just because you say you are? The old East Germany, or The German Democratic Republic (GDR) said they were antifascist. They also said that they were Democratic. What they actually were was a brutal dictatorship. But propaganda can’t be bothered with the Truth. It seems that not very many youngsters have heard of the GDR, or Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (that’s the Ministry for State Security or Stazi for you children.)
First, let’s look at some stuff the Germans have to say; it is their history, after all. East Germany: A failed experiment in dictatorship.
West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, was a republic based on a parliamentary democracy, that enjoyed the advantages of Free Markets. East Germany was a Socialist State, with a command economy under the control of Stalin’s Russia. These two ideologies came up against one another in Berlin, half West German, Half East.
In divided Berlin, the clash between the competing systems of capitalism and socialism could not have been more stark. The city, with a total of 3.3 million residents, was the hotspot of the Cold War — and, until 1961, it was also the hole through which refugees fled. But that hole was plugged with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Until that point, more than one million people, fed up with the economy of lack and the intellectual climate of an unfree society, had turned their backs on the GDR.
What we call The Berlin Wall, built by East Germany to keep their citizens in (did that make them prisoners?) was officially, according the GDR, the Anti-fascist Protection Rampart. That is Antifaschistischer Schutzwall in German. It was created to keep all those West German fascists at bay. In 1961. Actually it was to keep people in, because how dare you have a difference of opinion.
The secret police organization of the GDR was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or the Stasi. Introduction – Ministry for State Security.
The Ministry for State Security (MfS) acted with aggressive harshness and brutality during the early years of the GDR. Its methods ranged from physical violence to arbitrary arrests, from kidnappings in the West to conducting show trials and having the courts impose draconian sentences.
In the 1970s the MfS changed its secret police activities and began increasingly to use “softer” methods. The GDR leadership did not want to compromise its attempts to gain international recognition: persecution and repression were to be concealed. The MfS now focused more on preventive surveillance and so-called “psychic demolition”. It used manipulation and targeted rumours in its attempts to systematically intimidate individuals or groups, to ruin their reputations, isolate or criminalize them. Friendships were destroyed, and professional careers ruined without the victims even realizing why.
Strange how that playbook is still being used today by the Left. You have a different opinion? You will be destroyed. But that is where we are today. We are morphing into the old East Germany.
Why this post, and why today. You can blame social-media. I was having a discussion with a woman who was “reporting violations” of her county’s You Must Wear a Mask ordinance. I told her how happy that behavior made the Stasi, and how good citizens of East Germany were supposed to report violations of “the law.” That is not quite what the MfS did, but the organization did make a large number of “informers.”
The unofficial collaborators (IMs) were the “key weapon” of the Ministry for State Security (MfS). They were used primarily in the GDR. With their help the MfS spied on the population and tried to gather information on its moods and any attempts at “subversion”.[SNIP]
They also played an active role in the State Security’s activities in the field of so-called “psychic demolition”.
That woman I was having the “discussion” with? She changed the parameters on her account so that it was no longer public. That is so much easier than responding to sarcasm, or dealing with different opinions.
And so you have to ask… Did we win the Cold War? Or are we in fact becoming East Germany, where dissenting opinions are destroyed. Today we call it cancel culture. It isn’t that different from psychic demolition. History.
Ignorance. Rinse. Repeat.
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