Opinion/Editorial
THE EAST GERMAN PARADIGM
What happened in East Germany in 1990? It ceased to exist and became integrated back with West Germany. Why is the failure of this communist country important to consider in the situation America is in right now? The Stasi was created to police the state. The Stasi (Staatssicherheit) was East Germany’s (GDR) infamous secret police and intelligence agency, operating from 1950-1990, whose primary role was to monitor, suppress dissent, and control the population for the ruling Communist Party.
Using a vast network of informants (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or IMs) and brutal tactics like harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment, the Stasi infiltrated nearly every aspect of East German life, creating detailed files on millions of citizens to maintain the regime’s power. Historically, the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 is given as the reason the country failed so abruptly, but in fact, anthropologically and sociologically, it was because of the use of the Stasi in having family, relatives, friends, and neighbors snitch on one another by reporting unpatriotic talk or actions, as defined by the leadership of the country.
The Stasi was created to fight crime, but then very quickly it was declared a crime to either say anything negative about the dictator or be determined to be unpatriotic. Life began to change for the worse in everyone’s life. The traumatic and sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall served as the motivation and instrument to allow one-fifth of the nation’s entire population to leave East Germany and migrate to West Germany. That shock, taking place in days, was too much for those running that country (and was also a huge, unexpected shock to West Germany as well).
Technology has come along and added to the fears that many have held over the past few years in the USA that the surveillance tools, like the license plate readers constantly monitoring the location of all vehicles in local areas, the use of cell phone tracking, and computer driven doorbells and home and business cameras, will almost automatically turn the country into a surveillance state. At the same time, the leader of the country is discussing openly the turning of the Department of Labor into a governmental entity that encourages and accepts complaints from family, friends, and co-workers that are related to suspected immigration violations or unpatriotic comments or behavior.
The snitch nightmare in East Germany is slowly coming, and it seems that the mass media, big corporate entities, and billionaires with most of the country’s money don’t care what the result may very well be. Huge, crushing decisions to change a country’s success can have the ability to be ruinous to national economies and even the social culture itself. Think of the results in Great Britain from a hugely ruinous decision by the then bombastic prime minister there called Brexit. Great Britain withdrew from the European Union. Five years later, the economy of that once robust nation is in tatters, with its economy having shrunk during that time by almost ten percent.
The United States is following that bad example with the same kind of populist leader at the helm. With this kind of foresight available for fact-checking on the Internet, why is this directional movement being allowed to continue to where it likely has to lead?
