The East German Stasi (Secret Police)

[mmj_uk]

A fascinating read in the DM for anyone interested and reminder for why privacy is important in an increasingly surveilled world and perhaps you'll even recognise some similarities with the world today.

Full article here, well worth a read:
Stasi's 'no touch' torture: It was the East German secret police's most terrifying weapon - gaslighting mind games that drove its own citizens mad... and the lessons for today's social media generation couldn't be more stark
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9665947/Stasis-despicable-torture.html

Arbitrary arrest, solitary confinement in special prisons that were censored from maps and officially did not exist, systematic brutality, sleep deprivation and torture — these were the everyday weapons of the nearly 100,000 policemen in the Ministry of State Security as they kept their sinister tabs on a third of the entire nation, logging their every move and building up bulging paper files of information on them.

Informants were everywhere. People lived in fear of being accused. Here was the nightmare of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in all its grim, dystopian reality.

This was a country where the tap on the shoulder in the street was common, followed by the chilling words: 'State Security. Come with me.'

Where mail was routinely intercepted and 90,000 letters a day steamed open for inspection and wiretaps and hidden microphones were commonplace.

Where people's body scent was collected on pieces of cloth and stored in glass jars, so they could be tracked by dogs if they went missing. Where specialist teams even broke into homes and stole women's underclothes for the same purpose.

The trouble was that all this sinister behaviour was denting East Germany's international credentials. It liked to present itself as the perfect socialist state that put the West to shame but it was coming under fire for its breaches of human rights. It needed a makeover of its image, while still retaining its grip on the people.

So in the 1970s, the masterminds at Stasi School — formally known as the College of Legal Studies — decided on a new, more subtle tactic of repression, a way of stamping out rebellion without the overt use of force.

Instead of pounding their suspects into submission, they would send them mad. And so began the policy of Zersetzung.

The word meant disintegration or corrosion or decomposition. Today we would call it 'gaslighting' — playing with someone's mind and self-worth until any resistance crumbles and he or she becomes either compliant or apathetic.

Another phrase for it was 'no-touch torture'.

'Decomposition was designed to unglue a dissident's psyche, to chip away at his sanity,' according to U.S. academic Professor Dominic Tierney of the think-tank the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

'A regime opponent would find himself trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Everywhere he turned, an evil force seemed to be hounding him, even though he could not prove that he had been singled out.

'Who would believe that the government was secretly stealing his tea towels?'

A promotion at work would be denied for no good reason. Medical notes were interfered with and they were diagnosed for treatment they did not need.

On whispered Stasi instructions, staff in bars and shops would refuse to serve them, leaving them feeling isolated, unwanted, outsiders.

The continual sense of being followed and checked on, that no one around you could be trusted, was inevitably damaging — as at least one woman would later discover from her Stasi file, the person who had informed on her for years was her own husband, the father of her sons.

The aim, writes Max Hertzberg, veteran investigator in the Stasi archive, was to 'switch off' a person's supposed dissident activities.

Sullying someone's reputation was always an effective tactic, as a 14-year-old girl named Regina found out when she was targeted as a way of getting at her father, who ran his own business as a hairdresser and was therefore 'an enemy of socialism'.

The word was put around that she was a Flittchen — promiscuous — and strangers would stalk her, making lewd remarks and touching her up. She was followed and twice men tried to rape her. In the end she gave up the struggle and became a Stasi informant herself, grassing up her own parents.

'The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident,' writes German historian Hubertus Knabe. 'It preferred to paralyse them and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.'

Today, more than 30 years on, what deeply concerns him is that the evils of the Stasi are not acknowledged in the reunified Germany but swept under the carpet of history.

'Not until the communist dictatorship is as firmly in mind in Germany as the criminal regime of the Nazis will we really have succeeded in coming to terms with the legacy of the Stasi,' he says.

So much so that, according to polls, a majority of students in Germany today think there were democratic elections in the old East Germany whereas the truth is that it was a one-party, Left-wing dictatorship whose power was protected by thugs.

'Denying that the Nazi Holocaust happened is ridiculous and widely offensive. In Germany it's also illegal to do so. But not so for those who deny and minimise the trauma of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the 40 years of German communism.'

As for Zersetzung, Hope has a chilling modern take on that.

In the virtual world, information on all of us is stored away by tech giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Snapchat and Instagram.

Billions of people round the world willingly give away their personal details, and intelligence and police agencies, as well as employers, media and criminals, routinely draw on them.

Where the Stasi had to wheedle out the minutiae of people's lives and then store the information in millions of physical brown files, today it's all there tucked away in unseen digital files.

I might as well have just quoted the whole article it was so interesting but those are just some of the highlights.

I've heard a few eastern Europeans talk about what it was like to live under the iron curtain and a lot of it is hard to believe.

The book should be a good read.