American Greatness "In a 2019 article for The Atlantic, “The Lingering Trauma of Stasi Surveillance,” Charlotte Bailey explores how many of the thousands of Germans who were victims of the The Ministry for State Security—commonly known as the Stasi—still suffer from psychological trauma. The Stasi were part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Before its collapse in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the GDR, as Bailey describes, “went to extraordinary lengths to spy on and control its citizens.”
"The Stasi, Bailey writes, “wiretapped, bugged, and tracked citizens. It steamed open letters and drilled holes in walls. It had nearly 200,000 unofficial informers and hundreds of thousands more occasional sources providing information on their friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues. As the self-declared sword and shield regime, it aimed not merely to stamp out dissent, but to support a far-reaching propaganda machine in creating a new, perfect communist human being.”
"I have long argued what afflicts present-day America is not fascism, or Mao-style communism, but the totalitarianism of the former spy-state known as the German Democratic Republic. “All over the world,” Bailey notes, “authoritarian regimes still use some of the tactics favored by the East German dictatorship—informers are still widely used, for instance. But states are now using modern technology to oppress their citizens in ways simply unavailable to the Stasi—by monitoring movements, spying on communications, and tracking financial transactions, to name just a few. The tools, in fact, are available to (and used by) companies and the governments of liberal democracies, too.”
"David Murakami Wood, a surveillance sociologist and an associate professor at Queen’s University in Canada, says “States now have far more power than the Stasi.' ” . . .
Mark Judge is a journalist and filmmaker. His books include A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll and Damn Senators: My Grandfather and the Story of Washington's Only World Series Championship. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Daily Caller.
