Stasiland – U.S.A.?
Freedom is indivisible, and
when one man is enslaved, all are not free.
When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city
will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of Europe in a
peaceful and hopeful globe. When that
day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober
satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two
decades.
-
President John F. Kennedy, Ich bin ein Berliner
Speech, June 26th 1963
“I think at the end the Stasi
had so much information… that they thought everyone was the enemy, because
everyone was under observation. I don’t
think they (the Stasi) knew who was for them, or against, or whether everyone
was just shutting up. When I find a file
where they’ve been watching a family in their living room for twenty years I
ask myself: What sort of people are they who want this knowledge for
themselves?”
-
Author, Anna Funder, Stasiland, Stories from Behind
the Berlin Wall, Copyright 2003
By J.M. Hamilton 10-16-2015
In February of this year, JMH explored
whether or not the U.S. actually runs a command economy, or exhibits the
characteristics of a centrally planned economy; today, we visit a not entirely
dissimilar issue, often associated with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes,
and that is whether or not the U.S. runs a police or surveillance state? Moreover, if the U.S. is running a
surveillance state, who are the beneficiaries and to what end? And finally, is the U.S. marching down the road
toward an authoritarian or totalitarian state model?
Exiting through London’s Imperial War
Museums’ gift shop this summer, I ran into the book, Stasiland. The book was placed just above eye level on
the shelf, and being a history freak, I bought it immediately. Stasiland was researched and written by Anna
Funder, an Australian, starting in the mid-nineties and through the very early
aughts. Stasiland addresses topics –
taken largely from firsthand accounts and interviews - about German citizens,
who suffered under East Germany’s totalitarian regime; the men who made up the
German police state, or Stasi; and the Berlin Wall. Encountering this book was timely and I
highly recommend it, as Germany celebrates the 25th anniversary of its reunification this month, and last November was the fall of the Berlin
Wall’s 25th anniversary.
These are seminal events not only in
Germany’s history, but w/in the history of Western democracy as well. Moreover, there is a great deal the U.S. and
our citizens can learn from the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) police
state, as we shall soon see.
First a quick overview and some
history. Ms. Funder’s timing for writing
the book was impeccable, as even by the mid-nineties, the Berlin Wall was
rapidly disappearing, and for some Germans, perhaps intentionally or
unintentionally, memory of the Wall and East Germany were already beginning to
fade. That’s not to say, that there
weren’t, or are to this very day, some former East Germans engaged in Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the former
GDR.
For the majority of Western democracies’
citizens, Berlin represented the focal point of the Cold War that dominated
international relations and foreign policy, post WWII, all the way through the
very early 90s, when the Soviet empire and its satellites (including East
Germany) crumbled and collapsed.
The backstory: During the Cold War (a war waged between Western democracies, and the Eastern Soviet Union and its Communist satellites), Berlin
was severed in two by a physical barrier, The Wall. Berlin, the historic capitol of Germany, was
situated in East Germany. So the world
saw this Western enclave of democracy, West Berlin, situated inside the
Communist Bloc. The former German Capitol,
along with the German state, were divided up by the Allied Powers, Post- WWII,
into zones of influence and control: American, British, French, and
Soviet/Russian. The Berlin Wall ran up
against the Reichstag building, or German parliament building, which during the
Cold War was no longer operational.
Fearing that Western Europe - largely in
ruins Post WWII -would fall to communism, the Marshall Plan was introduced by
America, which provided aid and financing for Western Europe’s rebuilding. When the Soviets attempted a Berlin power
grab in 1948, essentially cutting off/blockading West Berlin from food and
medicine by rail and truck, the Berlin Air Lift was authorized by the Truman
administration. The Air Lift transported
tons of food, fuel and medicine into Western Berlin by plane on a daily basis for
over a year. As such, West Berlin became
a symbol of Western Democracies’ defiance against communism and totalitarian
tyranny. In 1949, the Soviets lifted the
blockade, and the supplies to Western Berlin resumed being transported into the
city by rail. (Prior to this crisis, in
1946, Winston Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain speech, in of all places -
Fulton, MO, warning of these events and the Cold War to come.)
Throughout the Cold War, Berlin, and the Berlin
Wall, became a symbolic backdrop for Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, who both
gave historic speeches in front of the Wall – to rapturous applause by West
Berlin’s citizens. Both President’s
speeches extolled the virtues of freedom and democracy against the evils of communism
and the tyranny of the totalitarian state.
The Wall’s construction began in 1961 by the East German regime to keep
East German citizens from fleeing to the West, and came down shortly after
President Reagan left office with communism’s demise. As mentioned, the two Germanys, East and
West, were formally reunited on November 9th, 1990. Ms. Funder's book takes us on a nightmarish
journey into the Orwellian police state of East Germany.
Among the key characteristics
of the East German state, outlined in Stasiland, were the following:
1. The state had,
and would exert, hegemonic control over nearly every aspect of an East German
citizen’s life, from the cradle to the grave:
religious, educational, sports, political, and career, etc. This power was exerted arbitrarily and capriciously.
2. If a GDR citizen
attempted to escape over the Wall, the escapee could be shot and killed, or if
they survived and caught, many were often sent to prison.
3. If an East German
citizen associated with the wrong element, say a foreigner from the West, said
citizen could be placed under surveillance and blacklisted, so that educational
and career opportunities dried up and vanished.
4. Citizens were
often coerced by the state into informing upon family members, fellow
employees, or fellow church congregants.
Stasi officials would often laugh at the number of protestors at a rally,
knowing full well that the number informants at the rally actually swelled protestor
numbers.
5. Many of the GDR’s
informants weren’t paid or even given special privileges. East Germans often informed upon one another
for purposes of payback, retribution, and for a sense of power.
6. While many of the
East Germans interviewed noted the insidious nature of mass surveillance, they
also noted the tremendous sense of inequality, once capitalism and democracy
triumphed over communism and totalitarian rule. Both systems present their own problems,
some former GDR citizens commented.
7. Without due
process, an East German could be held in detention and tortured, indefinitely,
and worse, murdered. The Stasi, or East German security and surveillance force,
held absolute control over the GDR’s civilian population, and was also charged
with foreign espionage and covert operations (basically, the equivalent to MI5 and MI6, or
the CIA and FBI, rolled into one).
8. If someone is
investigated by the Stasi, the individual is automatically assumed to be an
enemy of the state.
9. Dossiers on many
GDR citizens were maintained by the Stasi, and many of these files were burned
or shredded shortly before the Wall came down.
Hundreds of thousands of files have been reassembled, and the German
public can view their own files.
10. Many of the Stasi
men, when the Wall fell, found work in the West in insurance, marketing, and
real estate; and the Stasi generally suffered lower rates of unemployment than
their fellow GDR citizens, post-reunification.
The rank and file Stasi, largely, were not prosecuted. Russian leader Putin spent some time in East
Germany, during his KGB career, and witnessed the GDR’s collapse.
11.
If one wanted to get ahead in the GDR, you were expected
to be a party member. Lip service was
paid to democracy, and alternative political parties were established in name
only, but there was only one East German ruling party.
12.
The state often used blackmail and extortion to encourage citizens
to inform; and family members and children would be used as leverage and pawns
by the state to coerce citizens into informing upon others.
13.
The East German state controlled broadcasting, and the
news, except that which was beamed in from the West.
14.
At the end of the day, the motivation of the Stasi, first
and foremost, was to protect the state and the state’s elite, and GDR citizens
were essentially slaves to the state.
Therefore, it could be said, the Stasi often considered its citizens to
be active, or prospective, enemies of the state.
Reading deeper into Stasiland,
what one increasingly becomes aware of is how many parallels there are
between the policies and government operations of Western democracies today,
and the policies of hegemonic control exercised in the former Soviet Union, the Eastern
Bloc countries, and in particular the GDR. To be sure, the U.S. is not a totalitarian
regime, and Americans still enjoy a great many freedoms; but these freedoms –
particularly privacy – and the expectation of some economic security (aka The
American Dream) are rapidly eroding.
Indeed, some of the U.S. military and intelligence institutions
presently in place, as well as, some of our policies on mass incarceration and internet
surveillance, would suggest that America is on a slippery slope, if not
toppling into becoming an authoritarian regime.
Factor in the very real possibility that the U.S. arguable operates, to
some degree, a command economy (written about earlier this year), and how
SCOTUS – through campaign finance law – allows an elite ruling cadre (aka the oligarchy)
unmitigated access and control over the Congress and yes, even POTUS, and one
might conclude that some of the parallels between the U.S. and GDR are
frightening and cause for serious concern.
Consider the following:
1. The U.S. has a
ruling elite that holds a disproportionate amount of wealth, which has been
well documented by the fourth estate. The
Wall Street banks, alone, hold assets worth approximately 65% of GDP. While wages remain stagnant in the U.S.,
approximately 95% of all new income earned has gone to the 1%.
2. Thanks to SCOTUS,
the Citizens United ruling, and current campaign finance laws - to say that our
State and Federal officeholders are owned is no exaggeration. In short, the plutocracy owns the state, and
many elected officeholders owe their positions in the government to their
patrons, the ownership class. It is the
rare politician who can, and does, finance their own campaign.
6. As with the GDR,
the primary motivation of the NSA, and the various intelligence and defense
services, is to protect the state, and in the U.S. this would obviously include
the elite, who own and operate same. And
like the citizens of the GDR, arguably, U.S. citizens are interchangeable cogs
in the machine. Moreover, in the U.S.,
civil rights, especially the right to privacy, are under assault and steady
erosion. There are some jurist on the far right, who have argued that the Constitution affords no right to privacy,
whatsoever. Know this too, the surveillance state's lust for power is insatiable.
8. To keep up public
support for the war machine and the private contractors who own and operate the
DOD, the corporate run news media, arguably, runs fear campaigns to keep the
American public on edge and in support of a never ending war effort. Going back to Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, foreign entanglements have been a means to distract the public from
domestic and economic problems, and some wonder why the U.S. has been at war in
the Middle East, continuously, for over a decade with no end in sight.
10.
The elite, just like a totalitarian regime, fear democracy
and they fear the vagaries of courts and due process even more. That’s why, through free trade agreements,
they have set up extra-judicial bodies (ISDS) that allow them to sue foreign
governments, who threaten through regulation monopolistic profits. In essence,
the plutocracy has established its own commercial courts and tribunals, under
various free trade agreements and pending free trade proposals (TPP and TTIP), which
are a direct threat to the rights of man and popular sovereignty.
11.
Thanks to free trade agreements (aka corporate trade agreements), which have become little more than corporate welfare codified,
globalization has strangled what little economic security ordinary Americans
may have possessed. U.S. citizens - with
little or no education - find themselves competing with the sweat shops of S.E.
Asia, whose workers are often paid as little as 60 cents an hour. Thanks to globalization and corporate trade agreements (e.g. TPP and TTIP), it is an employer’s market for labor, and wages
have stagnated and wealth inequality has escalated to form a Neo-gilded Age. Throw in regressive tax policies, advocated
and enacted by the minions of the plutocracy, plus monopolistic taxation upon
the citizenry, and the U.S. middle class and the poor are under economic and political siege, as never before by the ruling plutocracy. Feel the crushing weight of a totalitarian
state, yet?
12.
While America may not lack for a vast cornucopia of
inexpensive products – dumped upon our fair shores by multinationals exploiting
third-world and child labor – the U.S. does suffer from a lack of jobs, opportunity,
and wage stagnation. This is yet another
means of economic and political oppression carried out by the plutocracy
against the American public.
13. Another means to exert economic control over U.S.
citizens, and an alternative means to control the number of jobs and wages, is via
business combination. The U.S. has seen
a record number of mergers and acquisition (M&A) in 2015 (thank you very
much Federal Reserve), and M&A fuels monopolies and cartels. Monopolies and cartels are known for issuing
pinks slips to control costs and pay down debt often utilized for financial
engineering. The resulting cartel or
monopoly can easily set the prevailing wage rates for that particular industry’s
labor pool. This maybe done through
collusion, direct or indirect (e.g. looking at a competitors job posting site
and the wages established for a certain class or type of employee); or in the case of a monopoly, the business utilizes monopsony powers to set wages. It’s just another means of economic control,
not unlike what one might see in a totalitarian state. And just like a totalitarian
state, the ordinary employee has limited negotiating power, and particularly if
one’s labor skills revolve around a monopoly controlled industry, a skilled
employee may find themselves with little wage and benefit negotiating power.
14.
As within the former Communist Bloc, the U.S. means of
production for a market – ownership and control - are often organized under a
single ruling body. In the GDR, this
would have been the elite cadres that run the state; and in American, it’s the
plutocratic elite, who also own and operate the state. In both scenarios, Crony Capitalism and
Communism, the means of production is often formed around a cartel or monopoly. As this blog has stated many times, monopoly
is little more than socialism by private proxy, with all the incumbent
inefficiencies of scale that we have come to expect and have witnessed.
15.
While the U.S. government does not own the press, the
plutocracy does; and the plutocracy’s message is heard loud and clear on a
daily basis. Factor in dumbed down content,
the consolidation of news outlets, and the gradual elimination of the long form
of journalism, and this spells trouble for U.S. democracy and an educated
electorate.
16.
The U.S. prison system is yet another means of control,
both economic and political. And while
the U.S. prison system is no Soviet Gulag, the U.S. does suffer the highest
incarceration rates in the world, all too often for victimless crimes such as
drug possession. And what is the
outcome? A class of citizens – prisoners
- who are disenfranchised, and often are a means of slave labor, during and
post incarceration. Try getting job with
a felony record, particularly in a sub-par economy, and we’d all come to
quickly understand how the prison, and parolee, population is a pool of slave
labor. Minorities suffer disproportionately from present laws, and enforcement of those laws, and these
laws are executed in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Do my readers believe for an instant, all of
this is by coincidence? Blacks and other
minorities tend to vote for politicians that are antithetical to the interests
of the Billionaire class.
18.
Witness too, the militarization of our state and local
police force, basically establishing local armies in our communities across the
nation, with fire power grossly disproportionate to any threat, real or
imagined. And speaking of threats, while
the hallmark of a totalitarian regime is to play up the external threat, we’ve
seen that the U.S. too, likes to play up the external threat, but that the real
threat – the threat to public safety - is from within. As documented by The Guardian there have been
over a 1,000 mass shootings within our borders, since the Sandy Hook Elementary
massacre. But apparently, the fact that the U.S. spends more money on defense, surveillance, intelligence, and the police state, than the G-20 combined, buys the average U.S. citizen little or no relief from the prospect of being gunned down in our own communities by our
fellow Americans.
20.
The surveillance state isn’t limited to the U.S.
government, however. There’s a very good
chance that your employer is swapping information with the government. As recently as 2013, Bloomberg reported that
thousands of U.S. companies were swapping intelligence with the surveillance state. Now, when one is working, we
expect to be monitored, as we are being paid for our time; but when we are off
the clock, what business is it of anybody, our employer or our government, how
we choose to lead our lives? That’s
where the right to privacy comes in. If
a citizen has done something wrong than the police, or prosecuting attorney,
should be forced to obtain a warrant, and judging by the history of our courts,
warrants are easy enough to come by.
22. A key characteristic of a surveillance state is the
secrecy it hides behind, where nothing is transparent and everything is
“classified.” As was the case in the
GDR, once the mask falls, the totalitarian state cannot stand public
scrutiny. It may take years, or even
decades, but the totalitarian state ultimately collapses under the weight of
its own lies. China should take note.
I could go on and on…. With parallels
between the GDR’s police state/totalitarian regime and our own U.S. government
and economy. Please note too, these
examples aren’t the ravings of a paranoid mind, but rather, I’m merely quoting
our own mainstream news media. Please, do
yourself and your children a favor, and read some of the articles highlighted
in blue, above.
It’s a lot to digest. The examples above on a one-off basis,
admittedly, aren't overly concerning (particularly when we – as loyal U.S.
citizens – like to give our government, our elected officials, and the
ownership class the benefit of the doubt).
Many of us are very proud of our country, especially what the U.S. has
the potential to evolve into. However, when
the aforementioned facts are viewed holistically, in sum, the American public should
really question where our government, economy, and the mass surveillance state
is headed.
A couple of final thoughts.
A friend of mine recently attended an
internet security conference. As relayed
to me, the conference was highly informative; but what was most interesting was
that during the entire seminar not once was end-to-end encryption
mentioned. Nor did anyone at the
conference mention end-to-end encryption as a means to protect privacy and hold
criminal enterprise and foreign governments at bay. In the ultimate Catch-22, not one speaker
mentioned how the surveillance state (NSA, CIA, FBI, Et Al.) had insisted that
U.S. hardware, software, and internet providers build backdoors into their
products, and how these backdoors were a threat to corporate, government and the
public’s privacy and internet security.
You see, thanks to these backdoors and the lack of encryption, we need the security state to protect us from the security state.
But if nothing in this piece concerns you…
Look how close we are to becoming a police state? All the tools of repression are in place: a massive surveillance state; a
monolithic DOD and a heavily armed police force; a watered down press and a public that receives 90% of its news from five corporations; secret courts and a government that is opaque; wars without end; intimidation of whistle blowers; the megalomanical greed of the plutocracy; and
a public that is willing to let fear drive them to sacrifice their freedoms for
specious claims of greater personal safety.
And last but not least, a government owned and operated by a plutocracy,
neatly privatized and legitimized for their personal gain. Unfortunately, the government itself, and the tools of repression, have become profit centers unto themselves. All it would take for the plutocracy to clamp
down, and destroy our freedoms is an actual act of terrorism or a false flag event. Burdened by the fear of a catastrophic event, many Americans would welcome such oppression with open arms, based upon false safety guarantees. In fact clamor for it. And within seconds, because all the tools of
repression are already in place, the U.S. becomes a totalitarian state.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
President Kennedy, months before his
assassination, said before the Berlin Wall:
Freedom
has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to
put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us. I want to
say, on behalf of my countrymen, who live many miles away on the other side of
the Atlantic, who are far distant from you, that they take the greatest pride
that they have been able to share with you, even from a distance, the story of
the last eighteen years. I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for
eighteen years that still lives with the vitality and the force and the hope
and the determination of the city of West Berlin.
And these walls kill, and are a direct
threat to our democracy and freedom.
Copyright JM Hamilton
Publishing 2015
