Sure, they were pretty much the same, only gradual differences - once you have convinced yourself that the first being instrumental in a few million cases of murder, give or take a few, and the second having in their ranks quite a few former inmates of Nazi concentration camps, is a minor point that can be readily abstracted away. But I guess that comes rather easy when you feel pressed to support the popular narrative that we are living in the best of all possible worlds now, and every step to the left or to the right of that will plunge you in the same bottomless pit of totalitarianism.
It’s a movie. Fear and dread, sure. I don’t say the Stasi were nice people, democrats, or whatever. They were authoritarian spooks in a society with plenty of totalitarian elements, no question about it.
What I don’t buy is that we allegedly have it so much better now. The difference between a one party system and a two party system is a gradual one.
What happened on the GDRs borders is often cited as their most violent human rights abuse. Of course it is deplorable to set death traps for citizens who want to leave your country, because you need their skilled labor to prevent your economy from collapsing. What are the EU member states doing these days? Conspiring to chain boats that try to keep people from drowning in the Mediterranean. They prefer to have them drown. The Iron Curtain has just moved, and is a body of water these days, or a Mexican desert. Because they are afraid their integration would over-stress their economic system. It’s the same fucking thing. Only in the case were emigration is suppressed, your citizens are the target, and they will finally rise up. In the case of suppressed immigration, it’s foreigners, and who gives a flying fuck about them in the next election.
Treatment of political dissidents? Spying? Pressure to conform with societal standards and economic demands? All gradual differences. I have seen the museum of Stasi prison cells. Every day they cart bus loads of pupils through there, to indoctrinate them with the ideology that socialism equals Satan. I saw that cell and thought, hey, that looks familiar. When I was, in the West, a few decades ago, imprisoned for taking part in a left wing demonstration, including police brutality, false statements by the police leading to a conviction, a judge who openly admitted he was biased and as far as he was concerned I could go fuck myself, an anti left wing media frenzy fueling that whole sharade, and actual fucking spooks knocking on my mother’s door to have a little talk - I had my own Stasi moment right there, in the fucking West.
Fuck the Stasi, I’m glad they’re gone. But I know for a fact that we have the same fucking things they did going on right here and now, and if you don’t know that, or are not impacted by it, you’re just lucky.
