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As politically incorrect as it seems to be now: The GDR thrived on people who actually believed in what they did. The trend to blame circumstances, pressure by

• seivan 11y ago
  Sounds like here. "Anti-fascists" being better off financially and doing career moves by finding "fascists". Charging $200 an hour for their "anti-fascism" and living in Gamla Stan (expensive and central) The Stasi archives are yet to be released in Sweden.
• yourapostasy 11y ago
  In your opinion with your experience growing up in the GDR, and perhaps in the opinion of your relatives who also lived in the GDR, what is the feasibility of a "Stasi-lite" arising from the harvesting of social media-collected data, and the "inter-personal" relationships built within social media contexts? Where the key difference is the data is very happily volunteered by just-as-fervent true believers in their pursuit of their micro-endorphin fixes of validation, and there is ample room for envy to dig up data as well. And the consumer of the data is not a coercive domestic intelligence apparatus, but innumerable commercial entities trying to proactively shape your desires?
  • jlg23 11y ago
    I don't think one can make a meaningful comparison between Stasi- and post-privacy era: * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) * Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by definition, not * snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about yourself tends to be "good" things only IMHO it is easy but very dangerous to liken the two because the latter has its own, distinct nature, dangers and MOs which should be addressed on their specific terms.
    • fweespeech 11y ago
      > * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) 1) Many of the tools involved can't actually be opted out of without technical knowledge. 2) I know at least two services (Facebook, LinkedIn) who have profiles on me despite me not having accounts with them. 3) I know of at least one analytics tracking service that resells data and links things to social media that was successfully sued for using invasive ways of tracking people that was only possible to opt out of with javascript blocking. So while its decentralized for the most part, it really isn't possibly to actually opt-out in any substantial way without javascript & ad blocking [which I've met quite a few people who just turn it off because its "too confusing" or never install it in the first place].
    • yourapostasy 11y ago
      I agree, it is too facile to conflate the two, that is why I tried to distance the real Stasi from the trends that I'm seeing by calling it "Stasi-lite". However, I'm seeing disturbing accretions of power over time enabled by the social networks' data harvesting, and the concomitant gold rush to gather any data, anywhere and plug it into everywhere it fits into a coherent "data narrative". I don't want to concern-troll; I'm young enough to still hold out hope, but old enough to understand human nature has not changed for millennia. Counter-examples to your points, with the full awareness that we are nowhere near the overtly oppressive levels of the Stasi. * We already have police cruisers harvesting license plates passing by. It is not long before surveillance camera feeds are hooked up to facial recognition engines ostensibly for highly-targeted in-store ads using new hyper-local delivery platforms (video screens beckoning you with a product pitch predicted to appeal to you, hyper-local audio only you can hear delivering the pitch). How long before simply walking around yields a minutely-detailed, fully-automated diary of your daily goings about that even in the glory days of the Stasi took punishing levels of manpower? * The consumers of the data might not be centralized, but as many have observed, tech is usually a winner-take-all game and the harvesting and collation of the data will more likely than not be another Google (or Google itself). The data will be sold in a highly-segmented manner to extract the maximum profit from the data, but the concentration of power enabled by pulling all that data together in 1-3 entities, not to speak of the Palantir-like statistical associative inferencing, will be unprecedented. Imagine human nature around that kind of data corpus. * People regularly air dirty laundry I would have never imagined in such a public setting. Alias doxxing only need happen once, and then everything negative ever said comes crashing home to roost out of never-erased archives. These are tools, with no intrinsic moral compass; how we use them is subject to moral evaluation. I observe that the output of these tools will be too expensive for individuals to access and use themselves, and it is only in the remit of very wealthy individuals and the larger commercial and governmental entities. These are to me the new, much more powerful suasion tools than newspapers and TV could ever hope to aspire to, for they can shape opinions using individualized social circles and will "feel more genuine/authentic". This might seem benign, until say, someone buys out massive, long-term campaigns designed to say, sway public opinion "at the grassroots level" to go against vaccinations. We live in a fascinating era.
• SeanDav 11y ago
  So informing was a useful tool to knock down your potential rivals or those whose faces did not fit. I despair at Human Nature sometimes...
  • pjc50 11y ago
    This is the real limitation of Communism. In attempting to eliminate all forms of socio-economic status discrimination, it eliminated all but one: Party status. In a one-party state your position in the hierarchy forms a total ordering. The only way to get ahead is through the party. This is far more brutal than the capitalist "rat race", where there are lots of different company fiefdoms (each of which is internally a command economy, of course) and you can just quit and try to climb the ladder somewhere else. In a Communist rat-race, it may be necessary to denounce your enemies to the extent of getting them killed, in order to advance your career. Note that an environment with no "Exit" and no "Voice" (in the exit/voice/loyalty model) results in lots of "Loyalty" ritual. This is also very conducive to demonstrating your loyalty by condemning other people's lack of loyalty.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      Perhaps you mean Marxism–Leninism (which ought to be called Stalinism really). While the Eastern Bloc and friends perhaps aspired to Communism, they certainly weren't there.
      • jerf 11y ago
        I don't accept the "it wasn't real Communism" argument, because real Communism has never been produced at a national scale despite a couple dozen attempts. We must conclude from the evidence that, yes, that is what real Communism is and produces, with real humans, which is the only kind of human that matters. There is at the moment no reason to believe that the next attempt to produce "real Communism" will produce anything different than what has already been produced. I don't see great differences in practice between the USSR and their eastern European wards. Given how extraordinarily dangerous that all attempts to produce Communism to date have been to all involved, even the Communists(! you remember "Stalin" and the other big names, you forget how many of their own he purged to get there), the rational answer is to stop trying. Communism is a great deal more likely to kill you than save you... and by you, I even mean its advocates in particular, which are really prone to getting purged, and in those cases where they don't get purged, only at the cost of continuously looking over their shoulders and living in a high-grade police state. Advocating Communism in practice comes perilously close to advocating for a government that will kill you, personally, not "generic you".
• lispm 11y ago
  > I don't see much of a difference to post WW2-Germany when all Germans suddenly discovered that they had been anti-fascist all the time. As a 'West German' I can assure you that this was not the case. Germans after WWII were fascist like before. Many even openly did admit it ('es war nicht alles schlecht unter Hitler', 'die Juden waren schuld', 'der Russe hätte uns sonst überfallen', 'die Wehrmacht hat tapfer gekämpft', ...). What they told is that they did not know about some of the crimes or that they did not participate, but generally there were very few claiming to have been anti-fascists or even 'active' anti-fascists (sabotaging the war, etc.). Most told you: 'ich habe nur meine Pflicht getan', or similar. Surely there were anti-fascists, but even those often served in the army and many died somewhere in Russia, because they fought for their country (that was what they told) or did not have an alternative. The few (surviving) people who could claim to have been active anti-fascists were met with a lot of hatred by those generations after the war, see for example Willi Brandt ('Vaterlandsverräter'). It took decades to get rid of the 'fascist' thinking. Mostly when those generations died away. Remember the controversy around the 'Wehrmacht' and the 'Kriegsverbrechen'? Decades after the war that was a hot topic.
  • jlg23 11y ago
    > As a 'West German' I can assure you that this was not the case. Germans after WWII were fascist like before. That is what I was trying to say; I'm sorry if I did not manage to express that properly by crossing the line to cynicism. I wholeheartedly agree with your summary of post-WW2 Germany - parts of my family later claimed they never liked Hitler but that they had been fighting in WW2 for Kaiser Wilhelm! A good watch for people interested in post-WW2 Germany's way of coping with recent history is "We Cellar Children"[1] (boy hides communist during WW2 in basement, then his fascist father just after WW2 and then he is finally arrested later on for painting a swastika on a wall after a journalist asked him to do so for a report...) I don't agree with your implication that "fascist thinking" is a thing of the past in Germany - but that's yet another topic. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054479/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054479/
    • lispm 11y ago
      > I don't agree with your implication that "fascist thinking" is a thing of the past in Germany 'fascist thinking' in general will never be a thing of the past. Not in Germany and not in many other countries. But the level of fascist thinking is relatively low in Germany - compared to the decades before or even to some of the neighbor countries (hungary, poland, ...).
• Overtonwindow 11y ago
  Was it possible, perhaps, that those who "actually believed in what they did" were in fact brainwashed by the state? I am curious what the total control of the state has on brainwashing, or at the very least, strongly conditioning a populace to assert one belief system over another. To put it in a more politically incorrect viewpoint: Is it possible whose who believed in the GDR were in fact brainwashed? I'm not clear where the inference of those who genuinely believed in the GDR as justification for informing on others comes from. Can you please elaborate?
  • jlg23 11y ago
    > Is it possible whose who believed in the GDR were in fact brainwashed? I don't think so. The GDR was not as isolated as one might think today. There was a black market for goods from the west and for currency exchange, one could get news/information from the West easily. In fact, within the GDR population the term "Valley of the Clueless" was a well known term for the only two areas where West-German TV was not available. [1] > I'm not clear where the inference of those who genuinely believed in the GDR as justification for informing on others comes from. Just the same reason people today give for doxxing political opponents - the believe to do the right thing for a greater good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen