March 10, 2008
Another mini-bombshell went off in the discovery of the Stasi’s activities: as many as 189,000 were employed as “unofficial” agents of East Germany’s security services just at the time of the fall of the Berlin. Mainly motivating them: political ideals and money, not force. That number is staggering. Not only does it reveal the penetration of the state into the private lives of citizens, but also the extent to which citizens were willing to participate in their own repression.
March 11, 2008 at 7:21 pm
What do you suppose the FBI and DHS files will show in the post PATRIOT ACT period will tell us about our own society? And I’ll bet you that few of them are doing it for the money, or by force.
Shades of McCarthyism.
March 12, 2008 at 8:28 am
My suspicion has always been that in 20-30 years, historians will come to terms with a nation that was both belligerent and xenophobic and, in the end, a participant in the foreign policy decision of this administration. I don’t know how deeply that might go. Will people have reported their darker neighbors almost randomly? Whose credit card accounts will have been monitored? I don’t know.