After a recent visit to Berlin, I picked up a copy of Stasiland by Anna Funder as a way of understanding the places I had just visited, and because understanding the Stasi may be a guide to thinking about the possible scenarios that could unfold over time as a result of domestic telecommunications surveillance in the United States. Funder travels through East Germany and interviews people who were part of the Stasi or who were victims of the GDR regime.

There were a few key themes that emerge from the book that are worth considering.

Partisans are dangerous. One of the people Funder interviews is the a former propagandist for the GDR regime, who still clung to his views about communism after the fall of the wall. His rationalizations were immediately familiar to me. I see them every day in Facebook memes and political oped pieces in newspapers.

The partisan starts with his conclusion, and weaves together a narrative by emphasizing facts that support the desired conclusion and ignoring or minimizing facts that complicate it. The worst part about partisans is that they are rarely self-aware of the abuse they are doing to the truth in weaving those narratives. They have a total emotional commitment to the conclusion they want to reach and they see the facts as just supporting structures that reenforce their position.

Its very easy for a person like this to see opposing points of view as epitomizing evil - literally a threat to everything that is good and decent. This is what happened in the GDR. Communist partisans were put in power by the Russians. They truly believed a warped version of reality - that people with other points of view were dangerous and evil. Those points of view were not suppressed directly - the GDR had multiple political parties and elections - they were subverted covertly. Networks of powerful people worked together to create bad consequences for those who stepped out of line or who held the wrong views. People were denied career opportunities or were more likely to find themselves in prison if they weren't of the right mind.

Some of this happens in America today. Partisans who own businesses hire likeminded employees. Various voter suppression efforts are engaged in - pamphlets giving the wrong election day are distributed in neighborhoods with particular political persuasions, the allocation of voting machines to different communities and the drawing of electoral districts biases results in favor of particular interests.

One difference is that in the GDR the state security establishment was responsible for pursuing this domestically through the use of surveillance and lots of funding was provided in order to enable it. In America we have many different kinds of partisans and control of the government is mixed between them and shifts back and forth. This prevents a significant effort by one faction to use the security apparatus of the state of maintain their power. However, it... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]