It is quite horrendous. One wonders, how all this was possible!
65 years ago and less than half a year after the birth of the DDR – German Democratic Republic or East Germany – the new state moved on to secure its position by introducing one of the most effective tools of social control in history: the Stasi.
Short for Staatsicherheit – State Security – the ministry in its charge called it to life with the Soviet secret police as its blueprint. In its first year, the Stasi had 2,700 official employees. Three years later that number grew to 13,000 – a rather moderate count compared to the 91,015 on the official Stasi payroll recorded on October 31st, 1989.
Between 1950 and 1989 the East German secret police provided regular employment to 250,000 people, at the same time using the “services” of 624,000 unofficial agents. Considering the numbers, one in 30 East Germans was more or less actively involved with the…
View original post 499 more words
AuntyUta 
Sadly NSA spying on all of us – it’s not just limit to US citizens and residents – is far more intrusive than anything the Stasi ever accomplished.
My goodness, I think what the Stasi did to the DDR citizens was absolutely horrendous! How can anything be worse? How many of the world’s population can be locked up in jail? Modern surveillance probably comes a bit cheaper than what the Stasi was able to accomplish. But to deprive more and more people of their freedom by jailing them there must be a limit to this. Or maybe it is “1984, here we come!”
In many US cities, 50-75% of the young black male population can expect to serve time in jail or prison because of the so called “war on drugs.” In many cases people are given long sentences for mere drug possession. And many people who are innocent wind up in prison because they can’t afford a decent lawyer and are pressured to to accept a plea bargain. After their release, they are ineligible for welfare, food stamps, public housing and many, many jobs due to the felony on their record.
Maybe it cannot get any worse than this. The question is, what do we do with all this information? I thought what the Nazis did was the worst that could ever have happened without an uprising of the whole nation.
I think we all have to make that decision for ourselves based on our own particular situation. I have dealt with it by becoming a full time activist – by educating and organising people to end some of the worst atrocities in the current system.
🙂