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Comment by jlg23 | Hacker News Reader

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 authorities or psychological factors like envy is just an attempt by many who once willingly, consciously participated to now clear themselves of responsibility. As such, 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.

I spent the first few years of my life in the GDR, moved to West Germany in 1989 just before the wall fell and moved back a few years later. We have seen our Stasi-records, we know who snitched on us - it rarely were those disappointed or envious. It were people who actually were much better off, people who were convinced in the GDR's ideology and people who snitched on my family as a career move. We also could clearly see that those who were real friends did not provide information on us, even though they were asked to - in those records they are labeled "useless as a source".

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> 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.

> 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/

> 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, ...).

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?

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.

Really we should call liken the post-privacy era not so much to the Stasi as to Hoover's FBI, which busied itself with sending death threats to MLK and suchlike.

Or Guantanamo and its micro-gulag. There's a lot of brutality but it's aimed at an extremely small number of people.

> * 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].

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.

> * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience)

I.e. you can opt to not read or write anything online, and communicate with nobody, live underground, and never get ill? I'm not quite seeing it.

> Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by definition, not

Commercial entities themselves are often very centralized (there is a clear chain of ownership and command) and can be themselves be embedded in and/or used by more centralized organs. So one might as well say the Stasi wasn't centralized because it consisted of innumerable spooks and informants. Think of it as "The Stasi Cloud" or something, if that helps. Nothing is truly centralized, if you split hairs enough.

> snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about yourself tends to be "good" things only

We're not talking about information that is volunteered when openly asked though. And besides, that's besides the point. It is still a trampling on basic human rights on pretty much a global scale, by all sorts of nations and private entities.

When I cannot communicate with anyone by phone, email, or a social website they can be bothered to use, then I do not have the right to have private friendships much less any means to organize politically to step on any powerful toes. I can't be a free human being without other free human beings. So do I have that right, or not?

Sure, we got engineered into falling into trap voluntarily. It's no real consolation, other than that we could end it, if weren't so addicted to having new toys, preferably yesterday. But we are, and we don't, and if we won't ever, then it's really just a matter of the political climate changing drastically and widely once more, and then it may not change again for a long, horrible time span.

Because another important difference between the Stasi and this is that there is no outside. We're not just talking about today, at least I'm not, we know what is possible and we see the world changing quickly.

> should be addressed on their specific terms

You only list things that are, in your opinion, different. What about what the knowledge that anything you (digitally) say to anyone might be recorded practically forever does in regards to self-censorship, how might it ultimately even stump thought?

And what about the "decentralization of responsibility"? This can occur within a monolithic bureaucracy, but how much more so in a dog eat dog just doing my job world. And it's a very big factor in such things.

You don't need strict, obvious centralization when you have enough people following along voluntarily, or making up their own little rationalizations why they do any of the 1000 voluntary things that ultimately all serve you more than them. You need enough people, and enough technology to multiply their power, and the rest just needs to be passive and/or divided.

You might convince me that there are several smaller and bigger Stasis, some with just a little power, others with more, and that they overlap and differ in various ways. Just like the actual people the actual Stasi consisted of did. But other than that, I disagree on all points.

The desire of people to be free from surveillance by practically unaccountable people who pull shit like wars of aggression, abductions, assassinations, can never be "dangerous" enough. Yes, crying wolf is also not productive, but I honestly think we're beyond that. There's something in the pen, and the only way to see how friendly or dangerous it is, is to call it out. If we're too scared to even do that, to enforce human rights no matter who goes there, it just might be a wolf.

I mean, how "should" things be addressed? So far what little activism and education there was, has had very little results. It's not like the trend is changing, or even slowing down. So okay, being too "dramatic" or whatever is not okay, so what is okay? How big do you think the time window is?

Extremely cogent points, thanks for bringing them up. Your "Sure, we got engineered into falling into trap voluntarily." reminded me of the Panopticon'ish quality of an increasing number of the social networks and data nets we are forming. Who needs a Stasi, when the people themselves will eagerly straitjacket themselves into the pre-determined, desired conformity of whomever wields the power of this data corpora?

And it isn't just the sheer quantity and/or quality of the data either, that I see as different from before. Like you pointed out, the sheer ability to store the data indefinitely and efficiently retrieve it regardless of time passed adds a new dimension and quality to surveillance capabilities that too few outside the surveillance industry recognize.

The secret police was just an apparatus of the real enemy: politicians that see human beings as a means to their ends. We can't stop people from voluntarily sharing their information; the right to do that is liberty. If you're worried about the government using whatever means it has to control us, then focus on reducing the role of government in our lives. I don't understand the line of thinking that takes major issue with people voluntarily sharing bits about their activities and interests, but typically has no problem with the government demanding and controlling the details of your entire economic life.

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?

> 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

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...

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.

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.

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".

Do you accept "it wasn't real free market" argument when free market policies and deregulation fail or lead to an increase of suffering, poverty and inequality?

No. It was on the trajectory towards communism, but didn't achieve it. For starters, the economy used money. If you want to see sub-state communism, look at kibbutzim. You will have plenty material for criticism there.

"All attempts to achieve Communism?"

There has been one famous example, the USSR and its friends. It's arguable as to whether communism was even really the goal (Soviet politicians famously promised constantly "communism in 10 years" and everyone knew that was a lie). Certainly what they had was not communism, because communism is stateless, classless and, as my fellow commenter points out, lacks money.

I just saw a great interview of Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton history professor. He's spent many years digging through Soviet archives and other primary sources and just published the first book of a two volume series about Stalin. One of the things that he found was that these people were actually Communists. It's easy and tempting for us to dismiss the Soviet Union as megalomaniacs that used Communist rhetoric for their own ends, but that's not the truth. These people were true believers and they did the things they did in order to bring Communism to fruition. It's a dangerous ideology fueled by envy and contempt. The Cold War was not just two great powers contending for influence, it was an all out battle between two fundamentally opposed visions for humanity. One in which each man exists only to serve the ends of society, another where each man is an end in himself.

Edit: Link to the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzPzfEVjNE

> It's a dangerous ideology fueled by envy and contempt.

You should do some reading on the condition of the ordinary worker at the time Marx was writing. This would give you a more balanced perspective. By and large, communist movements were successful in countries where a small amount of people exploited the rest.

> One in which each man exists only to serve the ends of society, another where each man is an end in himself.

Except for part where Western governments have no issues with regimes where each man exists only to serve the ends of a few (most of Cold War South America, for instance).

Not that I'm defending communism, which everywhere resulted in oppressive, inefficient and ultimately conservative bureaucracies, but there are good reasons while it was attempted in so many different places, and this wasn't solely due to USSR/Chinese/Cuban influence.

I can't and won't defend all of the things that the West did to win the Cold War. Some were outright wrong. But some were pragmatic choices between two evils. Supporting Pinochet's coup in Chile is the most famous case. Interestingly, and conveniently left out of the narrative by those who want to demonize the West, the Chilean Congress authorized Allende's removal because he was flouting the law, was a totalitarian communist, and was a close ally of Castro. Pinochet then refused to relinquish power back to the congress. He was not a good man, and sent death squads to kill people for being suspected communists, but it probably would have been worse if Allende had his way. People overestimate the amount of power the US and the West had to influence those kinds of events. We could influence things one way or the other, but we didn't have a liberal democracy wand that would magically transform a country's political culture. We tried that in Iraq and it was a failure.

You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite.

> We could influence things one way or the other, but we didn't have a liberal democracy wand that would magically transform a country's political culture. We tried that in Iraq and it was a failure.

I'm not disputing that (well, unless you mean that the main point of the Iraq war was to bring Coca-Cola and democracy to the oppressed Iraqi masses). It's just that IMHO, most of each block's policy was about protecting their own political and economic interests, camouflaging such unpalatable truths under the guise of "freeing people from oppression". You certainly had people who believed in what they were doing, but IMHO, for most of the people pulling the levers, that was about knowing on which side the bread was buttered.

> You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite.

It's ironic you write about the Spanish Civil War, considering that the main reason Stalin-backed communists got so much power was that the Republic was entirely dependent on them for weapons, largely in part due to the passive British support for Franco.

Of course they believed it, but nonetheless they were not actually heading towards it. How do you transition from a police state with a strong social hierarchy and monetary economic system to a stateless society with no classes or money overnight?

They were doing exactly what Marx and Engels called for. Violent coercion and oppression is the only way to crush human individuality. Verbatim from The Communist Manifesto:

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. EDITORIAL: I presume rebels means anyone who isn't a communist

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

While I know there's a big problem in American discourse with overlabelling everything from single-payer healthcare to duck hunting permits as "communism", I think if you can't call Marxism-Leninism or Bolshevism "Communism" then we're deep into no-true-Scotsman territory.

The inherent problem with framing everything in terms of class struggle is there's no room for human rights, which leaves the individual vulnerable to being crushed by the system. The few remaining people on the left who really do derive ideologically from Marxism-Leninism really need to notice this and advance their thinking a bit.

Marxism-Leninism is fine. Lenin decided to skip industrialization and went for socialism in one country (though he did try exporting "class consciousness" via war with Poland), as well as initiating the Red Terror. Stalin refined what Lenin had began.

Considering that communism requires the simultaneous abolition of the state, money/credit in favor of pure production-for-use and all class distinctions, it is dubious whether this can even be done at all, and certainly most countries are in no position to come close.

Communism requires no such thing. Marx and Engels and every other serious communist thinker understood that it had to be a gradual process requiring tremendous amounts of state coercion and oppression. Ctrl-F for my other comments on this thread to see an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto. Don't underestimate your enemy or they will win.

> in order to advance your career

Yeah, but "advancing one's career" is something that you didn't have to do at all in eastern bloc countries. Yes, if you wanted to get out of the country, or get rich, or own a car, or own a TV you really had to have friends in the right places. But an overwhelming majority of people didn't even know they should want things like this. Instead, they were happy to be alive and to have shelter and food, even if they had to wait in queues for hours to get that food.

Personally, I'm not old enough to remember much, but I do talk with older people - of the age of my parents and grandparents - and many of them have nothing but praise for the communist period. For example, I'm being told that year after year all the school children were able to go on summer vacation free of charge. They say all the textbooks, even at the university level, were either completely free or cost less than a pack of matches. Literacy and higher-education rates skyrocketed. Some remember even earlier times, when there was no electricity in most villages and they feel grateful for all the infrastructure work that was done then.

The more I hear and know about the era, the less I understand how it was really like. It seems so alien, so impossible, and it did fail in the end, but it somehow worked for nearly 50 years before that! How was that possible?

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.

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