If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.. might just be a duck.
I don’t believe those living “normal lives” in East Germany or the Soviet era considered the police to be evil and invasive the way we do today.
"normal life" under the Stasi was constant political terror and suppression.
The death counts are low because they thought death too little of a penalty for opposing them - they used psychological warfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung) and torture instead.
The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims states that there were between 300,000 and 500,000 victims of the Stasi's use of psychological warfare, direct physical torture and gross human rights violations: https://web.archive.org/web/20210909114942/https://irct.org/....
Sure, not as bad. Woohoo.
Planning, attempting to, or helping people escape (not stay) was the #1 reason for Stasi arrests.
Specifically, the most frequent Stasi arrest charges were Republikflucht ("fleeing the republic") and Fluchthelfer ("helping others flee")
Also, the Stasi ran on roughly 1 informant per 60–180 residents. Your network of friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors would have several. They officially criminalized private speech, correspondence and travel. The US surveillance system is bad, but the Stasi informant network and set of official consequences was at such a level as to cause constant fear and dread for everyone.
- as a citizen, being arrested for trying to leave
- as an illegal alien, being arrested for trying to stay
Those are literally structural opposites of each other.
Iceland and the UK in particular. They wouldn't even let me in at London Heathrow without a printed out return ticket (I had to run over to the British Airways desk to get a copy).
Either way - I was not allowed to stay longer than a few weeks.
That's not a wrong thing, it's very normal. If you want to stay, you have to apply for residency.
By 1) relying on such labour and 2) denying either lawful entry or any plausible path to permanent status for the vast majority of these workers and their families, not to mention many, many, many broken promises along the way (asylum, DREAM Act, don't get me started on Native American treaties), the U.S. has de facto maintained a legally-underprivileged and disadvantaged working class long after the statutory prohibition of (most) slavery and indentured servitude.
Yes, there are also economic and political circumstances within the US geopolitical orbit which encourage inward migration. That too cannot be separated from long-standing U.S. foreign, economic, and military policies within the region.
This needs to stop.
There are very few if any country that does not enforce immigration rules. Let any American try to live illegally in Canada. Sure, they can live under the radar like you can in Mexico too, but if they catch up to you, goodbye. Mexico doesn’t even treat its own returning citizens well. If you have not been a taxpayer you have to assume many things tax paying Mexicans get for free like education and healthcare. People act like we’re an aberration for enforcing immigration laws. We’re not. Go check out South Africa and see how they treat illegals.
The one place where any hard working person was welcome.
What is the protectionism even for? The US doesn't have a great social system that can be exploited.
Those"illegals"? They were making sandwiches and cleaning toilets, and this is their reward.
Yes we can have legal immigrants that fill skills gaps. Thats not an issue for 95% of Americans so long as it’s done justly (and not simply a way to pay workers less).
Immigration has an official legal process to follow.
Why is that so bad? If the law needs to change - fine, change it. But allowing people to break the law is to enable collapse of the rule of law.
Forgive my comparison, but it illustrates the problem.
The law cannot be allowed to become lawless itself, depriving the people of their rights to fast track the pre-determined punishment.
None of those are needed for enforcing immigration law. This is a choice, supported by a lot of people who should have known better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany_balloon_escape
If we don’t try to delete the data off our phones then the anti-freedom brigade has already won.
It's already a crime (in the books) to drive out of several red states for women's health care reasons, and they'll follow you on flock if they can.
Mark Bray had his and his family's airline tickets to Spain out of Newark "mysteriously cancelled" while in line after checking in their baggage.
It's as if they are looking for an exacting duplicate of previous regimes before they become concerned—the agency name must be "Stasi" and uniforms must be of the same color.
By the end of the 1940s, things are tightening up, there are now armed "police" who in effect work for the Soviets "protecting" East Germany at the border, barbed wire and deep trenches now block unofficial crossings, but it is still definitely possible to leave, in the worst case maybe you bribe a guard. Hundreds of thousands are able to flee by "just" walking (or driving) West.
In 1952 the "Special Regime" begins to "keep out spies". Most of the border is sealed, you can't bribe your way when there is no official crossing, the remaining guards are told to shoot people who try to cross, after all none of them are legitimate. However since Berlin still has a crossing, and the West still seems hell bent on holding their half despite the fact it's cut off from the world, you could travel to East Berlin and sneak across to West Berlin. Over the next decade or so millions do, East Germany tried very hard to stop this, but because it was physically possible it seemed like there wasn't much they could do...
In 1961 they built the wall. It was no longer physically possible to escape.
That's wrong.
I am sure you do not speak German, because otherwise you'd have a lot more information available.
If you do speak German, listen to Dieter Hallervorden. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJh9ejnpvFc
He explained why he escaped from the DDR. And they ALL knew that the cops were sniffing on them. Of course they considered the cops as evil and invasive, even by today standards.
He was not a “normal person”, normal people are like your neighbour who lives simply and doesn’t engage in politics except to share their discomfort about some relatively trivial grievance like the price of eggs.
Soviet famine of 1930–1933
"It is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union. In addition, 50 to 70 million Soviet citizens starved during the famine but ultimately survived."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
Great Purge
"Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million."
We don't look at the deaths of our own people as "oppressive" despite the fact that the circumstances that caused them to die was our system.
I'm not some bleeding heart liberal or anti-capitalist... I just have an open mind to the idea that we're not necessarily the good guys just because we are us and I look at what is factually true - as in, how could we be described by a non-sympathetic entity.
Everyone is their own hero. Nobody believes sincerely that they're the baddie.
Chronic lower respiratory diseases account for 145k people a year in the US, and that is a consequence (largely) of car dependence...
Or, more directly, 20,000 people a year die due to malnutrition and starvation, tallied over years (as most do) that can rapidly rise to over 100k in a half-decade.
The UK has an excess mortality rate of 330,000 linked to healthcare cuts (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/over-330000...).
I get that the numbers were talking about are much higher, but it doesn't follow logically to me that ordinary citizens knew that their government was the "bad" one with its actions.
Hell, I know Russian families who genuinely believe Putin is doing the right thing right now. So, I don't blindly accept that my government is right just because I think "we're the goodies".
I know Russians who want to have nothing to do with Putin and want to live their life.
I have worked with both Russians and Ukrainians who fled Russia and Ukraine to escape mobilization (Personal note: it was interesting to see how good cooperation they had).
Famine was so common you need extreme outliers like 1601–1603 which killed ~1/3 of the population before they tend to show up in history books.
The regions of the USSR (the Volga region, the Central Black Earth Region, the North Caucasus, the Urals, the Crimea, part of Western Siberia), Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus have suffered from the result of the famine caused by forced collectivization. About 7 million people were killed by hunger and illnesses associated with malnutrition in 1932–1933.
This tragedy does not have and cannot have internationally established signs of genocide and should not be the subject of contemporary political speculation.
Deputies of the State Duma, honoring the victims of the 1930s famine on the territory of the USSR, strongly condemn the regime that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals, and proclaim the inadmissibility of the revival in the formerly included in the Soviet Union, totalitarian regimes that neglected the rights and lives of their citizens.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230329195700/https://holodomor...
"The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933 that resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people, are the subject of scholarly and political debate, particularly surrounding the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which was designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention."