Citizen Spies
I was looking for the German or Russian word for the organizations in charge of the acts of turning your neighbors in to the state. I know the US one is Infragard but I remember as a child being taught the evils of Communism and how children would turn in their parents as dissenters and also how the Germans informed on each other. Anyway I thought a likely place to look is the sites that compare Bush to Hitler, so I googled it and there were only 76,000 sites which I thought seemed kind of small considering the subject. I went to Yahoo and there were 27,100,000 sites. Even Ask has over 2 million sites for Bush Hitler. Now call me paranoid, but Microsoft might want to buy Yahoo to make it more like Google. The media is pretty much all propaganda all the time, and an easy way to do the same to the internet is to control the search engines - why pass laws when the free market is the answer to all things?
As an aside, one story about Nazi Germany I ran across was about a secretary who wanted another girl's apartment so she turned her in. What is to stop the Infragard businesses from getting rid of their competition through various means? Knowledge is power - Francis Bacon
As an aside, one story about Nazi Germany I ran across was about a secretary who wanted another girl's apartment so she turned her in. What is to stop the Infragard businesses from getting rid of their competition through various means? Knowledge is power - Francis Bacon
posted by Flimsy Sanity @ 3:15 AM
4 Comments:
At 8:49 AM,
Anonymous said…
excellent research!
At 4:19 AM,
michael greenwell said…
there is a great story john pilger tells about two russian journalists who came to america and were being shown around various media places to see how an open media system works.
they were astonished by it and asked how it was done becuase in russia they had to send people to work camps in order to get that level of compliance!
At 6:43 AM,
Anonymous said…
Is this what you were looking for?
The Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life. In the mid-1980s, a network of civilian informants, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), began growing in both German states; by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed an estimated 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants. About one of every 50 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi — one of the most extensive police infiltrations of a society in history. In 2007 an article in BBC stated that "Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens." Additionally, Stasi agents infiltrated and undermined West Germany's government and spy agencies.
The Stasi monitored political behavior among GDR citizens, and is known to have used torture and intimidation to mute dissent. During the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, Stasi offices were overrun by enraged citizens, but not before the Stasi destroyed a number of documents (approximately 5%)[2] When the remaining files were published for review, many people learned that their friends, colleagues, spouses, and relatives had regularly filed reports with the Stasi. - wikipedia
At 2:49 AM,
Flimsy Sanity said…
About what one could expect from Germans ;).
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