Stasi

[darmstadt]

What with the UK now being the 'nanny state', CCTV, anti-terrorism laws used to track innocent people, remote controlled dustbins and all the other amazing stuff I read in the papers, here is the latest in a long line of unbelievable acts confirming my belief that very soon East Germany will have looked like a holiday camp compared to what the UK is becoming.

[eliquant]

"Tony Blair's got big ears, Tony's got big eaaarsss, nah- nah nah-nah naaah ..."

[RichardCranium]

"Tony Blair's got big ears, Tony's got big eaaarsss, nah- nah nah-nah naaah ..."

That's because Noddy told Plod that Big Ears was plump enough to be wearing a suicide vest.

[suityou01]

That's because Noddy told Plod that Big Ears was plump enough to be wearing a suicide vest.

Right, Cranium! Over 'ere. You're going on the database.

Then you can stand outside the school library for the rest of play time, not speaking to anyone.

[wobbegong]

What with the UK now being the 'nanny state', CCTV, anti-terrorism laws used to track innocent people, remote controlled dustbins and all the other amazing stuff I read in the papers, here is the latest in a long line of unbelievable acts confirming my belief that very soon East Germany will have looked like a holiday camp compared to what the UK is becoming.

Your name vill also go on ze list. Vot is it?

Don't tell him Pike!

[NotAllThere]

I suggest reading The Gulag Archipelago, being very afraid, and then emigrating. Oh, hang on. It's a daily mail link.

Nothing to see, move along.

[chef]

arrrrgghhhh my eyes my eyes, I didn't realise until it was too late that the link went to the Daily Wail !!!!

[Menelaus]

I suggest reading The Gulag Archipelago, being very afraid, and then emigrating. Oh, hang on. It's a daily mail link.

Nothing to see, move along.

The literary conclusions of the last nearly thirteen years are too obvious to ignore. It's true that the Gulag Archipelago is a worrying read, as is 1984 and the film V for Vendetta; I fear over time that something has gone badly, badly wrong in the "brave new world" (no reference to Huxley) that New Labour promised - in that such works are being looked upon as instruction manuals for the current regime, not works which would otherwise be the subjects of reaction from their readership of "phew, at least that couldn't happen here".

When it comes to a truly awful read though - and a possible prediction of the future, past the Stalinist, sorry, Blair-Brown, regime I'd recommend another work by Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, a novel which tells the story of a small group of cancer patients in Uzbekistan in 1955, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and explores the moral responsibility — symbolised by the patients' malignant tumours — of those implicated in the suffering of their fellow citizens during Stalin's Great Purge, when millions were killed, sent to labour camps, or exiled.

One of the patients fears that a man he helped to jail, now released, will seek revenge, while others come to realize that their passive involvement, their failure to resist, renders them as guilty as any other. "You haven't had to do much lying, do you understand?" Shulubin tells the main character, Oleg Kostoglotov, who was in a labor camp. "At least you haven't had to stoop so low — you should appreciate that! You people were arrested, but we were herded into meetings to 'expose' you. They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts ... And not just applaud, they made us demand the firing squad, demand it!"

Toward the end of the novel, Kostoglotov — who, like Solzhenitsyn, was forced into exile under Article 58, which dealt with so-called counter-revolutionaries — realizes that the damage done to him, and to Russia, was too great, and that there will be no healing, no normal life now that Stalin has gone. On the day of his release from the cancer ward, toward the end of the novel, he visits a zoo, seeing in the animals people he knew: "[E]ven supposing Oleg took their side and had the power, he would still not want to break into the cages and liberate them ... [D]eprived of their home surroundings, they had lost the idea of rational freedom. It would only make things harder for them, suddenly to set them free."[2]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Ward

[VectraMan]

I read somewhere that West Germany had four times the crime rate than East Germany. So clearly the Stasi were doing something right.

[wurzel]

I often look at these stories and try to see the other side of the coin. This one, however, is truly disturbing.