Reply to: Stasi

[OwlHoot]

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

Most East Germans probably had nothing worth nicking, unless you count a few mouldy spuds.

[wurzel]

I was having a conversation about this with a couple of left leaning friends earlier. I put it to them that if this law were applied right across the board then every child would end up on it because all kids at some time say something "racist" or "homophobic" even if its just describing something as being "gay". Of course, I should have known better; I was met with the normal faux indignation about how I could even suggest that they had EVER said anything un - PC in their entire lives and what a revolting human being I was for admitting that i HAD said something naughty at some point during mine.

[DodgyAgent]

It was reckoned that the Stasi make excellent taxi drivers. Apparently all you need to do was give them your name and they know where you live.

[Mich the Tester]

The only thing we need now is to be forced to drive crappy little plastic cars and the resurrection of the DDR is complete.

[DS23]

....however I cannot get into Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment nearly killed me...

it does what it says on the tin then?

[stek]

Solzhenitsyn was a genius, an arrogant one but with what he went through....

'One Day of Ivan Denisovich' is my favourite, however I cannot get into Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment nearly killed me...

[ratewhore]

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

No, your avatar is truly disturbing...

[NotAllThere]

I read somewhere that West Germany had four times the crime rate than East Germany. ...

And maybe a hundred times as many non-criminals in prison.

[NotAllThere]

... 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,..

Read it.

[Menelaus]

The Lives of Others (German film, ace) was on BBC4 earlier this week.

[threaded]

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

I read somewhere that habitual criminals were given a map and instructions on how to get to the west...

[doodab]

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

The osties didn't have anything worth nicking.

[wurzel]

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

[VectraMan]

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

[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