Staatssicherheitsdienst or in English, the State Security Service was the East German arm of the KGB but it was commonly referred to as the Stasi. They learned all the lessons that Stalin’s KGB could teach them and then in typical German fashion they made them more efficient. Their hallmark was to eschew the gulag by making all of East Germany one giant prison. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans were employed as informants on their families, friends and coworkers. All types of brutality and coercion were used by the Stasi. But their masterpiece was a technique called Zersetzung.
“The Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it’s described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally “biodegradation”. But actually, it’s a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn’t try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.”
—Hubertus Knabe, German historian
What seems apparent to me is that the Left has lifted this technique and applies it to both their operations in the intelligence agencies and also in their cancel culture operations through the woke social media platforms. Look at the definition, “by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships… It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.” These are the weapons of personal destruction that are on display throughout our culture.
What does it say about our country that the methods of communist dictatorships have been borrowed by our own federal police agencies? Maybe it’s just a case of, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the illegality of the techniques that are on display by the NSA and the FBI are wholly as despicable as what the Stasi did. And I don’t mean that they did things like torture people and beat confessions out of them. What I mean is that unlike Russia and East Germany our intelligence agencies are absolutely forbidden to violate the privacy laws inherent in the Bill of Rights. But these prohibitions have been swept aside without even a pretense of due process.
The excesses of Russiagate and the recent case of the leaked text messages of Tucker Carlson show clearly that the FBI, NSA and other executive branch intelligence services no longer feel the need to pretend to follow the law. They are clearly above the law and flaunt this status as a way to cow their targets.
When the East German government finally fell the records of the Stasi were exposed to public scrutiny and countless informants were exposed. Wouldn’t it be liberating if a full accounting was finally made of the partisan crimes that the Obama Justice Department perpetrated in 2015, 2016 and 2017? These treasonous acts very much deserve to be exposed and the culprits prosecuted. The death penalty seems excessive. I would say life in prison would be fair. And I don’t suggest this as a form of revenge, although I would enjoy that. I propose it as a deterrent against the next partisan hack who decides he disagrees with the results of an American election. After all we grant enormous power and prestige to the law enforcement personnel who work at the highest levels of the Justice Department. When they use that power to attack innocent Americans, they strike at the very heart of the American system.
