Angela Merkel, Stalin in Drag

 Back in the Pleistocene era in 1989 the Berlin wall went down.  Most of the East Germans, who had likely contemplated with envy the “freedom” enjoyed by the Jurgens and Gretas next door in the West, must have wondered with great anticipation what life in a post-Stalinist world would be like.  No Stasi knuckle crushing snoops in every crevice to monitor and record what you read, said, or might be thinking, no need to pretend that the stupid government propaganda was anything more than attempted manipulation and control.  How relieved and optimistic they must have been, and no one trying to peer into the future then, even with the wildest imagination, could likely have conjured up as a Frau-Fuhrer so ghastly a phantasm as the Teutonic Stalin-in-drag, Angela Merkel. 

A Stalinist world, such as the USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or Erich Honecker’s DDR, is an alternative universe, one where everything is the opposite of what it is said to be and where just pointing that out amounts to a serious crime.  “Democracy,” majority rule, is the imposition of diktats by the bosses in the Politburo. “Equality” is rigid caste system of privileged party overseeers.  “Freedom” is a one-way ticket to forced labor in the Gulag for those unenthused about life in the workers’ paradise, getting shot trying to escape from East Berlin, or sliding off a crude raft and drowning in the waters off Havana.    

Which bring us to today’s Germany where Boss Merkel has resurrected and summoned the Stalinist Stasi who now pursue the unenlightened ones who exhibit, shall we say, inappropriate emotions.  No room for Germans who do not like the way that they are told to feel about what the apparatchiks are doing to them, a bit like it was in back in the DDR.  Consider, below, this Orwellian description of what German politicians and German police do to German people who fail to understand the proper boundaries of expression.  From a report on recent German government crackdown on social media users.

“In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism. The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”

As officialese goes, this is hard to top for its sheer self-contradictory stupidity, and its bullying, sinister intonations. To begin, “The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action.”  "Hate posting"?  Well, this does sound serious: police action must ensue to stamp out, yes, hate posting. The German people are in grave danger.  But then, try not to laugh, as we learn that the Federal government launched a “coordinated campaign across 14 states” in a country of no less than eighty-one million people, to ensnare a grand total of 36 folks plunking away on social media. Sounds eerily like the Stasi of the DDR, searching far and wide, making sure that no one steps out of line with the approved thinking and guidance of Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker.  This does not describe the action of a government protecting the security and interests of its citizens: it is the work of a propagandizing regime of ideocrats chasing down a few hapless, harmless dissenters. With highly publized punishment for the recalcitrant few, you can cower the many.

These 36 people were “accused of hateful postings over social media” and please note the anonymity, a Kafkaesque nameless specter which accuses but cannot be identified, questioned, countered or even understood.  Who were the accusers and what was the exact nature of the accusations beyond the big old umbrella of “hateful”?  Vague and general works best for government enforcers.  “Hateful” in its normal usage is pretty subjective, but Merkel and the German political establishment have politicized the word so that it is objective, precise and, most important, applicable – “hateful” is disapproval or criticism of state-defined victims – but yet conveniently vague and abstract – producing “a climate of fear” – so as to be able to criminalize whomever they have determined has dissented from the state-imposed multi-cultural orthodoxy.  “A climate of fear” is a nice tool for the government bosses. They can pull it out when needed, supplemented with the lexicon of invectives – “xenophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “nativist” “fascist” -- and unleash their repressive organs, selectively, on whomever offends the the noble sensibilities of the moment.  

“Incitement to racism” as a crime is particularly troublesome to contemplate since “racist” is now applied so promiscuously, particularly by leftwing politicians all over the planet, as to be meaningless beyond its intent as an insult, shorthand for “a stupid, mean-spirited right-winger, lacking in compassion for the unfortunate who has no place in our progressive society.”  In the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed that half of Donald Trump supporters were “racists” and hence, “irredeemable,” which to a lot of people sounded rather hateful, not to mention, threatening. Unlike other crimes, e. g. murder, assault, burglary, jury tampering, it is impossible for one to prove that he is not a racist (no one I have ever heard of has of yet ever pulled off this feat), which makes it so handy and versatile.  Safe to say, no leftwing politician in the U.S in the last twenty years has not at some time resorted to calling someone he or she didn’t like a racist. And, speaking of “incitement,” and “hate speech,” reeved up on a steady stream of Trump-hatred from the likes of the NYT scribblers and CNN, MSNBC talkers, a leftist from the Bernie Sanders camp recently attempted to murder a couple of dozen Republican congressmen in suburban Washington DC.  

Let us now hear from the head German policeman, Herr, Holger Münch, speaking like he was trained by the editors of Pravda.  “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”  Orwellian Newspeak like this leans toward first-person plural pronouns – “Our free society…” –  there is, of course, no “our”, in possession of a "free society."  This is an intentional misdirection which camouflages the master-slave relationship of the German people and their German governors, the actual power exerted by an elite, privileged class over those whom they regard as their inferiors, some of whom, many perhaps, who resent the imposed mass migration of needy third-worlders and who don’t feel free to complain about it. Of course, we don’t know what the “threats,” “criminal violence” and “violence” are that filled the social media messaging of these now 36 criminals tracked down by the German Feds, but one suspects that the laws upon which the prosecution will be based have been written with  a maximum, "enemy of our freedom" scope and flexibility as to assure conviction and that the presiding magistrates will spare no effort to inflict maximum punishment.  Examples must be made.   

One “climate of fear” that does not seem to trouble Holger Münch much comes from the spectacle of secular, liberated German women accosted in mass by young immigrant Muslim males whose views of women are shaped by the texts of a seventh century prophet from a desert, and whose behavior, coming from German men, would put them for long stretches in prison.   From New Year’s Eve, 2016:

“The world reeled following reports that as many as 1,000 women had been sexually assaulted - groped, robbed, intimidated and separated from their friends - at Cologne's central train station on New Year's Eve. Many of the perpetrators, it was alleged, appeared to be of North African or Arab descent…”  

Oh, yes, no jumping to conclusions too quickly: the “alleged” North African and Arab-descendent robbers, gropers and sexual assaulters numbered at least 1,000.  They collected around one gathering place in a single city in contrast to the 36 Die Herren und Damen in 14 different states at home on laptops posting mean, angry stuff on their Facebook pages, probably read only by the flunkies in the governments' PC surveillance department who sicced the policemen on them.  Who, really, should be afraid of whom?  In the new DDR only Angela and her Handlangeren get to say.  But let’s pursue the conversation about fear.  There was a lot of it on the streets of Cologne and elsewhere in Germany from the criminal violence of Merkel’s protected class of victims.  The perpetrators, however, are not the concern or target of the nouveau Stasi Federal police chief.  Instead, room for more of them must be made so that Frau Merkel’s globalist, multicultural, bona fides remain in tact.  This is a “climate of fear” that the Germans will be expected by Merkel and her crew to get used to.

The hate-speech/hate crime legislation that Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada and other western European countries have put into place is a predictable, logical extension of their capitulation to third world mass migration.  In the U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, who was instrumental in the passage of the 1965 immigration law that led to the flooding of the country with third world immigrants, later became a strong advocate in the Senate of hate-crime legislation.  Mass immigration and hate-crimes are hand in glove measures for leftists. First you flood the towns with aliens and then punish the locals when they complain.

In the same news release cited above, Heiko Mass, the German Justice Minister, is now said to be pushing for a new law that targets “hate speech” on social media.  As the elites’ strategy of the ethnic replacement of their native populations becomes a painful reality to them, it becomes politically necessary to ramp up the criminalization of the inevitable expression of resentment that results, and to punish resistance and opposition to the planned destruction.  The criminalization of speech based on emotion is one more step toward completing the soft totalitarian society desired by the left with its coerced uniformity of thinking and behavior.  Somehow, somewhere down the road we will all be equal the way, God, no, sorry, history intended.  Don’t worry, be happy.

Communism: The Best Kept Secret

The totalitarian movements have been called ‘secret societies established in broad daylight. ’              

                                                                          Hannah Arendt

One of the hallmarks of Communist practice, that is, what Communists always do when they are in power is to authorize and document their decisions and actions in secret. Secrecy rules: their centers of power are mysterious – remote, inaccessible, protected from outside scrutiny, protean. The policies they create and apply are arbitrary and opaque.

This penchant for secrecy underscores the fact that dishonesty resides at the heart of Communist rule.  Communists are now and always have been monumental liars. They lie to get power. They lie to keep it and they lie about what they do to keep it.  When they hold power their operations embody what is the opposite of what we today call “transparency.” Secrecy and opacity are necessary elements of their self-preservation.  

A liar’s risk of exposure runs much higher if he must perform in a milieu where logic and empirical reality have some basic hold on serious discussion and communication.  Thus, Communist organs of power must be relentlessly secretive in order to preserve the ideological fictions of legitimacy and protect the power-holders and decision makers from the consequences of failure.  Secrecy protects the liars; those who attempt to penetrate it and to know and tell the truth become targets of systematic abuse.  Depending on how morally debased the regime is and how seriously threatened they feel that abuse ranges from slander and character assassination to physical destruction. 

The Soviet officials’ Central Office of Statistics we now know kept two separate and distinct sets of demographic statistics, one for internal use the other for publication.*  Demography measures the essential activities of people, and the practical effect of Communism tends to reduce what demographers measure: in short, Communist rule physically diminishes people and their activities, a sort of living death. They live shorter lives, produce less, have less and reproduce less.  Under Stalin, demography was a hazardous occupation. The secret, true statistics could never be publicized or shared because what they revealed contradicted the official claims of the regime and established its incompetence and failure.    

Hannah Arendt notes in her study of the Stalinist apparatus in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that there were three separate apparati in the Soviet system: The party; the soviet or state appartat; and the NKVD, that is, the secret police that did Stalin’s bidding.+  However, she makes the important point that the more visible the agencies were, the less real power they actually had—the secret agencies such as the NKVD were the real power centers, hence the secret police-state fundamental nature of this regime. “Real power begins where secrecy begins.”+ The “real power” is unlimited power. Police who are secret are unconstrained by law which means that they can do whatever the leaders want them to do to the people they are supposed to protect.

 Stalin also created extensive and obscure labyrinths of bureaucracy in order to occlude the paths of decision-making and deflect the application of accountability. “The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence…”+ The organ of the secret police combined the two essential elements of Communist rule, coercion and dishonesty. Secret police are a ubiquitous feature of Communist governments and are a necessary and inevitable result of the regime’s need to shield the operations of the ruling elite from public view.

East Germany’s Stasi, built by Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker may have been the most ubiquitous secret police force ever assembled.  It numbered 91,000 by 1989 compared with Hitler’s Gestapo of 7,000 in 1937. There was one full-time Stasi employee for every 180 East Germans.# The East German Party leaders not only produced the typical propaganda of Communism’s vast superiority and inevitable triumph, but it directed massive amounts of its human resources to prevent the East German people from knowing the truth and to punish those who might attempt to speak it.

          The need for secrecy in the Communist dictatorships would eventually take a toll. What is secret cannot be communicated and the absence of trust worthy communication makes effective decision-making difficult. Of the Post WWII, Eastern European communist states, Stephen Kotkin writes.  “[T]he Communist establishments were often incoherent, riven by turf wars and hyper-secrecy.  Decision making remained a black box even within the upper echelons, while wiretapping and informing were so widespread that elites often hesitated to socialize.”#  

Secrecy and the collateral suspicion made it hard even for the elites to manage and govern.  When no one can tell the truth, or when the truth simply becomes the official propaganda pronouncement of the moment eventually no one can trust anyone. Suspenseful anticipation of the next propaganda shift saps energy and exhausts resources.

The secrecy and dishonesty necessary to perpetuate Communist rule mean that enormous resources must be concentrated on coordinating the constant production of lies, a challenging task because each one of the many lies has a limited and uncertain durability and an unpredictable time-span span of utility.  Since the lies are in conflict with reality, but at the same time crafted and launched to represent reality, they are inevitably tested against reality – which unfolds often in unpredictable, uncontrollable ways – by the lied-to.  The lie must compete with the truth, and even though the competition is blunted by the secretive, coercive party organs, still the lie is at a disadvantage with the truth.  Once launched, the lie at some point falls under scrutiny and invites detection.  The liar, of course, has an investment in the lie, a practical investment with some gain or advantage to be anticipated. The more ambitious the lie, the more is at stake for the liar if the lie gets exposed.  For governments that are built on lies, of course, the investment in them is huge and what is at stake is their existence.  This explains why Communist governments have never been able to continue to function without massive and unrelenting coercion. Communists govern not only in opposition to their own people but against the truth – a perpetual war on two fronts which takes a toll.

Once the coercion is relaxed, the institutionalized lies, long privately doubted, can be publically contested and repudiated as they were all across Eastern and Central Europe in 1989-1991.  Once the lies are openly acknowledged and impossible to uphold, the leaders have nothing left to offer and no authority to govern.  Cynicism and resentment fill the void. They must either resort to force or quit.

The constant lies that were so successful for a good part of the twentieth century in perpetuating the delusion of Communist inevitability and superiority finally no longer convinced even many of those who ruled under its auspices. Secrecy even at is best is porous, fragile and unstable.  Once the secrets lost their coercive protection, disillusionment with Communism set in even in Western Europe where it was popular with the intellectuals.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI), muscular and confident at the end of WWII, by the 1970s had jettisoned its Leninist revolutionary purism in order to pursue power-sharing coalitions with non-Communist parties.  By the late 1980s its membership was in severe decline and the CPI was about little more than a refuge for ersatz revolutionaries.  Similarly the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1946 received 28% of the vote in the national elections. Though bitterly clinging more rigidly and desperately to its doctrinal purity than the Italians, by the late 1980s the PCF had become politically marginal and irrelevant to practical French politics.**   Communism without coercion cannot be sustained. 

The grim, anhedonic Communism that Mao and his Red Guard had imposed on the Chinese gave way to a full embrace of Western-style consumerism. The ugly, unisex Mao suits were finally abandoned.  Thirty years after Mao’s death Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wall Mart and shopping malls began to decorate the Communist Chinese landscape with Mercedes and Lexis autos filling the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.  Starbucks coffee could be purchased at the Great Wall.

The decades-long practice of Communism in large portions of the planet had finally in spite of the torrent of lies, the propaganda and the corruption, revealed the inanity of the theory and the failure of its practice. The satellites of the Soviet Communism Empire rebelled; in Russia the system simply collapsed.  The Chinese Communist overlords opted for schizophrenia.  They tolerated even encouraged capitalist economic practices while still talking like old guard Leninists and monopolizing political power as Leninists always do.  The archives are still closed, the crimes of the Moa era still to be kept secret from the Chinese people. 

Mao remains for his people the revered founder of modern China.  However, the murderous historical reality of his career was horrendous and intrusive enough to force even the ruling elite to the coining of a euphemism that hinted at least hinted at some imperfection in the rule of the Great Oarsman: “Mao was 70% good, 30% bad.”  The Cultural Revolution is now a collective memory of a disagreeable sort and as the vapors of Maoist fanaticism dissipated, chicken McNuggets, burgers and fries from Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds would be clasped in the hands of the youth instead of the Little Red Book.  During the 13^th Party Congress in 1987 the CCP formally changed the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to “people’s democratic dictatorship,” a contradiction or nonsense-phrase that one would usually only associate with mentally ill people or advertising executives.              

                                                ***********

*Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: the History of China’s most Devastating Catastrophe, 158-162, New York 2010, 325

+Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1976, 402, 403, 409

#Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, New York, 2009, 53, 13

** Zbigniew Brezezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Charles Schribner’s Son, New York, 1989 , 205-06

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