Fascistic governments: only the faces change
“People should listen to us when we say, again and again: we determine the order at our border! And we ensure that it is maintained, for good reasons. Whoever wants to traverse … needs permission. Otherwise, stay away from our border! He who puts himself in danger will die.
I know, ladies and gentlemen, it sounds hard. And will perhaps even be interpreted by some of you as ‘inhumane’. But what is ‘humane’ and what is ‘inhumane’?
Humane it is, to make peace for all men on earth … And if, as history teaches us, wars are made by man … then peace, too, is a work of man. Whoever seeks to weaken or damage the German Democratic Republic, whether consciously or unconsciously, weakens or damages the prospects of peace in Germany. It is humane to have created and built this state! It is humane to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the GDR against those people who would most like to eat it for breakfast …”
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, GDR propagandist
The Black Channel: 1965
Cited in Stasiland 2002:125
[…] Certainly, in my present, grey suits run a technocracy that adheres, slavishly, to a set of ideas based on a hierarchy of race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender and sexuality about how people should be governed and what their lives and deaths are worth. The Stasi were a most extreme face of governmental/regimental technologies that can and will be deployed by any state, and these days the technologies of surveillance, censorship, torture and incarceration-without-trial are being used across the liberal-democratic world. Suspected ‘terrorists’ in capitalist liberal democracies are treated in comparable ways to ‘enemies of the people’ in socialist totalitarian states. […]
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