Hey Millennials and Gen Z: Remember that time when there was that one country in Europe where people were afraid to do anything that deviated from the government line because they never knew who might be watching them and what they might report to the state authorities?
No? You don’t remember?
A history lesson, then: The nation in question was East Germany, a part of the Warsaw Pact, and a de facto colony of the communist Soviet Union.
I know, I know. “Ancient history” — there hasn’t been an East Germany since the 1980s, and, of course, to the modern mind anything that happened before 2010 is little more than a myth, and certainly not relevant.
But consider: In those days, in East Germany, the internal security police — the notorious Stasi — were supported by an army of citizen informers, snitches who would watch their fellow enslaved citizens and report them to the government for any perceived or imagined infraction. Deutsche Welle, the German news organization, notes that as many as “189,000 people were informers [for] the secret police of the GDR’s communist regime, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — that’s according to Thuringia’s state office for researching East Germany’s Stasi.”
The number reported by Deutsche Welle may, in fact, be low. Spiegel has reported that there may have been as many as two million informants in East Germany. A terrifying reality of East German despotism was that you had to be incredibly circumspect in what you did or said, lest you get a visit from the secret police. East Germany was a nightmare.
But now, America is quickly surpassing the nightmare of East Germany. We have wide-ranging surveillance of citizens using technology the old Stasi brutes couldn’t even imagine. And in the COVID period we have our own army of Stasi snitches prowling the streets and the Internet and reporting other Americans for transgressions against the state’s diktats.
A case in point is the lamentable treatment of Dr. David Murdock, of the formerly free state of Wisconsin. Locked down by Governor Tony Evers, the ideological descendent of V.I. Lenin now inhabiting the governor’s mansion in Madison, the state is now overrun by busybody snitches reporting on fellow citizens for not showing proper respect for the governor’s obnoxious “safer at home” order.
Dr. Murdock, it turns out, had the temerity to stand up for his fundamental and constitutionally protected rights by showing up at a protest in the city of Mosinee. The good doctor, a cardiologist, was photographed at the protest.
A “concerned citizen” — more accurately a would-be Stasi snitch — outed the doctor’s “reckless” behavior on social media. “His picture popped up, and when I saw it, I was furious,” the snitch whined to the New York Times. “I thought, this guy is out here hugging people and rubbing elbows without P.P.E. on and he’s actively seeing patients.”
Shortly after the snitch called out the doctor, the cardiologist was turned out of his job. “The following day, Murdock was suspended from the hospital for a week and has since extended his absence with annual leave,” the Daily Mail reported. The hospital “said Murdock had broken its company policy that required all employees to comply with Wisconsin’s safer-at-home order, which bans gatherings of 10 or more people.”
Dr. Murdock, for his part, said he didn’t do anything wrong. Which, of course, he didn’t. But he stood up, ever so slightly, to Tony “V.I. Lenin” Evers’ rules and so our nation’s new cadres of geheimen Informanten must seek his oppression and correction. To that end they continue to persecute him. “Authorities have now had to step up protection for the Wausau-based medic after someone left a bag of feces on the front steps of his home,” the Daily Mail noted.
The heroic doctor has not been silenced. According to the paper, he is still pointing out that the lockdowns are adding other harms to the dangers posed by COVID-19. “The forced lockdown has caused severe adverse health consequences locally, as it has prevented people from getting the care they need,” he said. “This is likely to get worse as many health care organizations are facing financial collapse.”
Like all good party apparatchiks, our cadres of virtue-signaling informants don’t actually care about their fellow human beings. They only care about supporting the party line, whatever it may be.
Once upon a time, when America was still the leader of the “free world,” and the captured peoples of the Communist empire looked with hope to the West that someday they too might be free, Americans scorned the appalling police-state behavior of East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact nations.
No more. Today all too many Americans cheer as state governors put shackles on their fellow citizens. Or, worse, they form up into vigilante posses (figuratively speaking) bearing pitchforks and burning torches and attack their neighbors, as happened at the end of March in Maine when a group of residents blocked a road with a downed tree to prevent people they suspected of having COVID-19 from leaving their residence.
As CNN reported, one of the besieged residents, investigating the loss of their cable connection, was confronted by the angry mob. “While investigating the downed tree, a neighbor started yelling at him and a group of people showed up and began to gather around. Believing the group may be there to harm him, [he] fled to his residence and told his roommates what he had found, the sheriff’s office said.”
Nearly cut off from help, the trio of residents resorted to desperate measures. “The three roommates stayed in the home, where they used a VHF radio to contact the Coast Guard for assistance and a drone to monitor the group’s activity, the sheriff’s office said.”
These are both egregious examples of a widespread problem now rampant throughout the country.
The vapid, virtue-signaling and self-serving Washington Post says that “democracy dies in darkness.” That bit of propaganda is not exactly correct. What is true though, and what we are witnessing daily, is that freedom dies when citizens allow it and participate in its murder.
This is how America becomes East Germany.
Image: master1305/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Dennis Behreandt is a research professional and writer, frequently covering subjects in history, theology, and science and technology. He has worked as an editor and publisher and is a former managing editor of The New American.
