Welcome to The Worthy House, where we offer
reality-focused writings on a variety of topics,
often on history, politics, and, in general,
on human flourishing in a post-liberal future.
I am Charles, the Maximum Leader 
of The Worthy House.
Today we are reviewing "Stasiland: Stories
from behind the Berlin Wall," by Anna Funder.
The wicked reality of Communism has, over
the past twenty-five years, been deliberately
erased from Western education and, more broadly,
from the Western mind. This was entirely predictable.
The reasons behind the erasure are not complex.
The ruling classes and social tastemakers
in the West at the time that Communism fell,
and for decades before and since, had and
have a lot of sympathy for Communism. They
were appalled by efforts, like Ronald Reagan's,
to actually end Communism, and they had no
real problem with it in practice. To nobody's
surprise, today they have no interest in admitting
their support for evil, or in exposing their
guilt to a new generation. Moreover, as Ryszard
Legutko has explained at length, Communism
has much in common with modern liberal democracy-far
more than liberal democracy has with pre-liberal
forms of political thought. Education and
the media are today controlled by these philo-Communists,
throughout the West (with a few virtuous exceptions,
notably Poland and Hungary). As a result,
from a combination of self-interest and ideological
sympath and compatibility, the vast majority
of people under forty today have little idea
that Communism was the most evil and most
lethal political system ever created, because
the truth has been deliberately hidden from
them.
Anna Funder's Stasiland, written in 2002 but
covering the author's journeys through the
former East Germany in 1996 and 2000, is a
partial corrective to this erasure of memory.
The Stasi, of course, were the East German
secret police. Stasiland is more of an introspective
examination of individuals and their stories,
heavy on emotions, including the author's,
than an abstract or statistical examination
of tyranny. Certainly tyranny is very evident
in this book, but it is not a history of the
horror of Communism in East Germany, it is
a history of a handful of people who lived
through that horror. Perhaps, though, this
is a more effective way of bringing home the
reality of Communism. The Black Book of Communism
documents precisely how Communism killed 100
million people, but the death of millions,
as Joseph Stalin himself supposedly said,
is a statistic, not a tragedy. Stasiland vividly
shows us the inescapable and inevitable reality
of Communism that is almost never taught and
rarely talked about in America today.
You will have to read the book to learn the
stories told by Funder's interlocutors. It
is impossible to do the stories justice, both
factually and to convey their emotional impact,
in a summary. Not all of her interlocutors
are those who were persecuted. Some of them
are Stasi agents and Stasi informers. Funder
even talked to Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler,
famous as the rage-filled talking head on
GDR ("German Democratic Republic," for those
who have forgotten) television given the task
of countering facts in broadcasts from the
West. She quotes him at length justifying
shooting anyone daring to try to escape from
the GDR, as "humane" and necessary because
"here in the GDR, peace has been elevated
to a governing principle of the state." That
reasoning is pretty much par for the course
for the former agents of the East German state
that Funder interviews. But, aside from the
stories themselves, several key points pop
out to the reader.
One is that no Communists were ever punished
in any meaningful way for their crimes. Funder
chalks this up to a desire to forget on the
part of the Germans. This is not correct,
or rather it is incomplete. Doubtless some
want to forget, but the Germans have not forgotten
the National Socialists, because they have
not allowed themselves to forget. The key
principle at work, though, can be seen not
in post-Nazi history, but in the more pedestrian
history of the numerous leftist and rightist
regimes that have ruled in various places
over the past decades. When any right-wing
authoritarian regime has ended in the past
hundred years and been replaced with a more
democratic regime, in which the Left is again
allowed free reign, those in power under the
prior regime, from the lowliest functionary
to the maximum leader, are always persecuted
around the globe until their death. This is
done regardless of any formal legislation
to the contrary, the rule of law, the doctrine
forbidding ex post facto laws, or any other
principle that might limit the revenge of
the Left on their enemies, and it is conducted
globally by the well-funded, well-connected,
tightly allied Left, rabid dogs to a man.
The best prominent recent example of this
is Augusto Pinochet, and perhaps Alberto Fujimori.
It is easy to adduce hundreds of examples,
and when such men (often heroes, like Pinochet,
who saved the lives of innumerable Chilean
citizens) are not judicially persecuted, they
are ostracized and humiliated, spat on and
forbidden to travel. But not a single example
can be adduced of the reverse process, of
the persecution of leftists formerly in power,
anywhere on the globe, at any time, even though
leftists have killed far, far more people
than rightist regimes. It is amazing, if you
think about it. No Communist or leftist formerly
in power in Central or South America, or Europe,
or anywhere, has ever been punished with anything
more than a slap on the wrist, no matter how
many tens of thousands they killed. In most
cases, like Fidel Castro, they have been globally
lionized, free to travel in luxury anywhere,
at any time, with no fear of criticism, much
less punishment. While Funder does not draw
this specific contrast between the treatment
of Left and Right, she does cover how Erich
Honecker, Erich Mielke, and other mass murderers,
along with tens of thousands of other killers
and torturers, received zero punishment. (Bizarrely,
the only crime Mielke was convicted of was
two murders of policemen committed in 1931.)
In fact, all former Communists for the most
part quickly became embedded in the new regimes,
often personally greatly profiting, and not
facing even social ostracism. Moreover, the
higher-profile Communists were, after their
fall, openly celebrated around the world by
the Left. Their lives were mostly awesome,
post-Communism. Nice work if you can get it,
I suppose, but a few more such bad men floating
face-down in canals, if the law will not do
its job, would have been, and still is, a
good idea.
A second key point is the total corrosion
of civil society that was created by the informer
state set up by the Stasi. "Relations between
people were conditioned by the fact that one
or the other of you could be one of them.
Everyone suspected everyone else, and the
mistrust this bred was the foundation of social
existence." This is not surprising, given
that there was one informer in every seven
citizens, and that the Left, unlike rightist
authoritarian regimes, functions mostly on
terror (rather than simple political repression),
of which informants are a critical element.
Funder gives an excellent flavor of this corrosive
terror, which is also well shown in The Lives
of Others, the 2006 film about life in the
GDR (although that film was criticized by
some, including Funder, for inaccurately portraying
the GDR and the Stasi as softer and more humanized
than they really were).
A third point is that Funder explains why
anyone would join the Stasi, or become an
informant, at all. To us, living in a mostly
free society, it seems like an odd choice
to voluntarily become an agent of terror.
But, "In a society riven into 'us' and 'them,'
an ambitious young person might well want
to be one of the group in the know, one of
the unmolested. If there was never going to
be an end to your country, and you could never
leave, why wouldn't you opt for a peaceful
life and a satisfying career?" This strikes
me as a cogent analysis, especially in a society
where Christian morality has been erased and
all that is left is self-interest, with no
responsibility to one's fellow man. And it
is closely related to C. S. Lewis's concept
of the "Inner Ring"-that people will often
compromise themselves without limit merely
to obtain a sense of being in the ruling group.
In another passage in the book, Funder quotes
a Stasi officer, asked "Why did [the informers]
do it?," as responding "Well, some of them
were convinced of the [Communist] cause. But
I think it was mainly because informers got
the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody. . . .
They felt they had it over other people."
This feeling of "having it over other people"
is a key driver of the Left's will to power,
and a major reason why leftist regimes are
able to maintain their power even when they
are obvious criminal states not even bothering
to pretend to adhere to their own ideological
premises.
Most interesting, perhaps, is something not
covered in the book at all, and that is the
book's reception in Germany. In 2016, in connection
with the re-release of the book, Funder discussed
at length that Germans received her book mostly
with either active hostility, in the case
of innumerable former Stasi agents or informers
and their allies, or with icy silence, in
the case of most other Germans. In the latter
category fit both West Germans who, for the
most part (as Funder also notes in the book
itself) don't like to talk about Communism,
probably for the same reasons that the American
ruling classes don't like to talk about Communism,
some combination of shame at their own actions
and active sympathy for Communism, and East
Germans who want to believe that the GDR was
somehow not all that bad. Funder cited (in
2016) one of her interlocutors, "Miriam,"
who now refused to give her real name publicly
in connection with the book, because in her
new job in public broadcasting her bosses
were all former Stasi informers who loathed
her for having been a political prisoner.
"[Her bosses] disliked, too, that she sometimes
objected to the news directors relegating
an item showing the GDR or the Stasi in a
bad light to the end of the bulletin, or not
broadcasting such pieces at all. [Miriam]
objected to what she saw as strenuous efforts,
in the public broadcaster, to show the GDR
as a harmless, safe welfare state with high
ideals; she objected to the rampant Ostalgie
[simpering nostalgia for the GDR], the Verharmlosung
(rendering harmless), and the Schönreden
(whitewashing). Miriam had spent almost her
whole life battling the Stasi, and they were
still there. She was tired, on a short-term
contract and vulnerable. It would simply have
made her working life too difficult to publicly
'out' herself. She decided not to come on
television."
Funder chalks this up, with an analogy to
those who fought Nazism, to the need for some
decades to pass for heroes who resisted tyranny
to be rewarded. Sadly, this is not correct.
She says it will probably take twenty or even
twenty-five years. But that time has passed,
and there is no such movement at all, as Funder's
2016 discussions showed. I can confidently
predict that in twenty years from now, or
forty, or sixty, not only will there be no
such recognition of heroism, but the heroes
will be mostly forgotten, and when remembered,
cast in a dubious light. They will be viewed
as men and women of mixed character, who,
because the evils of Communism have been mostly
or totally forgotten and suppressed, will
be criticized for extremism and failure to
recognize the supposed good aspects of Communism,
which resisters to Communism will be seen
as having undercut by their opposition. Thus,
they will receive no honor at all.
The naked truth is that the Left, which controls
all of German social and political life today,
likes and has always liked Communism, and
hates and hated those who opposed it. Until
their power is broken (which may, indeed,
happen before twenty years are up, in which
case I withdraw my prediction), there will
be no recognition of the heroes who resisted
at great personal cost. In Hungary and Poland,
which have, fortunately, already partially
broken the power of the Left, such recognition
has occurred and is continuing, suggesting
I am right, and Funder is wrong. In fairness,
though, Funder does acknowledge the possibility
of recognition never coming, though under
a different mechanism: "There may never be
[such recognition], if the Stasi win the PR
war they have been waging, a war apparently
supported by a general public that does not
want to have to acknowledge this second lot
of twentieth-century-German evildoers." But
it is not just the former Stasi-it is their
allies and comrades in arms, the Left in general,
both in Germany and globally. They are responsible
for the evils of Communism, not, as they would
have it, some unspecified, vague set of forgotten
men and women, more sinned against than sinning,
misled by their desire to achieve human happiness.
All of them should be held to account, and
punished accordingly.
