East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)

Science-fiction industrialization (TV series spoiler), Emperor Clone Cleon (Day) and Azura, "Foundation" S1E10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05qXF5QLWw

> Do you know how many people we uncovered?

It's remarkable how quickly Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe the moment Soviet support went.

Despite decades of intense propaganda, killings of people in uprisings and the methods of Stasi as described in the article.

Even with all that effort most people didn't believe in the regime.

So it's hard to say whether the Stasi's tactics worked. Only people in the regimes like Ceausescu and Honecker actually thought people liked it. And perhaps not even them.

Time and again we see how half-assed dictatorships don't work. Soviet Union and the Eastern Block failed because they tried to be nice. By doing so, they achieved the worst result possible: cynical, profoundly disillusioned society and an economic failure on top of that. They should've either folded when they realised that "classless and stateless" Communism was never going to work - which is, by the late 1970s at the latest, or practiced pure Stalinism where everyone who wavered, got purged in an instant and thus generations kept being genetically filtered for obedience.

There is no such thing as "Socialism with a human face". It is so anti-human, it can only exist by hard coercion, or not at all.

If people believed in the regime, they wouldn't have needed a Stasi to impose it upon them.

It was, of course, quite unfortunate that the footsoldiers carrying out an illegal coup faced sanction, while their leaders got off scot-free. (Well, most of them, Guiliani seems to be deeply fucked, and now that he's no longer useful to the regime, has been thrown overboard.)

(I'm sure someone will now chime in to explain to us how no, it's quite normal for a mob that's trying to overturn the results of a democratic election to break into a capital building while congress is in session, putting it under lockdown. And then someone else will chime in how it's exactly like a bunch of college students protesting by sitting down in the hallways of a campus building that they on any normal day have full access to and refusing to leave.)

Incidentally, the organizers of that putsch are now imprisoning people without trial in foreign concentration camps, and are refusing court orders to have them released. This is also, of course, above-board behaviour, and demonstrates that they have nothing but the deepest respect for both the law, the democratic process, and the checks and balances that safeguard us.