> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
It was also not very unique? The social intimidation like arresting family members, public shaming and widespread people spying on people are just the cookie cutter template? China, NK are still cooking this recipe.
The GDR had possibly the highest ratio of secret police (Stasi) employees per # population in world history, it was really ridiculous how paranoid that government was. About 0.5% of the population were Stasi employees and an additional 1% were "inofficial employees", informers.
Its also the measly rewards that they did it for. In a dysfunctional economy, some people sold out there family and friends, cutting them of forever, for as little as a cheeseburger now and then.
Murderous dictatorships are enabled by mass surveillance and personal data collection. Especially East Germany, which was obsessed with data harvesting on every individual and installed as many CCTV cameras as its budget and tech would allow. East Germany would be creaming itself over the panopticon we are walking into.
Yeah but there's lots of surveillance like stuff that goes on without turning into murderous dictatorships. In England where I live we have cctv all over the place and on the internet Google knows most of my stuff but neither really worry me - we haven't really had a dictatorship setup since 1215 or so.
1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line.
The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement).
If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
> Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.
I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.
I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I'm not arguing in favor of a state run economy or a dictatorship or whatever else it is you seem to have concluded. Flawed though our system may be I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But all the same it's important to be able to recognize where we could do better. Optimizing for investor return is frequently not synonymous with optimizing for societal well being. I don't think engagement algorithms that result in negative emotions are really a benefit to anyone other than the company that deploys them.
So too for the online advertising industry. We - ie capitalists - have dedicated some of our best minds to building out something that vaguely resembles a panopticon. When you consider the intangible social and political externalities it seems to me that the place we've arrived at isn't a good one.
Don't forget that in addition to any negative impacts of the things that were built, every day spent in that way was a day not spent pursuing scientific or mathematical breakthroughs.
In my country, there is a barrage of Russian propaganda trying to relativize our shitty experience with the communist regime. They keep flooding the zone with claims about democracy being flawed, weak, bureaucratic, meaningless, and decadent. And it is working. People appreciate democracy a lot less than ten or twenty years ago.
Sure, there is a time for the self-criticism of the flaws of the West. I just think now is not the time. Democracy and freedom are under serious threat worldwide. Now is the time to keep reminding ourselves how great it is what we have built. Now is the time to be absolutely clear that the flaws of democracies are not in the same category as the flaws of authoritarian regimes.
I still remember what it was like living in a totalitarian regime - and I was living in a soft totalitarianism nearing its collapse. I am not old enough to remember the hardcore Stalinist era. And still, it was so bad that whatever you believe is bad about capitalism is like 1% of how bad it was. Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
Look, I am a pessimist. I think there is a very real chance that the US is turning into a Russia-like state. I hope not, but if that happens, very bad things are likely to happen in Europe too. We will all live it once again. If you still don’t understand what I mean, I suggest this: let’s bookmark this discussion and get back in 5 years, if we are still alive. Then, you will tell me what you think about optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. If you still think it is a problem worth mentioning by then, I will be very happy.
> Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.
I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding.
Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amount of opportunity available to our society in a general sense, it's more than a bit depressing to think that this is how we (collectively) chose to use it so far.
A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. Like yeah I think the advanced bioengineering is a fantastic accomplishment. I don't think we should get rid of it. Things were definitely worse before we got that figured out. I don't miss amputations and lobotomies. But is it really necessary to so badly misappropriate the opportunity that it affords us?
Given how different your perspective is from my own I can appreciate that my original short and rather flippant comment failed to convey that particular message.
There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good.
> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus
What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.
Nothing more than a fictional hypothetical for use as an analogy. Suppose advanced technology T requires broad societal effort to develop, for which societal mastery of advanced scientific topic S is a prerequisite. The analogy is nothing more than "first society achieves X, then it can achieve Y" where X is desirable but Y is not and both are fairly difficult.
I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.
The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.
Conversion metrics = people find what they want to buy quicker and more efficiently, allowing them to spend time on leisure that would otherwise have been spent on gathering needed goods.
Engagement metrics = making entertainment that's popular rather than what's mandated by the state's culture committees.
Optimizing them is a virtuous and noble profession.
Extensive effort to improve conversion metrics tends to result in dark patterns (and increased revenue).
Extensive effort to improve engagement metrics tends to result in negative emotional states (and increased revenue).
When it comes to entertainment, optimizing return on investment often means maximizing the size of the potential audience. The end result of that process is usually slop.
Dark patterns and slop aren't well defined terms. Engagement resulting in negative emotional states is not obviously a problem. Social studies academics pretend it is, but have no trouble with people consuming state TV news even if it shows them a constant stream of bad news stories.
> Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony
A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
I read a quote somewhere that said democracy does nothing to promote good leadership. The point of democracy isn't to elect a good government, the point is to quickly get rid of a bad government
The multi-year terms still lets bad governments do a lot of damage though, and they have to be pretty bad to actually be removed for good.
Perhaps it would be better to pick the government at random and then have much more frequent votes with the only choice being whether to pick a new random government or not.
If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.
What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
With these definitions, you can have a democratic or non-democratic system, and both can give rise to libertarian or authoritarian societies.
Democracies tend to produce more libertarian systems than dictatorships, but only to some extent, and in fact, they are often authoritarian in various aspects. All it takes to oppress some people in a democracy, even when they are not causing harm, is the majority of people wanting to do so.
Vice versa, a dictatorship with some enlightened, incorruptible, and perfectly mentally stable dictator that acts as a night-watchman so that individual freedoms are respected would be more libertarian than a democracy, but it's unlikely you'd get such a dictator.
>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.
"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.
I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.
There have been such dictators in the past. Singapore is one example. Arguably the British Empire was libertarian by the standards of its time (and empires).
Perhaps the least recognized example is America. The Constitution imposes libertarianism on the population against majority will. You can't change the constitution with a 50%+1 vote, so it forces freedom of speech and other rights on people who might otherwise easily vote to get rid of them. There's no one man enforcing the constitution, just a general agreement to obey SCOTUS.
Authoritarianism is the oldest form of effective government. Just as curious note, dictatorship was introduced during the Roman epoch and was used as temporary measure during war times. Look for example in Ukraine where the same ruler is avoiding elections since some time due to war, in the root sense of the government-style it is possible to describe it as a dictatorship today, if it hadn't been for the negative connotation of that term in the last 100 years.
The ruler is not "avoiding" elections due to war, he is prohibited by the constitution to hold them during wartime (not to mention the feasibility of letting the inhabitants of occupied regions to exercise their voting rights). So it is not a dictatorship in any sense.
"East Germany" fell apart because the people stuck there quickly realized how "ridiculous" it was. (See the post you replied to.)
There was a lot of contact between West and East Germans due to the awkward nature of the division of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. In contrast, that contact doesn't exist between North and South Korea.
(Remember, West Berlin was an enclave inside of East Germany, and West Germans were allowed to travel through East Germany in order to travel in and out of West Berlin.)
They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.
And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.
But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
Do we? I’d say it’s pretty close, especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’ every time any social programme is proposed.
By "we", I didn't mean Americans, but weaterners. We have the National Health Service where I live and it is a complete mess (I know someone who waited over seven years for a jaw operation, another who has several years to wait for autism screening). I don't want the American system, and the basic principle of the NHS is good but still....
This AI slop is a pretty accurate description of my local medical practice (bar the cheap joke at beginning and everyone having an English accent):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw
We hardly ever hear about East Germany or all the horrors of living in such a place. Very rarely these days. I've known quite a few people who lived under that regime and they told me what it was like. Everyone was being watched, and even school children had to write spy reports on their neighbours. All while the East German state kept proclaiming how it was a place of freedom and equality.
1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.
There should be things you don't come back from.
For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.
2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.
The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).
Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
Yes, here in Poland 36 years later people still seriously argue the country would be much better if we hanged the communists off lampposts (like it was done in few other places).
There ws a great cost to a "peaceful transition". The entire judiciary was basically full of extremely corrupt people, half of the political class. Even today when the old judges are almost all gone the horrible culture they had still corrupts many younger ones (although today it is more towards incompetence and indifference rather than corruption).
Would it be better to have half a million (or possibly entire million if you count inevitable victims on the other side) die to avoid it? We are still paying the price.
There is an argument that had we sorted the communist problem successfully back then we wouldn't have politicians later that let themselves be corrupted by Putin into funding his army. And perhaps there would never be an invasion of Ukraine.
Or if we done away with the peaceful transition, the communists in other neighbouring countries would attempt to hold on to power with everything they got. Who knows.
"Should we have put 500,000 people to death?" sounds like pub conversation, to be frank. There are plenty of options between 'no repercussions for the old regime' and Rwanda.
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
You need "a little bit" of politician/judge/enforcer lynching to keep the government in line the same way they make a big show of "a little bit" of kicking in people's doors at 4am to keep the peasants in line.
I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?
Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").
I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
Because the optimum is a public process which proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt so that every good person supports their punishment and has the confidence (certainty of guilt) to support it publicly.
But if the choice is between no punishment and somebody gunning them down in the street or droning them, i prefer the latter.
Court processes are useful when guilt is uncertain at first look and you want to increase certainty. But dictators and their close supporters, the certainty is often sufficient by nature of many their actions being public. Sometimes they literally go on TV and declare they're going to a foreign country to kill their people and take their land. At that point, it only becomes a matter of making sure you have the right person.
And don't forget the victims. Many authoritarian regimes don't kill opposition outright (for various reasons) but imprison them instead. Such a victim knows many of the people (cops, judges, informants, etc.) responsible for / guilty of falsely imprisoning them. After a regime change, the victims go free and have often more knowledge of the offenses than can be proven to a court by the simply virtue of being there and therefore have more than enough confidence to deliver a just punishment.
>I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.
This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
It's a hard one. I can tell you something which doesn't work because the Americans have tried it twice so far. It won't work to say "Well, that was naughty, please don't do it again".
That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0
In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed
In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
> The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.
I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later.
The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.