Gaslighting in Democracy

Gaslighting is “the practice of psychologically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity, memory, or powers of reasoning.” There are many daily examples of gaslighting coming from the media and corrupt politicians daily. The question remains, are those manipulated able to tell that they are manipulated and are they making corrections to the warped reality they have been convinced to believe and trust?

At the end of WWII, Germany was split into two parts. One part was controlled by the Allies minus the Russians, Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), German Federal Republic or West Germany; the other part was controlled by the Russians, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, (DDR), German Democratic Republic or East Germany. That side of Germany, five states in total, was neither Democratic, nor a Republic, it was a dictatorship controlled by the Soviet-style Communist Party.

The Soviets made sure that a long border, a physical Iron Curtain, was built between the two German countries with a wide no-man’s land guarded by prison-like watchtowers with machine guns, guards, mines, trenches, and barbed wire. Sometimes this frontier ran through farms and pastures, splitting farmers’ lands. This border remained in place from 1949 until 1990 and it stretched 1,381 kilometers (858 miles) from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. It was established on July 1, 1945 as a boundary between the Western and the Soviet occupation zones of Germany.

To forcibly keep the East German population trapped inside the socialist country, the border was built as “the world’s most heavily fortified, defined by a continuous line of high metal fences and walls, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, automatic booby traps and minefields. It was patrolled by 50,000 armed East German border guards.”

This border reflected Winston Churchill’s ideological metaphor of the Iron Curtain that split the Soviet and the Western bloc countries during Cold War as an ideological boundary between capitalism and socialism/communism.

The city of Berlin itself was split into two parts, the Western side, and the Eastern side. West Berlin was democratic and free while East Berlin was communist and captive. The 27-mile long and tall Berlin Wall was built to divide the two city parts, separating families overnight, building the wall sometimes through the middle of a street. The first victim of the Berlin Wall was a lady named Ida whose apartment building was on the side of East Germany while the street was now in West Germany. She jumped and died on the way to the hospital. At the Berlin Wall, Thousands Tried Creative—and Dangerous—Ways to Get Across (history.com)

People communicated from their apartment windows across the street, over the wall. Many lost their lives in the process of trying to escape from East Germany to freedom in West Germany.  Many succeeded making it to the west by any means necessary, some creative, others daring, and others quite dangerous. Nobody is on record trying to flee to East Germany.

“Wolfgang Engels, a 19-year old East German soldier who helped build the barbed-wire fences that initially separated both Berlins, stole a tank and drove it through the wall itself.” He got caught in the barbed wire and was shot twice but managed to escape. . At the Berlin Wall, Thousands Tried Creative—and Dangerous—Ways to Get Across (history.com)

DDR or East Germany was held under the Communist Party control, with the help of the infamous STASI, the security police. It was a police state, and everyone lived in fear. Nobody could leave if they wanted to.

DDR was NOT a democratic republic, it was a socialist tyranny controlled by the police state under the rule of the Communist Party.

After the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys unified in 1989, Angela Merkel became their Chancellor from 2005-2021, the longest ruling chancellor in history. She attended the Karl Marx University where she received a degree in physics and worked in East Berlin; she earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry.

“Some of her former colleagues from the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry claimed that she was active as a secretary for agitation and propaganda at the Institute, though Merkel maintained that she was responsible for cultural affairs.”

Why the citizens of the former 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany chose to elect her Chancellor, is hard to understand. The entire West Germany had to support the disastrous centralized economy of the East Germans and their poverty resulting from the Communist Party mismanaging and stealing resources for their own wealth.

When oblivious Americans advocate for democratic socialism, they are advocating for a dictatorship. But they think they are advocating for free stuff and government welfare provided by the free market like in the Scandinavian countries. But these Scandinavian countries are not socialist, they support socialized health care and other generous welfare; they have a robust economy derived from free markets and companies that operate without direct government control and pay confiscatory taxes.

Unfortunately for Americans advocating democratic socialism, they will get socialism with the Communist Party controlling the means of production or they will get fascism, where the omnipotent government will control corporations’ means of production and will tell them what to say and do, what to produce and distribute, all in line with the government’s fascist agenda. Unlike what you read online, nazis (fascists) were not far right groups, they were members of the National Socialist Party (Nationalsozialistische Partei).

 

Your Anonymity is Gone

Former Stasi prison in Erfurt

Photo: Wikimedia

I wrote before about the 2006 Oscar winner for the best Foreign Language Film, “Das Leben des Anderen” (The Lives of Others), a German drama that describes in painful detail life in the communist East Berlin of 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

The movie begins in the Hohenschonhausen prison which is now a memorial dedicated to the victims of Stasi repression. It is alleged that the movie director, Florian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck, was not allowed to film there because the memorial’s administrator, Hubertus Knabe, objected to making “the Stasi man into a hero.”

Florian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck is quoted as saying, "I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening in to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him. I sat down and in a couple of hours had written the treatment” (the first draft of a screenplay).

The movie is not important because it showed how a famous actress was spied upon, her life, trials and tribulations, and the secondary sycophants who answered to the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party). It is important because it shows the drab and meager daily life of fear, uncertainty, and horror that people from all walks of life, ordinary and exceptional, endured under the brutal and repressive socialist republics ruled by the communist party.

Like the actress in the movie, homes were bugged; all telephone conversations were recorded and listened to by underlings and useful idiots who were paid by the regime to spy upon the lives of everyone without their knowledge or a court order. All incoming and outgoing mail was opened, read, and copied by small bureaucrats whose job was to report anything out of the ordinary and catalog their daily blogs.

The King of Communism, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, a cobbler with only elementary school education under his belt, kept us all well-monitored and oppressed.

The secret police did not have sophisticated wireless technology to spy on citizens like we have today. They also did not seek nor need warrants to record everything people did or said in their homes, cars, at parties, or on the phone. There was no social media sites, email, or text messages. They had the oppressing power of government on their side and technology was not so advanced.

Today the spying game is much more sophisticated and does not require special agents – just a smart computer program with the right software and algorithm, mining social media, especially Facebook via innocent games that ensnare not just every information detail a user voluntarily posts on his/her wall or blog, but all the information, photos, and activities of every “friend,” relative, acquaintance, and commenter they have interacted with on a social platform or using a tech device.

Josh Bernstein, in a recent video asked a very poignant question, “Is this the end of privacy as we know it, or is it already here?” He was referring to the 31-year old Vietnamese-Australian Hoan Ton-That, who developed an app that allowed users to change hair and facial features on photographs. “But, unfortunately, he did not stop there, he shared his invention with law enforcement agencies” federal, state, and local police departments in the United States.

His company Clearview AI has developed a groundbreaking facial recognition software app that, according to Bernstein, “will soon end everyone’s personal privacy.” That’s company boasts 3 billion images that he has “lifted” from all social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other popular sites. Bernstein stated that That claims that “his database is larger than what the federal government and Silicon Valley have.”

It is alleged that the software has been used to solve crimes and to identify suspects and arrest them within hours of committing a crime. Theft, shoplifting, assault, identity theft, sexual abuse crimes, and murder cases were solved by using That’s technology.

Clearview AI app helped unravel crimes using still video shots, friends’ photos, and other social media posts, and matched the perpetrator, his identity, his friends, his hobbies, and all his media posts, including where he ate recently. So far That’s app has been used for good, to catch criminals, but in the future might this technology be misused to damage and control the innocent?  https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-this-end-of-33447458?utm_medium=post_notification_email&utm_source=post_link&utm_campaign=patron_engagement

Government control under communist party regimes required a lot of manpower to spy on its people, and to inform authorities about the whereabouts and contacts of a trapped population, prisoners within the borders of their own countries.

But we now have GPS tracking in smart phones, TVs, cars, boats, appliances, robots, engines, refrigerators, cameras, social sites, credit cards, flights, and grocery shopping, just to name a few. It enables faceless individuals to track us and our lives daily. The NSA data storage center in Bluffdale, Utah is said to be able to handle a lot of zettabytes of information. One zettabyte of data is 1 (one) followed by 21 zeroes.

Satellites can take pictures with extreme accuracy. Drones can spy in your bedroom as you sleep. Smart meters, smart water meters, smart gas meters relay information to the mother ship about your electricity, water, and gas consumption.

Appliances can be remotely turned on and off and refrigerators talk to your grocery store and place food orders for you. Utility companies can turn off your electricity, dial back your air conditioning use or turn it off, change the ambient temperature in your home, turn off water, electricity, and gas whether you want it turned off or not.

Tech giants monitor what you watch, what you say, what you buy, block your access to conservative sites, take down videos that offend liberals, stifling your freedom of speech.

Academia censures by denying tenure to conservative professors and disinviting speakers they disagree with. The MSM promotes political correctness and liberal views, preventing any polite opposition or diverging guests to exercise their freedom of speech.

The more we talk about freedom (of speech, of assembly, to carry guns, religion) in the world today occupied and controlled by everything progressive, the more we hear the chains rattling. Your brothers and sisters are watching you with disdain and hate – empowered by non-elected bureaucrats, politicians, academia, plutocrats who think they know what’s best for us, and young techies who spy on the “lives of others” with gusto and the ignorance of useful idiots.

The Soviets' Inner Wall

A Memorial to victims who died at the Berlin Wall
Photo credit: Wikipedia

…'from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe'    – speech made by Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri

At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Germany from 1945 to 1949 into four sections, each administered by a different allied country, in order to prevent the spread of Nazism (National Socialism).

The Americans, the French, and the British did not take as seriously as the Soviets did the virtual division line between their controlled territories and those controlled by the Soviet Union. People from the western and eastern parts came and went as they pleased, crossing this imaginary border and angering the Soviets in the process who were very partial to their communist ideology and boundaries.

On May 26, 1952 the newly-formed Soviet East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) began building an actual inner border concrete wall, 9 ft. tall and topped with barbed wire, which they dubbed “the anti-imperialist wall.”

In reality it was not a wall built to keep imperialist invaders from West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD) out of East Germany (DDR) but to keep their own East German people inside a one giant Stalinist prison.

To protect their zone and their ideology, the Soviets built one of the deadliest border walls in history. If their citizen dared to even try escaping to the West, they were summarily shot and killed. The wall was so long, over 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to the center of Germany, that it put the Berlin Wall to shame. The concrete wall topped with barbed wire snaked around the countryside with no trees a certain distance from it so that escapees would have no ground cover in any direction.

There was a vehicle barrier in front of this concrete wall and a six foot wide plowed strip of dirt to record foot prints. Watch towers and manned posts made sure that guards caught those attempting to flee. If caught after the fact, the citizens were heavily fined and imprisoned for three years.

Trees were cut down and underbrush was cleared so that there was always a clear line of sight and a clear line of fire. With electronic sensors strategically placed, this “death strip” was running through towns, manicured stretches of land, farms, coal mines, and even through the middle of a house. Many communities were split in half, very similar to the Berlin Wall which split streets in half.

According to historians, out of 17 million East Germans, one million people a year were trying to flee to the west. The border with its buffer zones, no man’s lands, and more guard towers than one could imagine, became so elaborate and strict that the population’s flight or attempts to flee were reduced by 75 percent.

An impregnable barrier of iron, concrete, barbed wire, electric sensors, watch towers, plowed strips, and mine fields was thus built between the German Democratic Republic in the East and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. When historians refer to the communist Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe, they are referring to this border wall between the two divided Germanys. The first reference to the Iron Curtain, fearing the spread of communism, was made by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri.

By the 1980s thirty guards were protecting each three-and-a-half mile stretch of the entire border wall. Sixty thousand anti-personnel mines to deter border crossings further reduced the escape rate to less than one percent.

Hundreds of people trying to escape to West Germany from East Germany were shot, stepped over land mine wires, or were killed by dogs. Some of the guards themselves tried to escape to the west.

For over thirty years the Soviets built an elaborate system to imprison East German citizens in their own communist prison country. On November 9, 1989, a series of revolutions caused the demise of this border, the “Iron Curtain” between the East and the West.

The more visible and more photographed wall by the press, The Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression and shame, of dividing a city between the communist ideology of the Soviets and the capitalist one of the West, was dismantled with much fanfare and celebration, chunk by chunk, by people who escalated the graffiti-painted side of the West. Checkpoint Charlie, the actual crossing point in Berlin, became part of the dustbin of history.

The main stream media revisits the Berlin Wall when it’s convenient to support the progressive globalist narrative of ‘no borders.’ They equate a wall today which protects the sovereignty of any nation as an oppression of the migratory masses from third world countries who are entitled to invade well-developed nations with generous welfare systems, a social security which is missing in their basket-case nations from which they hail. Asylum-seekers and economic refugees have certainly already overwhelmed several European countries.  

The inner East German border wall was also dismantled with less press coverage, creating almost two million tons of debris. A small section of this wall is preserved today in Hötensleben as a memorial to the death zone created between the free state in the West and the communist prison state in the East.