• dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    This was basically the end state of East Germany right before the wall fell. Something like 1 in 6 people were either in the Stasi or were Stasi informants working alongside them. One wonders what the power dynamic might have mutated into once there were no more sheep because everyone was working for the wolves.

    Maybe that’s the kind of loyalist utopia these (and those) chumps were dreaming of but I’d doubt that’d actually shake out how they expected it to.

    • NobodyElse@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      I doubt the dynamic would have changed much. They’d just start with the purity and loyalty tests and start devouring each other. The fascists always need a convenient enemy

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      Fascism is a means to an end. The end result of fascism is cronyism, where power is delegated based on fealty.

      Each level of fascism is a concentric circle, with a new out group named at every iteration.

      Right now, it’s LGBT, specifically trans people in addition to immigrants. Once all of the outgroup is gone, a new one is named.

      • MelodiousFunk@startrek.website
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        4 days ago

        It’s a good thing we don’t have the gubmint compiling lists of, say, neurodivergent folks, so everything’s all nice and ready when the time comes.

    • Saleh@feddit.org
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      4 days ago

      That is hardly comparable.

      Eastern Germany did not have an oligarch class to feed and did not aspire to invade other countries to rob their resources.

      Most of the people you mention were informal informants (190k vs. 90k regular employees by the lat 80s) and these mostly worked out of ideological conviction and didn’t receive relevant payments for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator

      Obviously these informants did not know who else around them was an informant. Economically they were doing normal jobs and receiving normal pay like everyone else. This cannot be described in terms of “wolfs and sheep”. American cops, ICE and the like full well know who their colleagues are. They get paid, usually full time to exercise their jobs and they have a direct authority to abuse, like with civil forfeiture.

      A Stasi informant couldn’t reveal himself to his neighbor and demand money from him. First of all his neighbor might as well be an informant and second of all the informant has no power except to make allegations, for which he would have to compromise himself and be targeted himself.

      The GDR was authoritarian for ideological reasons, not to feed the greed of a select few. This is fundamentally different to Capitalism and its final form, Fascism.