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.
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.