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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (530054)	11/21/2009 5:35:27 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575535

I am not fan of the GDR. But I think Americans get a little too smug in their condemnations. Not as formalized as the Stasis but we have had our witch hunts and lynchings caused by people who are snooping and spying. During the Iraqi war, FLA quakers were spied upon and reported to the FBI because they opposed the war. There was the McCarthy error when lives were destroyed. And there were the lynchings of blacks and on minorities based upon less flimsy evidence of a West German dessert. Such behavior is unacceptable whether its in the old GDR or the contemporary US of A. Do you not agree? A West German dessert. A "flour box." A female driver. The East German secret police took an interest in all manner of banal details as it oppressed its citizenry. Now that Germany is celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Wall, more people than ever are taking a look into their Stasi files. A West German pudding. That was all it took. Once the Stasi found out about it, a family breadwinner was fired from his army job and an East German household was plunged into destitution. Even worse, the family later found out that they had been turned in by a close friend. "She was watering the plants and went through the cupboards to find a Dr. Oetker dessert," Vera Iburg, who has worked with files kept by the East German secret police for the last 20 years, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to the snoop. "What was she doing? She had no business there!" The murky world of Stasi spying is hardly a secret, particularly since the 2006 Oscar winning film "The Lives of Others." But with thousands of spies and well over 100,000 "IMs" -- unofficial collaborators -- not all accounts of Stasi spying are fit for the big screen. Indeed, Iburg says it is the personal, much more banal stories that keep her up at night. Iburg has the emotionally draining task of sitting with people as they read their files. And with Germany now celebrating two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she has had a lot more work to do than usual this year as ever increasing numbers take an interest in what the Stasi knows about them.