Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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I went to the DDR museum in Berlin today. Part of their display is a whole exhibit devoted to how the Stasi monitored the lives of ordinary East Germans.

Honestly, it was kinda laughable. It was so primitive compared to what the 5 eyes routinely do to their own citizens with the aid of social media. Really, they tapped the phone lines but if you said "we shouldn't talk on the phone" that wasn't an admission of guilt or an indication that they should follow you.

And the normal accusation was "mental illness" if you started behaving in ways that the regime didn't approve of. Glenn Greenwald's latest piece [0] on his struggles with corporate media rang the same bell: "Depicting critics of liberal orthodoxies as mentally ill, rage-driven bullies, and shadows of their former selves, is a long-time tactic of guardians of establishment liberalism to expel dissidents from their in-group circles." Replace liberalism with authoritarian socialism and same same.

I was struck by how far we've gone towards something that even the East Germans considered untenable and intrusive.

[0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-medias-double-sta...

If you try to leave the US, no US official will stop you. If you tried to leave the DDR, you got shot. Or mauled by dogs. Or blown up by the minefield.

Watch the movie balloon to get a feeling how it was to live there. Not the same, at all.

> If you try to leave the US, no US official will stop you.

That is not actually true, and I am saying this as a dual citizen who is culturally American. Under 8 USC section 1185(b) it is unlawful for any Untied States Citizen to depart from or enter or attempt to depart from or enter the United States without a United States Passport. So you need an US passport to leave or enter the US even though you do not show immigration agents your passport when leaving the US. When you return you will need your US passport to be admitted.

While it is true that there is no "passport control" on exit in the US (while there is in Europe), it could be easily implemented and scaled into action by a simple law passing Congress.

It was not the annoyance of acquiring a passport which stopped people from leaving the DDR.

If passport control were to come into existence (whether by Congress or presidential executive order), and you can only leave on an American passport as an American citizen in America, then you can very easily be barred from leaving with a passport.

If a non-evil country turns evil, it suddenly is evil.

You can stop using social media or use some specific social media with zero monitoring by state (mastodon?), but it was almost impossible to escape from DDR.

And you can't compare liberalism with real threat to your life from being tortured in soviet psychiatric hospitals. In fact to have almost zero chance to get such treatment even if you'll post thousands of posts like this about liberalism per day.

You think Mastodon isn't monitored? What could possibly make you think that?

Watch a movie Dear Comrades and tell me how you feel after it.

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