Nazi metaphors have become far too overused. To the Left, everything to the right of Chairman Mao Zedong is fascism. Such overuse of Nazi imagery is disrespectful to the unique evil of the Holocaust. It should stop.
Still, a more modern and exact analogy can be applied to the modern American Left. It is the Stasi, the feared German secret police that terrorized East Germany from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In a compelling new book, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, scholar Alison Lewis reveals that while dictators such as Hitler or Stalin sought to crush writers and other artists because they feared the freedom they represented, the German Stasi saw them as allies.
While the Nazis and their counterparts, the Stalinists, attacked a wide range of artists as “degenerate,” the Stasi worked with and supported entertainers and writers. The German communists had their own versions of people like Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, the publishing industry, and Hollywood — useful idiots who echo whatever the leaders of the party tell them.
Similarly, while there was only one law under the Third Reich, in East Germany, it was different. In their book The Stasi: Myth and Reality, Mike Dennis and Norman Laporte examine the two justice systems in postwar Germany. They identify the “normative” and the “prerogative” states.
The normative state was the outwardly appearing system of constitutional law. The prerogative state was the reality — a vast and corrupt bureaucracy filled with spies and political actors who could toss people into jail for any reason. A woman named Ines Meichsner was sentenced to 10 months for “gross annoyance” by being involved in the peace movement. Another activist, Uwe Kroker, was arrested for “gross rowdiness” for painting a peace sign on his wall.
Dennis and Lapoerte write: “According to state socialist theory, ‘bourgeoisie’ law and the concept of the separation of powers served to protect the [powerful] in a sham democracy like that of Western Germany, whereas ‘socialist legality’ was an expression of the will of the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party in alliance with the farmers, the intelligentsia and other working people.”
The American left is trying to set up its own prerogative state even as it attempts to dismantle the normative state.
The prerogative state is represented by the army of activist judges who have issued injunctions against President Donald Trump and his attempts to govern the executive branch. These activist courts are cheered on by the same Democrats who once condemned them. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) encouraged former President Joe Biden to ignore the courts, and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) tried to drag Chief Justice Roberts into a hearing on Supreme Court ethics.
Now they are holding up the courts as an alternative to the prudent and ignoring the separation of powers. Klaus Marxen, Professor of Criminal Law at Humboldt University of Berlin, has written that the Stasi “treated law as an instrument of politics.” In 1979 Stasi officer Erich Mielke put it this way: “Power is the most important position from which to fulfill the historical mission of the working class, to establish Communist society … Socialist law is an important instrument of exercising, enhancing and consolidating power.”
In its 2000 obituary for Erich Mielke, the New York Times explained that “Communist rule in East Germany [was] where assassination, kidnapping, execution, denunciation and intimidation were used to achieve and maintain power under the long, menacing shadow of the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, “Stasi informants, many of them coerced, spread suspicion and betrayal throughout society — between spouses, between schoolmates, between office colleagues — a terror that outlasted the East German state, which effectively collapsed when the Berlin Wall fell, and formally ceased to exist when Germany reunified in October 1990.”
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It concluded: “Mr. Mielke’s creed, expressed to subordinates in 1982 and recorded for Stasi archives, was: ‘All this twaddle about no executions and no death sentences, it’s all junk, comrades. Execute, if need be without a court sentence.’”
It’s a nightmare the Left would welcome.
