Re: So.. was privatisation a success or not?

On Mon, 7 Jan 2008 17:46:39 +0100, "Lüko Willms"
<l.willms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Mon, 7 Jan 2008 14:25:52 UTC, schrieb MM <kylix_is@xxxxxxxxxxx>
auf uk.railway :

communities who lived in constant fear under wall-to-wall surveillance,

are you speaking about every spot of the land being under
surveillance by CCTV? The six-month long preservation of each and
every communication data (who called whom from where and for how long,
who emailed whom and when, which website did you access), i.e. about
today's reality?

But the technology wasn't around in the DDR, or anywhere else for that
matter. The Stasi would have denounced their grandmothers for the kind
of technologies available today. All they could muster was smelling
jars! Instead, they made sure they had their spies everywhere,
possibly even in the same family as those being spied upon.


East Germany is no more,

sure, the Stasi was really artisanal compared with the modern, much
more efficient surveillance apparatus now in place.

They seemed to keep the citizenry under their thumb for forty years
with what tools they had available.


and luckily little bloodshed accompanied the protests that led up
to the fall of the Wall.

because it was not the NATO airforce who bombed the Wall, as in
Jugoslavia, but the people themselves.

What I meant was, during the initial Leipziger Monday Demos the police
were urging that force be used and some force was indeed used (guns
fired). But somehow, after Gorby told Honecker not to expect any
support for Hungary-1956-style repression, the demos got bigger and
noisier, and the wall fell just a few months later with, as I claim,
little bloodshed. The police in the run up to the opening of the
borders were expressly ordered not to open fire. Of the dozen or more
hours of footage I have watched of the situation leading up to the
collapse of East Germany, the authorities just seemed totally bemused.
A few days earlier they were celebrating the 40-year aniversary, and
then, Scheisse!

MM
.

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