Thoughts about the way the world is set up, and the way it's changing. Trying to see the forces moving beneath the surface of history as it is happening.
15 March 2007
Carpet-slipper sadism, Imperial Rome, the Stasi, and now
Mary Beard reports on a visit to the Stasi Museum in Leipzig:
But what was odd was that most of the objects on show didn’t obviously match up to the image of terror that I had been given. In one room there was a vast Heath Robinson machine – driven by a series of wheels, spun by a big metal handle. It was the mail scanner, which was supposed to have processed tons of suspicious mail, mechanically opening the letters, delivering them to the view of Stasi operator one by one, then resealing them. It took only a glance to see that this great lumbering machine could not possibly have worked as claimed – even if it did produce some annoyingly mangled letters.
The most extraordinary room, though, was the “disguise room”, where old Stasi camouflages were hung. It was indistinguishable from an amateur dramatic costume store. Cheap and ill-sewn outfits stuffed on bent hangers, each with a label pinned on. My favourite was “the Arab” (with the predictable towel for a headdress, a bit like this picture), but “the photographer” was a close second. Again they couldn’t possibly have worked in the way you would have imagined. Any Stasi agent sloping through the streets of Leipzig in “the Arab” get-up could hardly have gone unnoticed. They might just as well have carried a large placard saying “Stasi agent”.
So how do you account for the image of terror that my hosts conveyed? The only explanation was that terror doesn’t necessarily depend on efficiency, still less on subtlety. Menace can equally well be delivered by ridiculous half-disguises and bathetic contrivances. The sheer, almost comic, hopelessness of the Stasi’s repertoire was itself part of the weapon of fear -- a taunt to the people.
There is a nice Roman parallel in the reign of the emperor Commodus (AD 180-92). On one occasion, as I remember the story, the historian Dio Cassius was sitting with the other senators on the front row of the amphitheatre. The emperor had himself been taking pot-shots at animals in the arena and wandered over to them waving the head of an ostrich, and gesturing with it to the seated aristocracy that decapitation might always be their fate too. Dio – a rare eyewitness to such imperial displays – explains that he could hardly stop himself giggling and so plucked a laurel leaf from his wreath and stuffed it in his mouth. Funny it may have been. But Dio makes it absolutely clear that the emperor was simultaneously just as terrifying as a Stasi man with a towel on his head.
State terror can work in surprising ways.
Posted by Mary Beard on March 15, 2007 at 12:02 AM
FUD - "fear, uncertainty, doubt" Always works - with kids ("what's daddy going to do now?"), spouses ("lovely dress", "where'd the money come from?"), employees ("good work", "afraid you're just not a team player") etc etc.
The smiling, reptilian, unpredictably violent mafia boss (Little Napoleon in Some Like It Hot).
RD Laing describes the pathology well in "The Divided Self". Mixed messages, double binds and so on.
More relevant to political thuggery is Trotsky's analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, for instance in The Revolution Betrayed:
Here it becomes clear what the mass social base for the political regime of Stalinism was - a broad and diffuse crowd of privileged union and party bureaucrats. The minimal cultural level and maximal insecurity of these people defies belief, of course. Similar traits characterized the social base of imperial thuggery, except that that comprised a broad and diffuse crowd of slave-owning landowners, top military brass and moneylenders.
Of course, the Roman thugs already had slaves and rule by clout, although they had to disembowel the old body of the republic to achieve completely arbitrary rule by force. The Stalinist gangs had real trouble creating slavery and arbitrary rule. The emperors had the wind of history in their sails, the Stalinists didn't - just the putrescent gases of a much more powerful capitalist world market.
Orwell caught the gloomy atmosphere of oppression very well in 1984, as did Huxley the showbiz aspects of it in Brave New World. What the German and perhaps the Russian postmortems on Stalinism will produce will hopefully take us a bit nearer the limits of dystopia. A pre-post-mortem so to speak was Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (useful brief intro on Wikipedia). Farewell to Lenin, the Stasi Museum(s) and so on, like a French novel I recently read about Brecht and the Stasi (La Maîtresse de Brecht. (Brecht’s Mistress) by Jacques-Pierre Amette), highlight the BANALITY of what was going on. Suburban totalitarianism. The Nazi ethos without Ragnarök/Götterdämmerung. Carpet-slipper sadism at the dawn of a new day instead of the fiery end of a dying epoch.
Plenty of contradictions of the most titanic kind. Plenty to hate and spew bile over - and... yet...
Almost twenty years on the ordinary people of the old Eastern Bloc are still not at ease with their new system, and don't feel at home in it. And the shreds of the old Doris Day/Bing Crosby optimism of the Free World are lying in stinking piles around our ankles like the melted rubber of overinflated balloons.
Eppur si muove, I think Galileo would mutter about world history today. No stasis, despite the best efforts of the Stasi and the States.
She finishes off:
****************************************************
Choppa's response:
FUD - "fear, uncertainty, doubt"
Always works - with kids ("what's daddy going to do now?"), spouses ("lovely dress", "where'd the money come from?"), employees ("good work", "afraid you're just not a team player") etc etc.
The smiling, reptilian, unpredictably violent mafia boss (Little Napoleon in Some Like It Hot).
RD Laing describes the pathology well in "The Divided Self". Mixed messages, double binds and so on.
More relevant to political thuggery is Trotsky's analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, for instance in The Revolution Betrayed:
Here it becomes clear what the mass social base for the political regime of Stalinism was - a broad and diffuse crowd of privileged union and party bureaucrats. The minimal cultural level and maximal insecurity of these people defies belief, of course. Similar traits characterized the social base of imperial thuggery, except that that comprised a broad and diffuse crowd of slave-owning landowners, top military brass and moneylenders.
Of course, the Roman thugs already had slaves and rule by clout, although they had to disembowel the old body of the republic to achieve completely arbitrary rule by force. The Stalinist gangs had real trouble creating slavery and arbitrary rule. The emperors had the wind of history in their sails, the Stalinists didn't - just the putrescent gases of a much more powerful capitalist world market.
Orwell caught the gloomy atmosphere of oppression very well in 1984, as did Huxley the showbiz aspects of it in Brave New World. What the German and perhaps the Russian postmortems on Stalinism will produce will hopefully take us a bit nearer the limits of dystopia. A pre-post-mortem so to speak was Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (useful brief intro on Wikipedia). Farewell to Lenin, the Stasi Museum(s) and so on, like a French novel I recently read about Brecht and the Stasi (La Maîtresse de Brecht. (Brecht’s Mistress) by Jacques-Pierre Amette), highlight the BANALITY of what was going on. Suburban totalitarianism. The Nazi ethos without Ragnarök/Götterdämmerung. Carpet-slipper sadism at the dawn of a new day instead of the fiery end of a dying epoch.
Plenty of contradictions of the most titanic kind. Plenty to hate and spew bile over - and... yet...
Almost twenty years on the ordinary people of the old Eastern Bloc are still not at ease with their new system, and don't feel at home in it. And the shreds of the old Doris Day/Bing Crosby optimism of the Free World are lying in stinking piles around our ankles like the melted rubber of overinflated balloons.
Eppur si muove, I think Galileo would mutter about world history today. No stasis, despite the best efforts of the Stasi and the States.