One of the recurring motifs in much German-language literature from the 60s to the 80s (Bernhard, Kofler, Uwe Johnson, Handke and others) is the threat of secret police and intelligence services. You can guess why. And that other motive, also frequent and linked to the first, which consists in naming (by fictitious or real names) quidams who, during the dark years, officiated as state criminals, then forgotten after the end of the war, while continuing to exercise their activities (in the police or justice or other administrations, for example) by remembering, without scruple and with nostalgia, the good old days of legitimate violence.
Here’s a passage from the book of Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Masante, embroidering on this theme, among many other passages, so haunted is the book by the threat of arrest.
« but which of the two or three was the fear-driven weapon bearer, I don’t know. Who was it, who should it be here who feared his pursuers, who said there were always two, no more and no less? They followed him or would follow him, lose sight of him again, pass him, overtake him or stay behind him, but one day they would face him, he said. ID please, that’s how it starts. Certainly, there were always others, Motschmann and Kranzmeier, Globotschnik and Fricke, but all with the same past, with the same future, graduates of the police academy, matured in the security service, yes-men to discipline and order, firmly in the saddle. He said maybe they weren’t even looking for him, maybe they had never seen him, but sooner or later he would become their victim. Perhaps he was a little lower on the list, but he was on it, others were at the top, perhaps those who were given to rebelling more actively than was in his nature, but these ranks would gradually thin out, the active rebels would become rarer, the merely disagreeable would follow, then finally the silent ones among them, his time would come.”
The gradation in the repression of political opponents follows exactly this rhythm:
1. First, the most vindictive are silenced by criminalizing them under the heading of undermining state security or terrorism, thus legitimizing their control through police violence. This first step is a specialty of authoritarian regimes (liberal or communist), but is also widespread in many so-called liberal democracies.
2. Once the most virulent opponents have been crushed, any expression of criticism, no matter how innocuous, can be attacked: this applies to regimes that rely on unlimited surveillance systems, such as China. But the same is true of many authoritarian or even totalitarian countries, where free expression, whether on social networks or in the street, simply no longer exists.
3. The final step is to extend surveillance to involve the entire population – by hiring citizens as informers. This was a very common policy in the Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union, where anyone who dared to criticize the regime within the family, professional or neighborhood circle was in constant danger of being denounced by those closest to him or her. In the most radical cases, we speak of a paranoid state, where everyone distrusts everyone and everyone distrusts everyone. There are many such states in the world today: North Korea, Eritrea, Egypt, Afghanistan, Syria, Burma, Central African Republic, Iran, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Belarus, Nicaragua, Russia (with varying degrees of effectiveness, of course)…
To assess the nature of a political regime, it is often wise to measure the degree of surveillance and repression it reserves for its opponents.
However, we should not blithely assume that democratic regimes are immune to abuses such as generalized surveillance or “widespread” and “systematic” repression of opponents. Surveillance technologies made considerable progress during the Cold War, and the United States, with its notorious J. Edgar Hoover, witch-hunts and repression of black activists, was no slouch compared to its Soviet adversary in this field.
The intelligence services are a real blind spot in democracies, an off-screen area that no party, to my knowledge, dares to question (except when things get out of hand, as in the case of the Rainbow Warrior bombing, for example). And yet, not only is it a kind of state of exception in a democracy, but it’s also a tool whose uninterrupted progress, whose optimization “goes without saying”, is available to anyone who wants to make use of it: activists from La Quadrature du Net, for example, never stop reminding us of this. In the name of security, surveillance systems are being developed and deployed, which (future? Not so “future” in reality) rulers will use to their heart’s content if they feel like setting up an authoritarian system.
There are many reasons for the general passivity of citizens in liberal capitalist democracies towards the problem of state surveillance, starting with the opacity of said systems (or their technicality, and the staggering level of ignorance in digital matters). But far beyond the very recent issue of digital technology, it’s rooted in the certainty, particularly among people who are de facto “on the side of power”, starting with the bourgeois classes (supported and sustained by power, with which they are in fact confused), that they “have nothing to reproach themselves for”. From a historical point of view, this is an extremely naive attitude (in a totalitarian regime, the mere fact of having thoughts, an inner life, is grounds for suspicion). Nevertheless, this position is coherent: what threatens power often also threatens the ruling classes (starting with the left-wing opposition, if the interests of capital are at stake). The apparent moderation of liberal democracies has a soothing, calming and reassuring effect on many people. But the worm is in the fruit (and indeed, in any political regime: it’s intrinsically linked to the exercise of power).
(NOTE : I haven’t found an English translation of W. Hildesheimer’s book Masante. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough? So I’ve translated this passage from the German text, using an automatic translator: it’s obvious that this translation is only a very uncertain and literarily deplorable approximation of the original text. Please do not use this excerpt as a basis for judging Masante’s literary quality (and the work of W. Hildesheimer, one of my favorite authors)