Sorgir kommúnismans, sorgir uppljóstrarana

Þetta hljómar auðvitað skelfilega, sálusorgari fólksins var hendbendi kommúnista og hugsanlega framseldi eða sagði frá fólki í söfnuði sínum.  En þetta er langt í frá einsdæmi.  Það eru mýmörg dæmi um að prestar hafi verið í þjónustu leyniþjónusta í kommúnistaríkjunum.

En því miður var þetta snar þáttur í lífi í ríkjum sósialista/kommúnista.  Börn voru hvött til að segja til foreldra sinna, eiginmenn njósnuðu um konur sínar, vinnufélagar fylgdust með hvor öðrum.  Engin var óhultur.  Enginn vissi hver var uppljóstrari, enginn vissi hverjum var treystandi.

Ef til vill var það stærsti glæpur sósialistanna, það að etja þegnunum endalaust á móti hverjum öðrum, fjölskyldumeðlimum gegn fjölskyldumeðlimum, vinum gegn vinum, samlöndum gegn samlöndum, vinnufélögum gegn vinnufélögum.  Þannig brutu þeir vísvitandi og kerfisbundið niður samfélagsmynstrið, vináttu og fjölskyldubönd.

Þess vegna hefur uppgjörið við þessa helstefnu verið svo erfitt, þess vegna hefur það í svo mörgum löndum ekki farið fram, vegna þess að svo stór partur var samsekur, vegna þess að svo stór partur viðkomandi þjóða skammast sín, vegna þess að hann er samsekur, stundum vegna frjáls vilja, oft vegna kúgunar, en skömmin situr jafn stór eftir.

En það er líka erfitt að dæma þetta fólk, sem sumpart lifði í eilífum ótta, óttaðist um líf sitt og sinna nánustu.  Fólkið sem langaði í stöðuhækkun, bara að færast upp um "eina tröppu", langaði að tryggja börnunum sínum menntun, langaði til að komast af.

Ég tengi þessa frétt við grein sem ég las nýverið við grein sem ég las á vef The Times.  Þar sagði frá eiginmanni sem njósnaði um eiginkonu sína.

Þar mátti lesa m.a. eftirfarandi:

"There can be few marriages quite as strange or as burdened by history as that of the German politician Vera Lengsfeld and her former husband, who spied on her for the East German secret police. “I have forgiven him,” the 54-year-old former dissident said. But she made it clear that personal forgiveness was as complex as the uneasy unification of Germany.

This, after all, was no conventional marital betrayal — no fling with a neighbour or office romance. Every halfway political conversation, every dinner with friends became the subject of a report to the Stasi. "

"“Now we have to see if he wants to meet me again,” she said. We are sitting in a corner of the high-walled Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin, one of the most notorious of Stasi jails that is now an open museum. Ms Lengsfeld has just shown me her old cell and the exercise yard, seven paces long, five paces wide. Prisoners were deliberately subjected to radiation. “Thousands were psychologically destroyed,” she added.

“When we were fingerprinted, we had to sit on a piece of fabric. This was later placed in an airless jar because they wanted to capture our smell. Can you tell me why?” The jars were later discovered in the Stasi cellars. Ms Lengsfeld’s husband, Knud Wollenberger, codenamed Donald by the Stasi, had tried to warn her not to attend a peace rally in 1988. Today it is clear that he knew from his Stasi masters that the woman he claimed to love, the mother of his two children, was about to be arrested.

After a humiliating month in the jail, Ms Lengsfeld was expelled from the country and spent time as a philosophy student in Cambridge. Only after the Berlin Wall collapsed did she discover that her husband had been informing on her during much of their marriage. They divorced and have not spoken since. "

"The old East German state refuses to lie down and die, and that angers the likes of Vera Lengsfeld. She may be ready to make her peace with a husband who was manipulated by the regime — but not with her former jailers.

Watching you, watching me

• The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the Stasi, was founded in 1950 with the motto “Shield and Sword of the Party”

   

• In its 40-year history it employed 274,000 people; it had a staff of 102,000 in 1989 and infiltrated almost every part of East German life

   

• After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 angry citizens stormed its offices and arrested officials, who had by then shredded hundreds of thousands of incriminating documents

   

• Thousands of archivists have attempted to piece together the documents

   

• A decade after the fall of Communism, 3.4 million citizens had asked to see their files

   

• Since 1989, 180,000 people have been identified as informers, although the real figure is likely to be higher"

Greinina í heild má finna hér. 

Pólskur biskup viðurkenndi að hafa átt samstarf við leyniþjónustu