2021-03-28

Woke/CRT Culture: The Red Guard-Stasi Mashup

Many have made analogies between the woke "cancel culture" phenomenon and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I think this is a great analogy, but I think that another, perhaps better, analog has been overlooked, namely the "Disintegration Directive" of the East German Stasi. (Archive link here)
Briefly, the Disintegration Directive, also known as the Decomposition Directive (officially Richtlinie 1/76 or the Zersetzung in German) was the approach that the East German secret police (the Stasi) took from 1976 onwards to crush dissent, or even potential dissent.

Before 1976, the Stasi used the conventional gulag-and-torture methods to control political opinion in the DDR. But in the 1970s, the DDR was seeking international recognition, so they needed a lower-profile method of suppressing opposition to Communism.

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