Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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Comrade Bourbon

Published by peter on 2012-04-08 in Communism, History and Politics. 0 Comments

The Bourbons, in Talleyrand’s famous formulation, learnt nothing and forgot nothing.  Further to my speculations as to what Czechoslovakia’s last Communist ruler, Gustav Husak, thought about his life’s work after he was deposed, along comes an interview with Margot Honecker, wife of the last-but-one leader of the DDR, Erich Honecker.   This is apparently her first public interview since defenestration.

Friedler [her interlocuter] said that over the several days he interviewed her, Honecker, who during her 26-year tenure as education minister introduced weapons training to schools, and ordered every teacher to report all incidences of deviation by pupils from the communist line, remained bizarrely detached from reality and resolute in her defence of East Germany.
“Margot Honecker showed no remorse, or discernment, she expressed no word of regret or apology,” he said.”

Her dogged devotion to the cause is to be admired, although it might better be termed recalcitrance. 
In one of history’s great ironies, when the Honeckers were  pushed from office in 1989, they also lost their (luxurious) state housing and benefits.  Having spent both their careers as members of the nomenklatura, they were now homeless, and were forced to ask dissident Lutheran pastor, Rev. Uwe Holmer,  for help in finding somewhere to stay.  He and his family hosted them for several months.   Somehow, one cannot imagine Margot Honecker acting likewise, if the situation were reversed.
 

Teaching children not to think

Published by peter on 2012-04-06 in Culture and Politics. 0 Comments

Suzanne Moore rightly criticizes the back-to-rote-learning-the-times-table fever that has so gripped this British Government and the chaterati generally.

We could ask writers about reading, but why listen to the likes of Michael Rosen when we can bang on about phonics, which naturally enough children must be immediately tested on as soon as they get the gist? According to the Daily Mail, a government initiative to test school literacy levels will see more than 500,000 six-year-olds asked to read made-up words such as “jound”, “terg”, “fape” and “snemp”. What a perfect way to symbolise our obsession with testing. We test nonsense when we could “gyre and gimble in the wabe”. We could get kids to do what they already do – imagine words. Sorry to bring this up, this awkward issue of imagination, but having observed 22 years of state education, I see its slow strangulation.
Of course, many are reassured by this return to tradition, an education in conformity, with its refusal to teach students how to code, source, verify and interpret data, and its division between arts and sciences when it is at this crossover that some of the best thinking is being produced. All this explains the continual cracks made at media studies, which is about learning to negotiate a mediated world through something other than 19th-century novels – mad, huh? But it is an exercise in sentimentality, not a design for living for now.
The current doublespeak means that free schools are not free at all. Intelligence, the ability to connect and create ideas, the so-called thinking outside the box – these things are hardly likely when the box itself is idolised. Far be it for me to advocate a return to actual free schools where my friends’ kids learned to make a dope table, but to purchase wholesale the idea that this return to “traditional methods” works for all is stupid. Evidence tells us otherwise. As a policy, it is more about what works for politicians than what works for children.
Our political class is indeed the pinnacle of smug regurgitation. Many are the products of the very best education, and what do they desire? Only to replicate what they know, not to transform the world. As our access to information widens, our education system could open up. Instead, it narrows itself to certainties that anyone with half a brain would have questioned a long time ago. Go to school, get a good job, don’t ask what it’s for. Freedom does not come from thinking by rote. Whatever they tell you.”

 

Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister

Published by peter on 2012-03-13 in Politics. 0 Comments

Australia’s new Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator Bob Carr, is a deeply serious and intellectual politician.  He was Premier of Australia’s largest state, New South Wales, for 10 years, making him the state’s longest continuously-serving leader. (Only Henry Parkes in the 19th century beats him non-continuously.)  A former journalist, Carr is renowned for his detailed knowledge of US political arcana, having read, it seems, every book on US history, law and politics published since Thomas Harriott’s account of Virginia in 1588.  As Premier, he undertook major environmental initiatives, creating acres of new national parks.  His key failing was not to tackle Sydney’s transport infrastructure crisis, but perhaps this is a problem too hard for a democratic leader to solve.
As an intellectual, Carr is in a long Australian tradition of serious, heavy-weight Foreign Ministers:  John Latham, Doc Evatt (President of the UN General Assembly in 1948-9), Garfield Barwick, Paul Hasluck, Gough Whitlam, Bill Hayden, Gareth Evans, and, of course, most recently, Kevin Rudd.    Carr is perhaps the only politician in the country who could make Rudd look intellectually ill-equipped  for the job of Foreign Minister.  Even the non-intellectuals who have been foreign minister  have often been men of principle, humanity and integrity, men who sought to make the world better than it had been – for instance, Stanley Bruce, Percy Spender, Richard Casey, Andrew Peacock, Alexander Downer, and Stephen Smith.  Several of Carr’s predecessors went on to higher roles – eg, vice-regality (Casey, Hasluck, Hayden), judicial office (Latham, Evatt, Spender, Barwick), or to work for international organizations (Bruce, Spender, Evans).
How strange then that just two weeks ago, Carr was retired, pursuing his literary and writing interests, and not even a member of any Parliament.  His long-ago-stated life’s ambition to be foreign minister looked like a pipe dream.   As Gore Vidal wrote of his grandfather, a blind man who became Oklahoma’s first Senator, no obstacle is too great if you mean to prevail.
It is interesting, I think, that the surprise resignation which provided the opportunity for Carr to enter the Senate, and thus to become Foreign Minister, was that of NSW Senator Mark Arbib, who, according to Wikileaks, was a regular visitor to the US Embassy in Canberra.  The NSW Right faction, of which both Arbib and Carr are members (as was Paul Keating), is known for its admiration for the USA, and its wonkish interest in US politics.   There would be few other foreign ministers who would know, without having to first check, which state primaries the US Secretary of State’s husband won in the 1992 presidential election, for example.
And what will be Carr’s priorities? At his first press conference, he mentioned his admiration for Indonesia’s society and people, contrary to most Australian media reporting, so I expect he will take a close interest in Asia. (His wife was born in Malaysia.) He does not speak Mandarin, as Rudd does, but he shares Rudd’s awareness of the potential negative consequences that a resurgent undemocratic China may have on the region and globally.   Carr’s americanophilia will enable him, better than anyone else in Australia perhaps, to steer a policy course in Australia’s own interests, and not slavishly dependent on US views of the world.  Some messages only good friends can give, and that makes Carr’s position a very strong one for the Australian-American alliance, and for American self-awareness about its true place in the world.
 

The mechanical judiciary

Published by peter on 2012-02-19 in Computer technology, Culture, Law and Politics. 0 Comments

In the tradition of Montaigne and Orwell, Rory Stewart MP has an extremely important blog post about the need for judicial decisions to be be made case-by-case, using humane wisdom, intuition, and discretion, and not by deterministic or mechanical algorithms. The same applies to most important decisions in our lives and our society. Sadly, his view runs counter to the thrust of modern western culture these last four centuries, as Stephen Toulmin observed.   Our obssessive desire for consistency in decision-making sweeps all before it, from oral examinations in mathematics to eurozone economic policy.

Stewart’s post is worth quoting at length:

What is the point of a parliamentary debate? It isn’t about changing MPs’ minds or their votes. It wasn’t, even in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1860s Trollope describes how MPs almost always voted on party lines. But they and he still felt that parliamentary debate mattered, because it set the terms of the public discussion, and clarified the great national questions. The press and public galleries were often filled. Churchill, even as a young backbencher, could expect an entire speech, lasting almost an hour, to be reprinted verbatim in the Morning Post. MPs put enormous effort into their speeches. But in the five-hour debate today on the judicial sentencing council, the press gallery was empty, and for most of the time there was only one single person on the Labour benches – a shadow Minister who had no choice. And on our side, a few former judges, and barristers. For whom, and about what, were we speaking?
Continue reading ‘The mechanical judiciary’

Husak Agonistes?

Published by peter on 2012-01-02 in Communism, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Posting recently following the death of Vaclav Havel, my mind returns to a question that has long pre-occupied me.  What did Havel’s predecessor as President of Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak, think of communism and of his role in it?  What did he think he was doing, at the time and subsequently?
Husak was a leading Slovak communist from before WW II (taking part in the brief Slovak National Uprising in September 1944), and afterwards.    However he fell victim to the Stalinist purges and trials that took place across most of Eastern Europe of the early 1950s (some of which which I wrote about here), and he spent the years 1954-1960 in prison.   Although most of the purges in Czechoslovakia at that time had an anti-semitic aspect, I do not believe he was Jewish. What does such an experience do to a good communist?  Does he, like Koestler’s bolshevik, Rubashov, come to believe that the Party, possessor of objective truth and the imprimatur of history, must always be in the right, and that therefore he, despite the evidence of his own lying eyes, is in the wrong?  Or does he maintain his innocence, believing that some error of judicial process has been made?  Such a view may require courage in the face of injustice and evil, as shown by Husak’s compatriot, the very brave Milada Horakova.   Or does he reject his prior beliefs in communism altogether, turning apostate like Cristóvão Ferreira, Portuguese Jesuit-turned-Shintoist, and the subject of Shusaku Endo’s great novel, Silence?    Or does he become some Vicar of Bray character, sailing – cynically, opportunistically – in whatever direction the prevailing winds point, not really believing or disbelieving anything?   A man is rarely just one straight thing, and someone may be each of these at different times in his life, especially someone sitting in prison with lots of time to think.
Husak was subsequently rehabilitated by the KSC, and served as Deputy Premier of Czechoslovakia from April 1968.  Was he appointed then because the reformers around Alexander Dubcek considered him a reformer too? Perhaps he was viewed by them as akin to the Polish communist leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had also been detained in the purges of the 1950s (although never tried or convicted, nor even, apparently, interrogated), and later rehabilitated and made leader.  If Husak was indeed a reformer in April 1968, then why did he adopt a collaborationist line after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August?  Was he, like the later Polish leaders, Wojciech Jaruzelski and Mieczyslaw Rakowski, convinced that collaboration was the only feasible and patriotic path for a national state inside the Soviet empire at the time.   General Jaruzelski still maintains this position regarding his imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.  If, instead,  Husak was a not a reformer in April 1968, was he actively duplicitous, or merely some Vicar of Bray.
And after the fall, when the KSC-dominated Parliament of Czechoslovakia voted unanimously in December 1989 for Havel to be President, what then did Husak think?  That the winds had once again shifted, and that it was time once again for All-Change?  Or that, despite the revisionist winds, blowing this time from Moscow itself,  he had been right all along to be a communist, and that history, far from having ended in the present, would at some future point judge him so?
A Polish journalist, Teresa Toranska, published in the twilight days of Polish communism a series of interviews with leading communists who had led the party at its rise to power four decades before (Toranska 1988).  What was striking to me when I first read these interviews twenty-odd years ago was the variety of responses of those interviewed:  from regret and sadness, through to defiant recalcitrance.   Some begged forgiveness for what they had done or been complicit in.  Some had, apparently, subverted the system from within (for example, Stefan Staszewski secretly printing and distributing multiple unauthorized copies of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956).  Others thought only that mistakes had been made, although apparently not by them.   Still others, like the Bourbons, had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.  I am intrigued by where Husak would have placed himself in this cabinet of wonders.
And, as always, how interesting it is that colonial empires so often collapse from the centre – France in 1958, Portugal in 1974, the USSR in 1989.
POSTSCRIPT [2012-01-21]:  Some of the diversity of views of Party members is shown in the first part of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1981 parallel-worlds film:  Przypadek  (Blind Chance).
POSTCRIPT [2012-04-08]:  And here is Margot Honecker, as obstinately recalcitrant as a rhodesian whenwe.
References:
Shusaku Endo [1966]: Silence.
Arthur Koestler [1940]: Darkness at Noon.
Teresa Toranska [1988]:  Them:  Stalin’s Polish Puppets.  HarperCollins. Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska.

Hamlet by the Moskva

Published by peter on 2012-01-01 in Literature, Politics and Shakespeare. 0 Comments

The re-assignment last week of Vladislav Surkov, formerly Chief of Staff for the Russian President, following the opposition protests, reminded me of the fascinating profile of Mr Surkov in the London Review of Books by Peter Pomerantsev two months ago.  The profile ended with a sinister interpretation of Hamlet:

‘Life in Russia,’ the journalist told me in the democratic bar, ‘has got better but leaves a shitty aftertaste.’ We had a drink. ‘Have you noticed that Surkov never seems to get older? His face has no wrinkles.’ We had more drinks. We talked about Surkov’s obsession with Hamlet. My companion recalled an interpretation of the play suggested by a literature professor turned rock producer (a very Moscow trajectory).
‘Who’s the central figure in Hamlet?’ she asked. ‘Who’s the demiurge manipulating the whole situation?’
I said I didn’t know.
‘It’s Fortinbras, the crown prince of Norway, who takes over Denmark at the end. Horatio and the visiting players are in his employ: their mission is to tip Hamlet over the edge and foment conflict in Elsinore. Look at the play again. Hamlet’s father killed Fortinbras’s father, he has every motive for revenge. We know Hamlet’s father was a bad king, we’re told both Horatio and the players have been away for years: essentially they left to get away from Hamlet the father. Could they have been with Fortinbras in Norway? At the end of the play Horatio talks to Fortinbras like a spy delivering his end-of-mission report. Knowing young Hamlet’s unstable nature they hired the players to provoke him into a series of actions that will bring down Elsinore’s rulers. This is why everyone can see the ghost at the start. Then when only Hamlet sees him later he is hallucinating. To Muscovites it’s obvious. We’re so much closer to Shakespeare’s world here.’ On the map of civilisation, Moscow – with its cloak and dagger politics (designer cloak, diamond-studded dagger), its poisoned spies, baron-bureaucrats and exiled oligarchs who plan revolutions from abroad, its Cecil-Surkovs whispering into the ears of power, its Raleigh-Khodorkovskys imprisoned in the Tower – is somewhere near Elsinore.

Reference:
Peter Pomerantsev [2011]:  Putin’s Rasputin. London Review of Books, 33 (20): 3-6 (2011-10-20).

Christopher Hitchens RIP

Published by peter on 2011-12-23 in Obama speeches, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

I have long been annoyed by the abuse of power that media organizations – even noble and high-minded ones – are prone to engage in.  Newspapers, for example, often run obituaries of people who work for them in support roles, such as their administrative and printing staff.  However virtuous or locally-influential such lives may have been, these people were not public figures, and it strikes me as a mis-use of media power for them to be given prominent public obituaries merely because they happened to have worked for an organization that prints such obituaries.  Until it introduced a section of its obits page for readers’ own accounts of the lives of recently-departed ordinary people, The Guardian, for example, was a key offender in this, with all manner of obscure back-office staff being given national obituaries.   Is this newspaper just an in-house magazine for its employees?
The death of Christopher Hitchens has allowed The Grauniad to fall back on its old ways, with pages and pages devoted to Hitchens and all his works – a seeming HitchFest – as if his death were a major world event.  Vaclav Havel,  who died shortly afterwards, received fewer column inches, yet demonstrably had a greater impact on the world.    I expect that The Guardian has given so many pages to Hitch because he seems to have been known to and had great influence on other journalists, and because it can.  That latter reason, it seems to me, is a mis-use of their power;  it is also something Hitchens himself would have objected to.
Bloggers have also devoted much attention to his passing on.   I have no problem with this, as blogging does not pretend to be a public service activity.   Although I have tried over the years to read most everything Hitchens ever published, usually with great enjoyment, I have hesitated at his passing on to write about my reactions to his work and life.     I never knew him (although I know people who did) so I will not comment on his personality or his personal life.    As a writer, he was an extremely elegant and well-turned stylist, and always provocative to thinking.   His invective, even when I disagreed with it or its targets, was always finely-honed and often very amusing.  I will miss reading him immensely.
I had several major disagreements with his views (at least as far I knew them from his writings).  Firstly,  someone who could join a Trotskyist political groupoid had to have very poor political judgement. (The same could be said for that other early-Trotskyist, late-onset neocon, Norman Geras.). The people in these groups in the 1960s and 1970s were in general in my experience not pleasant, not rational, not open to reason, and not realistic about what works in the world.  And  each group was not unlike a cult.   They were often very elitist, believing they could see the future which the rest of us dummies could not;  and few of the Trotskyists I have encountered in my life had any empathy for working people.   I can only see membership of such a groupoid as evidence of gross mis-understanding about the world, of how it is, and of what it may become.  Of course, we all lack understanding of the world when we are young, and some of us gain our wisdom faster than others.
Secondly, for all his internationalism, Hitch never “got” Barack Obama.  I read his writings in the US Presidential campaign of 2007-2008, and subsequently, and mis-understanding and mis-construals were evident throughout.  Sometimes I thought his mis-readings were deliberate and wilful (as in his accusation that Obama was  not a sincere religious believer), while at other times he was simply mistaken.   From the very first time I heard Obama speak (in 2004), I knew him immediately.  He reminded me of scores of dedicated foreign aid workers I know from Africa and Asia:  “We are the ones we have been waiting for“, “Yes, we can“, etc.  This is the language of community empowerment, of working-with not working-through people, of helping the poor and downtrodden through empathy from a position at their level, not condescending to them from a position at some level above or outside them.    Tim Geithner, with his superb social-parsing skills,  is, it seems, another  person in the same mould.
Hitchens apparently thought such statements by Obama vacuous.  Why would Hitchens – an internationalist – not also understand this about Obama, I wondered?  Hitchens had traveled a great deal, and often to nasty places, but as far as I know he never lived in any such place for any time.   He had not ever had to negotiate a foreign culture over the long term, except that of the USA, which is certainly different to Britain, but not so different as Indonesia, say, or Kenya.   And perhaps Marxism, with its impersonal theory of history across all time, and Trotskyism, with its belief in global revolution across all space, together make it hard to see the impacts of specific cultures, histories and societies – in the here and in the now – on the lives of people, and on their political possibilities, and on what actions are needed to change these lives and possibilities.  And, for the same reason, perhaps a person focused on dialectical analysis of grand theories of global history simply cannot easily understand someone seeking to improve the lot of a single group of people in one housing estate in Chicago, a community organizer say.  This far from the Bolshevik Revolution, it is easy to forget that many on the left (and particularly Trotskyists) disparaged acting locally, to the point where small-scale actions even received their own term of socialist invective: ameliorism.
And, finally, Hitchens seemed to not fully understand religion.  I was with him all the way in his criticism of the evils and sins committed by organized religion, and  in its name.   I was also with him in his refusal to bow down:  Any God that required our worship is not worthy of it.  Certainly no believer in the universal rights of man would countenance such feudal fealty.   Too, I was with him in his courageous refusal to run scared, to adopt religion as a crutch or consolation, as a candle for the dark nights of life.   But, even after all these aspects are considered, there remain other reasons for human religious or spiritual impulses, reasons which are good and valid and true.   Despite what Norm thinks, one may be drawn to sights unseen without any prior beliefs and without any desire to worship deities, but merely with a desire – often unexpressed or even unexpressable – to experience contact with elements of the non-material.   Such a desire motivates many mathematicians and musicians and artists, in addition to explaining the mystic strain evident in most religions.    Is there a non-material realm, outside the world of our five senses?  An entire branch of contemporary physics – String theory and M-theory – is posited on there being such a realm, comprising further dimensions of space-time inaccessible to us, despite the absence yet of any inter-subjective and replicable scientific evidence for it.    Do non-material or spiritual entities exist?   To me, that question is the same as:  Do mathematical objects exist?   On this aspect of religion, Hitchens (from his writings) seemed completely tone-deaf, just as if he lacked  the sense of hearing, or sight.
But, as I said, I will miss reading him immensely.
 
POSTSCRIPT (2012-01-14):  The Times Literary Supplement of 6 January 2012 publishes a letter by Mary Kenny which criticizes Hitchen’s simple-minded, black-and-white approach to religion, in regard in particular to his reporting on the Irish divorce referendum of 1995.    As she says,   “Yet a good journalist, let alone a great journalist –  as Michael Dirda (also December 23 & 30, 2011) claims Hitchens to have been  – would not  have scribbled off such a slapdash and superficial polemic:  a journalist in the tradition of Geroge Orwell would have examined such a social juncture in all its many nuances.”  The polemic by Hitchens that Kenny refers to is in his book, God is Not Great.
 
Footnote:
Andrew Sullivan’s tributes here, and links to Normblog’s and other tributes here.

Havel na Hrad!

Published by peter on 2011-12-19 in Heroes, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

A memorial salute to Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), who died yesterday.  I first read his Letters to Olga in the 1980s, and have found this and his other writings inspiring.  Havel’s life, too, reads like one of his own plays, and I long admired his courage, his profound self-awareness, and his integrity-of-purpose.

In one of his memoirs, Havel mentions the trepidation which Mikhail Gorbachev apparently felt prior to their first meeting, a meeting that took place in Moscow in 1990 shortly after Havel’s assumption of the Presidency of Czechoslovakia in December 1989, and immediately following Havel’s first official trip to the USA.  Gorbachev, a victim like any other citizen of Soviet misinformation and propaganda, it seems had never met a genuine dissident before and feared what Havel would say or do in the meeting, perhaps even fearing that Havel would attack him physically.
This anecdote came to mind today while reading a surreal account (Chodakiewicz 2011) of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, which claims the entire process of political transformation 20 years ago there was engineered by the Russian Communist nomenklatura as a grand, multi-national, multi-party, multi-year, multi-political-party conspiracy to remain in power.   Among Chodakiewicz’s offensive absurdities is to claim that the leadership of the Polish United Workers Party (the Polish communist party) was second only to that of Bulgaria in its servility to Moscow in the post-war period.   One wonders just why, then, did Poland experience no Stalinist show-trials in the early 1950s?  Why then was Wladyslaw Gomulka arrested, stripped of his posts and detained for several years in the same period, without being interrogated or tried or punished or executed (as were, say, his equivalent colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and then later restored to a leadership position?  Was this, too, a charade that was part of the grand conspiracy?    How could such evident nonsense be published in a reputable refereed journal?
Footnote (2011-12-26):
In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker (2003), Havel says regarding his first meeting with Gorbachev (in which the two negotiated the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from Czechoslovakia):

I met Gorbachev about two months after I was elected President.  We went to Moscow, for my first visit to the Kremlin, and we met for eight or nine hours.  At first, Gorbachev looked at me as if I was some kind of exotic creature – the first living dissident he ever saw, who was coming to him as the head of a state that had been part of his realm.  But, gradually, we developed a kind of friendship, which had even begun to develop at the end of that first long visit to the Kremlin.”   

References:
Guardian obituary here, and Economist tribute here.  The Economist claims that Charter 77 was the “first open manifestation of dissent inside the Soviet empire”.  That claim rather ignores the various uprisings going back at least to 1953 (in the DDR), in Hungary in 1956, in Poland on numerous occasions, and even in Moscow – the public protest by the Moscow Seven in August 1968 against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was indeed, one of several protests in the USSR and elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
A salute to another Czech hero here, along with a note on the leninist nature of Gorbachev’s reforms.   And here a tribute to the Moscow Seven.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz [2011]: Active measures gone awry:  Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, 1989-1992.  International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, 24 (3): 467-493.
David Remnick [2003]:  Exit Havel.  The New Yorker, 17 February 2003.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Published by peter on 2011-11-03 in Forecasting, History, Politics and Prophecy. 0 Comments

It has always struck me that Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism would be eclipsed by socialism and then by communism was a self-denying prophecy: because he made this prediction, and because of the widespread popularity of his (and other socialists’) ideas, politicians and businessmen were moved to act in ways which allowed capitalism to adapt, rather than to die. It seems that the end of communism may have been partly due to similar reflective-system effects.
In her book, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder writes the following about the opposition to the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the former German Democratic Republic (the DDR):

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that it appeared that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them. (pp. 197-198)
 

NOTE:  A comment about the processes which led to the end of communism in the USSR is contained in this post.
Reference:
Anna Funder [2003]: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. (London, UK: Granta Books).