The Stasi and the Overcoat

by William H. Benson

June 14, 2018

The East German communist government collapsed in late 1989, and soon thereafter, its people were amazed to learn that the Stasi secret police had a bulging manila-colored file on many of them.

For decades, across East Germany, thousands of spies had watched for indications of suspicious activity or words that indicated an individual’s dissatisfaction with the communist government.

Fellow workers, neighbors, family members, even spouses, spied on each other and then submitted detailed reports to the Stasi. Officials then added the reports to a person’s file, and then re-stacked the files on metal shelves, seven-shelves high, deep inside a Stasi directorate building.

It was a vast operation of spying, producing reports, and preserving files, mainly gossip, all done in secret. Its purpose: “to root out the class enemy.”

The Stasi, the Ministry for State Security, was formed on February 8, 1950, and was dissolved a month shy of forty years later, on January 13, 1990. One investigator ventured to say, “The Stasi maintained greater surveillance over its own people than any other secret police force in history.”

The Stasi abandoned “arrest and torture,” in favor of psychological harassment. Officials would go into someone’s home and re-arrange the furniture, or change their brands of tea bags, and other tricks designed to let the victims know that officials were watching. As a result, the people crouched in fear. 

At the most, the Stasi employed 91,000 workers, but they relied on 189,000 unofficial spies, a cobweb of unidentified informants, called IM’s, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. 

In late 1989, when East German governing officials sensed the end was near, Stasi employees set to work to shred the files, but the sheer volume was too vast. In early January of 1990, a crowd gathered outside a Stasi office building, and demanded that Stasi officials stop the shredding, and they did, but not before they had shredded millions of pages, about 5% of the total.

Ever since, investigators have dug into some 16,000 huge manila-colored bags of shredded documents, containing about 45 million pages, and worked to re-assemble them, but the job is big.

The remainder of the files stand on the shelves, 69 miles long (111 kilometers), in 13 offices in Berlin and other German cities, and “they contain the everyday results of a people being spied upon.”

At first, there was anxious discussion about whether to seal the files, keep them secret, or allow everyone to see their own file. At some point, the new government decided to permit free access to the files. People read their own file and could, with some effort, identify who had spied upon them.

Numerous Stasi officials were prosecuted for their crimes after 1990, when the files were opened.

How did a secret police organization maintain its power for forty years? One researcher explained, “The psychological terror the Stasi state depended upon, from the first day to the last, was the presence of the Red Army, and the willingness of the Soviet Union to use force. When the Red Army went, the Stasi state went too.” Indeed, the KGB maintained liaison offices in all 8 main Stasi directorates.

Yes, the KGB and the Soviet Union’s Red Army intimidated the Stasi, but in addition, there were thousands of East German clerks who, also out of fear, refused to speak out, and chose to participate in the spying, reporting, and filing.

The Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol, described the justifications that governing clerks make to survive, in a short story he entitled, “The Overcoat.” In his office, the main character, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, did one thing, copy other documents in longhand, day after day. 

When offered more productive work, like change the header, or reword the documents’ words, Akaky refused. Unthinking and unfeeling, he copied all he was told to copy and would not change. 

Today, in our world of 2018, the internet is wide open, and social media is pervasive. Governments, companies, and institutions struggle to define a person’s right to privacy. The fear is constant that a ruthless government might use the internet and social media, as tools to browbeat, intimidate, and then control a nation’s citizens, obliterating right to privacy, and a host of other rights.

When that happens, the regime will construct a bureaucracy, hire an army of clerks, build thousands of office cubicles, give them each a computer, and set them to work, to shatter other people’s lives. No longer will they need reams of paper, or miles of shelves to hold the files. 

Summer-time Reading

by William H. Benson

May 31, 2018, 

The invention that makes men and women most human is recorded language, embodied in the alphabet. In the far distant past, a wise soul decided to attach a written character to a human sound. Today, when we see “Sh, z, p, th, t, b, or d” on a printed page, we know the sound, we imitate it, and we understand the idea that the author recorded and wished to convey to his or her readers.

By stringing together letters in ink on white paper, men and women for centuries have transmitted their ideas into the future. Books record an author’s thoughts, opinions, experiences, and emotions.

Animals lack this ability. They cannot relive or experience another animals’ life moments. Instead, they experience life moment by moment, second by second, with little reflection on their past.

Teachers encourage their students to read, and many do. Elementary students read grade school-level books, mainly fiction. Middle school students love to read adventure stories, like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, Charlotte’s Webb, Tarzan of the Apes, or Robinson Crusoe.

At some point in high school though, some students surrender their love for the adventure story and gravitate toward more serious works, like Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

After college, adults, more often than not, lay aside books, especially those of literature. They have jobs, a boss to obey, families to feed, endless football and basketball games that need watched, and little spare time. If they read at all, they read books and papers that their jobs require. Warren Buffett says, “I read 500 pages every day,” but he reads business publications.

This past week I read one guy’s opinion, “I am still fascinated by how much a person can change by reading a single book. Books carry decades and centuries of knowledge and wisdom.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I have re-read three novels I read in high school: Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies. Each are short, fun, easy to read, and packed with ideas.

George Orwell published Animal Farm on August 17, 1945. In it, the animals on Farmer Jones’s farm headbutt Jones off the farm and take over his land and farming operation. One pig, Napoleon, then dictates how the other animals, those he calls his “comrades,” will work. 

Napoleon says, “the happiest animals live simple lives,” and he formulates Seven Commandments that he inscribes on the barn wall. Number seven reads, “All animals are equal.”

The cart-horse, Boxer, says often, “I must work harder,” and “Napoleon is always right.” The sheep bleat out the farm’s slogan, “Four legs are good. Two legs are bad.”

Orwell admitted that his book is an allegory, and that Animal Farm represents the Soviet Union, and that Napoleon is Stalin. In order to consolidate Napoleon’s power, the pig transforms each of the seven commandments. The seventh becomes, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

In October of 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. The title, he said, came from a Fire Chief at the Fire Department, who explained, “Book-paper catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Bradbury’s main character, Guy Montag, lives in an anti-intellectual world where possession of a book is criminal. Guy and his fellow firemen start fires by spraying kerosene-fueled flames that they aim at books, or at the houses that contain books. 

One night at a fire, out of curiosity, Guy conceals some books under his arm, takes them home, and reads them. He reads Ecclesiastes and Revelations from the Bible, works by Thoreau and Shakespeare and Jefferson, and is amazed. He decides he must quit burning books, and his life begins to unravel.

William Golding published Lord of the Flies on September 17, 1754. To his wife, he explained that he wanted to write a book about how a group of boys would change, for the worse, if tossed together on a deserted island, without the protective influence of adults nearby.

Instead of enjoying the adventure together, the boys—Ralph, Jack, and Piggy—divide into vicious tribes, each intent on subduing or killing the other. The boys cling to a superstitious belief that a beast, the Lord of the Flies, lives on the island, and to flush out the beast, they set the island on fire.

In short, the boys transform into monsters, lacking pity for the others.

Golding said, that “the shape of society depends directly upon the ethical nature of the individual,” and that “civilized society can quickly deteriorate into danger, terrorism, and anarchy.”

This summer take a vacation, and read. Every day for thirty minutes, read the books you failed to read in high school, but always wanted to, and then tell your friends and family what you learned. You just might gain some of the “knowledge and wisdom,” that the books contain.

Patterns vs. Randomness

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2018

Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland in 1818. Although born into slavery, Douglass was fortunate enough to escape to the north as a young man, and there he became an ardent abolitionist.

Douglass said, “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”

Also, born in 1818, on May 5th, was Karl Marx, the German political writer and thinker. A writer for The Economist said, “Marx was a latter day prophet. The fall from grace is embodied in capitalism; man is redeemed as the proletariat rises up against its exploiters and creates a communist utopia.”

In 1816, a few English writers enjoyed a summer’s vacation at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The poet Lord Byron suggested that they compete to see who can write the best ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s girlfriend, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then just eighteen-years-old, dreamed of a scientist who built an eight-foot-tall creature, and then galvanized the spark of life into the being. 

“From vaults and charnel-houses he exhumed dead bodies,” Mary Shelley wrote. The scientist, Victor Frankenstein regretted his experiment. He said, “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life.” Mary Shelley published her ghost story, Frankenstein, on January 1, 1818, 200 years ago.

Three random events: the birth of an African-American slave boy in Maryland, the birth of a Jewish boy in Germany, and the publication of the world’s first horror story. Few at the time considered those three events important, and yet we acknowledge them now.

An interesting thought. What is happening now, or who is being born now, in 2018, that people in the year 2038, 200 years, or eight generations, into the future, will look back on as noteworthy? A difficult question, because human beings see far better into the past than into the future.

Space exploration is the wonder of the age. For example, on Saturday, May 5, at 5:05 a.m. Pacific time, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, NASA’s team launched a rocket towards Mars. It should land on Mars’s surface on November 26, 2018, after six months and twenty-one days of travel across 300 million miles of space. America’s achievements in space astonishes the rest of the world. 

The discovery of life, even intelligent life, on other planets though, may occur sooner than we want. Like Victor Frankenstein, we may regret that possible discovery, depending upon the degree of intelligence and of technical sophistication that we may find elsewhere in the universe.

An interesting podcast I heard last week on Invisibilia asks a set of intriguing questions, “Are we destined to repeat our patterns, or do we stray in surprising directions? Is the course of our lives a predictable pattern, or is it random?”

The podcast introduces Shon Hopwood, who in March appeared on 60 Minutes. Shon grew up in David City, Nebraska. After dropping out of college, “after about ten minutes,” he returned home, shoveled manure in a feedlot, drank plenty of beer, and then robbed five small banks in Nebraska.

Authorities caught him at the Doubletree in Omaha, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years. He arrived at the Federal penitentiary, in Pekin, Illinois, in May of 1999, and there he lifted iron, ran miles on the track, played hours of basketball, and worked in the law library.

A casual observer would say that Shon’s life would continue to disappoint his parents and siblings, that he would achieve very little stuck in prison, and that his life pattern was well-established. Pekin released him in April of 2009.

In June, Shon will turn forty-three. He is now married with two children. He received his college degree from Bellevue University in Nebraska, and his law degree at the University of Washington. Today, Shon teaches criminal law at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. 

How did he transform his life? He began to read the law books in Pekin’s law library. He came to love the law, and saw that, “the law was a big puzzle.” He wrote appeals for other prisoners, and two of them the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear, an incredible stroke of unmerited luck. 

To Steve Kroft, on 60 Minutes, Shon said, “my life doesn’t make sense to me, and I lived it,” and he credits, “the people who went out of their way to make grace for me, and that made the difference.”

Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford College’s commencement exercises on June 12, 2005, and he said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” 

I wish my best to the high school and college graduates this year. I say, work to connect the dots one at a time, and create a life pattern that will astonish your parents and friends. Yield not to the temptation to swallow the delusions of racism, communist utopias, fabulous ghost stories, or robbing banks. 

James Comey and the F.B.I.

By William H. Benson

May 3, 2018

Two weeks ago, I finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I., first published a year ago, in April 2017. David Grann, the author, tells a fascinating account of the reign of terror that the Osage Indians of central Oklahoma endured in the early 1920’s. 

Wildcat drillers had discovered a reservoir of oil that lay underneath the Osage Indians’ reservation. Hefty royalty checks transformed these destitute Native Americans into “the richest people per capita in the world.” They built mansions, purchased automobiles, and hired servants and chauffeurs. 

Then, one by one, certain Osage Indians began to die, or rather someone began to kill them off. Some were slowly poisoned. Some were shot. A bomb at night killed a husband and wife. Then, by ruse and artifice, the deceased’s claims to the oil passed on to others, some to non-Native Americans.

After more than twenty Osage Indians were killed, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., dispatched a former Texas Ranger, Agent Tom White, to Osage County to investigate and unravel the mystery. White assembled a team of undercover agents who infiltrated the county and discovered a sinister conspiracy of white people, who were killing the Osage Indians, in order to grab their oil rights.

Grann tells a fascinating story, all true, and in it he shows how White and his undercover agents brought into play more modern techniques of investigation to ferret out the truth. 

Fifty plus years ago, when in grade school, I read Quentin Reynold’s book, The F.B.I., first published in 1954. Some of its stories still stick in my memory. He tells of gangsters and bank robbers, including Ma Barker and John Dillinger, and of Russian spies, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

1. Edgar Hoover wrote the book’s “Forward,” and in it Hoover says, “When a young man files an application with the F.B.I., we do not ask if he is the smartest boy in the class. We want to know if he is truthful, dependable, and if he played the game fair. We want to know if he respects his parents, reveres God, honors his flag, and loves his country.”

Last week, I began to read James Comey’s recent book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. The former F.B.I. Director lost his job a year ago, on May 9, 2017, when Donald Trump fired him. In the year since then, Comey has written a book, more of a memoir, than a “tell-all” exposé. He devotes only an estimated 20% of his book to his interactions with the president.

In the rest of the book, Comey tells of his early years in college at William and Mary, in law school at Chicago, and of prosecuting criminals in U. S. Attorney’s offices. He describes wrangling with the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, the gangsters, and the terrorists. He rehashes his prosecution of Martha Stewart, his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and he stands by his decisions. 

A smart thing that Comey did was draft memos, after he met or spoke with the president. One memo lists details of Comey’s meeting with President Trump on January 27, 2017, seven days after the inauguration. Alone, the two men shared a meal at a small table in the White House’s Green Room. 

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on 20/20, on Sunday, April 15, 2018, Comey described their conversation. Trump said, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.” Comey said nothing. “We simply looked at each other in silence. I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression.”

At the end of the meal, Trump repeated his words, “I need loyalty.” This time Comey said, “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump said, “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.” Comey said, “You will get that from me.”

Comey’s account demonstrates the distinction between a glib politician, and a stubborn law enforcement agent. The former says whatever he or she wants to say, but the latter is careful to stay within the borders of truth. The former is looking for followers who obey his or her wishes, but the latter avoids following anyone or anything, except the closest path to the truth.

Two and a half millennium ago, in ancient Greece, Socrates thought as deeply on the issues of truth and lies, knowledge and ignorance, and ethics and immoral actions, as anyone has. Up to the day the authorities ordered him to drink the hemlock and die, he maintained that a frank, honest, and public discussion of life’s great issues is necessary for a person to feel truly successful.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Near his book’s beginning, James Comey admits that on occasion he can be “stubborn and prideful,” as I suspect most F.B.I. agents are, but anyone who reads his words or hears him speak will detect his commitment to a higher loyalty: to the truth, to the rule of law, and to the U. S. Constitution. 

Mark Twain in Syria

by William H. Benson

April 19, 2018

In the year 1867, the thirty-one year old Mark Twain joined several dozen other Americans on a pleasure cruise across the Atlantic to see the sights around the Mediterranean Sea. When in Syria, Twain and his friends hired a guide and rode horses from the coast inland, towards Damascus, then south to the Sea of Galilee, and finally alongside the Jordan River to Jerusalem.

In his book, The Innocents Abroad, Twain reveals his disgust with Syria and Palestine. The worst of the worst though, for him, was the village of Magdala, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. 

He writes, “Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy. The streets of Magdala are reeking with uncleanliness.” 

“As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible. But the ring of the horses’ hoofs roused the population, and they all came trooping out—old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled, and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, instinct, and education.”

In a deafening chorus, they shout, “Howajji, baksheesh!,” a cry for money, and Twain and the others paid “baksheesh out to sore-eyed children, and to girls with tattooed lips and chins.”

A reader of Twain’s words may wonder, “Why are these people so pitiful, reduced to begging?”

Twain hints at an answer. “If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic.”

In 2012, the popular science writer Jared Diamond asked a similar question in his book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. In it, he points to the differences between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, a single city that the U.S. / Mexico border cuts in two.

Diamond writes, “The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple. It is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border.” 

On the Arizona side, he says, “good economic institutions motivate people to become productive. They protect private property rights, enforce contracts, provide opportunities to retain control of their money, control inflation, and allow an open exchange of currency.

“If those institutions are missing, people are unlikely to work hard. They know that their earnings or profits are likely to be confiscated.”

A more perceptive question, “Why do people stay in wretched conditions, like in 1867 Magdala?”

The answer is not simple. It comes down to human motivation. It is difficult to move alone, to leave the familiar for the unknown. After all, family and familiar are the same word. 

The Chinese say, “If you want to go quickly, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.” It is easier to leave behind depravity and wretchedness, if an entire family, clan, or tribe moves together.

And yet each fall, freshman college students pack their bags and head off to college alone, and they go quickly. For the boys and girls in 1867 Magdala though, college was not an option.

The U.S. federal government, through HUD, has funded a program, “Moving to Opportunity.” “Poor families receive housing vouchers that require them to move to better areas. The vouchers go to only a quarter of those who qualify. Waiting lists are sometimes a decade-long.”

But, “the benefits, in social-science terms, are astonishing. Children who moved before the age of 13 went on to have incomes 31% higher than those who remained.” The fog bank of depravity and short-sighted thinking lifts, and people for the first time begin to see opportunities.

Some insist that a young person should build a life where they are. Russell Conway’s Acres of Diamonds comes to mind. Then, there are government programs that invite entire families to leave and start over in a different neighborhood with different schools and jobs. Do we stay? Do we leave?

World Vision estimates that more than 5.6 million Syrians have fled their country, since the civil war there began in March 2011. Over 6 million are considered as “displaced persons” within Syria, and 13.1 million need humanitarian assistance. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives.

President Bahar al-Assad has rained down on the rebels, from helicopters, an estimated 70,000 barrel bombs loaded with chemical agents, the most recent on Douma, earlier this month.

Millions have left, leaving behind homes and possessions, choosing the strange and unknown, over the dangerous and the familiar. Millions have stayed at home and suffered unspeakable atrocities.

Should they leave? Should they stay? Each must decide.