Zersetzung, how the STASI controlled the minds of citizens - Gazeta Express
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Short and Albanian

Express newspaper

22/08/2022 14:16

Zersetzung, how the STASI controlled the minds of citizens

Short and Albanian

Express newspaper

22/08/2022 14:16

Jurgen Fuks, a rebellious intellectual who fell victim to Zersetzung in the 1970s, described that unusual period of continuous isolation that lasted for years as a “psychosocial crime,” and as “an attack on the human spirit.” Like him, by some estimates, at least 5-10 people fell victim to Zersetzung during the Honecker era.

By Emanuel Pietrobon

The battlefield in the wars of the future is the human mind, or rather its control. Because controlling an individual is tantamount to turning him into a "Manchurian Candidate", although not necessarily programmed to kill, but to vote a certain way, to think a certain way, and to act predictably.

But also because controlling a whole mass of individuals, i.e. public opinion, means having the fate of a country in your hands. So a new way of war is emerging, called cognitive war. The Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have accelerated its use.

Meanwhile, it was first the research of Nazi scientists, and then of the two opposing blocs during the Cold War, that laid the foundations of this war. And if you search for the history of this field, then you will surely come across a pioneering technique used by the STASI, the East German secret police: Zersetzung.

Zersetzung, is a term that in the German language can have a multitude of meanings, all of which are related to each other, such as erosion, destabilization, decomposition and disintegration. This is exactly what happens to the mind of the victim of this psychotechnique, which is step by step destabilized and degraded.

So Zersetzung was about deconstructing the mind. It is a technique of cognitive manipulation and psychological destabilization, born in the time of Nazi Germany, in the laboratories of Kurt Plotner, and after the war was perfected by the dreaded STASI of East Germany, finding a wide application during the era of Erik Honeker.

The aim was the desire to fight in a more effective way against the political opposition and social resistance against the communist regime. But also because suppressing dissent through physical force could be counter-productive. So something new was needed, which was widespread but invisible, harmful but intangible.

Zersetzung was thought to have such characteristics. As the 1960s progressed, in parallel with the perfection of the Zersetzung method, the East German authorities progressively reduced the use of tools such as judicial persecution and physical violence against dissidents, opponents and critics.

Zersetzung, structured and applied by East Germany, was developed by a group of sociologists at the Juristische Hochschule der Staatssicherheit (JHS), also known as the STASI School. Drawing on the Nazi legacy of propaganda and psychological warfare, which was quite extensive, STASI researchers perfected Zersetzung, making it a method of damaging the victim's self-esteem to the point of provoking serious identity crises. .

When struck by this method, a charismatic political opponent followed by the secret police would begin to experience particularly dark times, caused by social abandonment, freak accidents, isolation and rejection.

Although the events seemed personal, and seemingly detached from the subject's political activities, they were psychologically destabilizing and capable of causing identity and emotional crises. Eventually, mental exhaustion sometimes led to suicide.

Each means was legitimate in function of the mental degradation of the targeted subject. Thus, he could be enticed to have sexual relations with minors, to become part of problematic social circles, with drug addicts, or to involve him in petty crimes such as theft.

Or to bribe his colleagues to ignore him, and to have his bosses at work hinder him in his daily activities or transfer him to distant places. They would encourage him to question the reality around him, in the hope of driving him crazy.

Zersetzung was an efficient method because it was almost always personalized. Those responsible for the "mental decomposition" of the victim studied his character traits, values ​​and habits, working out sociograms and psychograms from which the strategy of his marginalization could be developed.

Jurgen Fuchs, a rebel intellectual who fell victim to Zersetzung in the 1970s, described that unusual period of continuous isolation that lasted for years as a "psychosocial crime" and as "an attack on the human spirit". Like him, according to some estimates, at least 5-10 thousand people fell victim to the Zersetzung during the Honeker era.

It was Fuchs, deported to West Germany in 1977, who made the German public aware of the Zersetzung. He began to publish in the magazine "Der Spiegel" his testimony along with a series of documents related to the use of psychological warfare by the STASI.

They would be followed by a host of books, documentaries and investigative journalism.

Although the justice has surprisingly taken an ambiguous attitude towards this issue. At the same time that the STASI successfully implemented Zersetzung, the largest mass surveillance regime on the planet – in terms of spies per capita – was set up in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania.

But at that time, re-education courses were also on the rise in the United States. Even in democratic countries, mind manipulation programs were implemented with an intensity comparable to that in Iron Curtain countries, from the MKULTRA program to Mockingbird and COINTELPRO. And today as then, nothing has changed: the goal of the people at the head of the world remains to control the minds of individuals. / Il Giornale – Bota.al