Snitching Loosens Social Cohesion – Welcome to Stasiland
From Parker-Joseph.com -
James Higham at Nourishing Obscurity writes from personal experience. I too spent several years in Russia, in the years immediately following the fall of the communist regime, and can remember vividly the eyes of people around you, never making eye contact, always looking at the ground as they walked the city streets. But the one sound you never heard on the streets of Moscow at that time that struck me more than anything else, was laughter. In 95 they were still a people in fear of their own government, and the snitches who would denounce them.
It is far nastier than it seems at first glance:
One of the quirks of living in Russia was being among people just coming out of the USSR strictures whilst at the same time, things were being reported back here that the UK was moving towards a new serfdom, an EUSSR or UKSSR. If that seemed fanciful to many over here, it wasn’t to me as I saw the last vestiges and one of those was the policy of Denunciation.
This wasn’t just snitching anonymously – it was a formal process, with forms to sign and anyone could do it. If a neighbour’s behaviour annoyed you, you went along to the local office for these things and filled in the forms. Of course you didn’t report them for that – you found something on them and reported that.
In my first year there, I brought back a young lady one afternoon [for English of course] and the landlady went beserk, pushed the young lady out of the door and she meekly accepted it, a smile on her lips.
Turns out her mother had Denounced my landlady years before.
You can just imagine what that does to a society, to it’s character, to its cohesion and it is only possible where the elite ensconces itself and encourages the people to turn on each other. This is why people were still loathe to talk years later, why eyes were avoided, why no one smiled up front. I heard many tales, mainly from the late middle-aged, about the Black Mariahs which came at midnight and they were no film producer’s fiction. I’ve walked on the ex-lake which everyone knew the bodies were beneath.
So this exhortation for kid’s to snitch needs to be nipped in the bud right now.
As a commentator has said:
“The most chilling aspect for me is that people sat round a table and agreed that this is okay, that it isn’t vile, destructive and utterly repulsive behaviour.”
..and I pray that one day we may be in a position to name them.
This, suggests James, more than any of it needs resisting – this is the way they divide and rule, as you know. The question is whether the great unwashed also realize this.
http://parker-joseph.com/pjcjournal/2012/07/26/snitching-loosens-social-cohesion/
