Spies, bikes and smuggled ink: Fighting pollution and the Stasi

November 12, 2024 6:27 AM

...in the Shadow of the Berlin Wall. [BBC] "Named 'Operation Trap', the Stasi's attempted to crush a group fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the right to speak out. The secret police's tactics ranged from interrogations and jail to bizarre mind games. In one incident, informants who managed to infiltrate the environmental movement covertly took coffee from a shared pantry without putting money into the coffee kitty. That plan did not work out. On the contrary: Operation Trap became one of the very rare cases in history in which the Stasi was forced to back down."
posted by AlSweigart (4 comments total)

Thanks for this post. I love learning about the Stasi and all the idiotic ways they fucked up.
posted by Uncle at 7:09 AM on November 12, 2024

I think that it could be dangerous, or at least unfair to resistance groups, to regard the Stasi as prone to idiotic fuck-ups. This retaliation seems indeed to have been poorly planned and to have gone off badly for the state, but that's not to say that this group was playing games without real risk, even if they wound up not experiencing the consequences that they could have expected. And the article highlights that their activities even managed to rouse a fearful populace, an achievement to be celebrated:

Halbrock, standing in the bitter cold and protesting against his friends' arrest, couldn't believe what he was seeing. "We had teenagers showing up [at the solidarity protest], and elderly people, and someone from a bakery even brought us rolls," he recalls. "In East Germany, that kind of public support was so unusual. More often, people would tell us, 'Are you crazy, risking jail for such nonsense?' But that time, we managed to break through that sense of isolation."

posted by It is regrettable that at 7:24 AM on November 12, 2024 [1 favorite]

For a brief moment, I thought that the activists had confronted their known Stasi members and demanded that the price of their continued infiltration was that they stop fucking with the coffee kitty.

I thought the analogy to a nuclear reactor was a good one, and echoes what I read in Services' A History of Modern Russia: the paradox of authoritarianism, about how the use of fear and repression requires constantly adding pressure because populations get acclimatized to it, and it's a system of control that fails catastrophically. Any attempt to even stop getting more repressive risks a breach that tears it all down because the contained pressure can only be released explosively.
posted by fatbird at 7:45 AM on November 12, 2024 [5 favorites]

Yeah, communists were often worse than the west about ecological matters.
quora: How did the Soviet Union handle the issues of lead paint, leaded gasoline, asbestos and CFCs?

It really depends upon the cultural conciousness though. China has executed company executives for financial fraud and tainted baby formula. As in the US, authorities ignore illegal pollution when possible, and punishments are only fines and jail, but they can hand out more jail for more people than the US ever does.
- Three executives will spend 3-4 years in prison for dumping arsenic into a lake
- China jailed almost 47 steel executives for 6 to 18 moneths each for faking emissions data

Almusingly the Stasi come off much nicer here than UK spycops, who even proposed marriage to or fathered children with women they were investigating or exploiting for access to other targets (theguardian search). I've no idea why searching "spycops" yields zero metafilter posts.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:43 PM on November 13, 2024