Duas histórias sobre dois casos: o Foro de S. Paulo e a Stasi - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Two tales of two cases: sobre o Foro de S. Paulo e a Stasi (ex-RDA)

  

Paulo Roberto de Almeida, diplomata, professor.

Nota sobre as entrelinhas da História.

  

A maior parte dos jornalistas e das pessoas comuns deve desconhecer os mecanismos pelos quais os comunistas cubanos atuaram para consolidar o Foro de S. Paulo, independentemente da capacidade do PT de supostamente “influenciar” dezenas de partidos e movimentos de esquerda da AL. 

 

Depois da queda repentina do muro de Berlim e da rápida absorção da RDA pela RFA, a Stasi não teve tempo de limpar os arquivos, e daí se soube que mulher vigiava o marido, como se viu na “Vida dos Outros”.

Os comunistas cubanos estão tendo todo o tempo do mundo para fazer o serviço, o que impedirá revelações históricas como se viu no caso da RDA, mas não os impede de controlar, agora e sempre, figuras e entidades para atingir suas finalidades próprias.

 

A diferença entre os dois casos ainda habilita certas pessoas a posarem de “democratas”, confiando na intangibilidade dos arquivos, ou na contenção segura dos controladores. São os caminhos diversos da história, sobre os quais apenas novelas ao estilo de John Le Carré podem desvendar o que está realmente por trás de certos “fatos”. 

Não sou nenhum John Le Carré, mas sei ver o que se esconde atrás de certos cenários, que podem ser de extrema-direita ou de extrema-esquerda. Muitos ignoram que Chávez, ou Fidel Castro, por exemplo, ambos considerados líderes de esquerda pelos ingênuos de sempre, foram o mais próximo que a AL teve de certo DNA fascista ou nazista, o que é característica própria de todas as ditaduras, de esquerda ou direita.

 

Ditadura é ditadura, de qualquer cor ou ideologia. Mas certa esquerda na AL apoia Putin, um êmulo de Hitler, apenas porque ele é antiamericano, um avatar próprio aos ingênuos ou ignorantes dessa esquerda.

A ingenuidade, ou desconhecimento, de certos fatos, para mim evidentes, impede que jornalistas e pessoas comuns possam reconhecer no papel que o Foro de S. Paulo tem para o PCC um equivalente funcional similar ao que o Cominform tinha para o PCUS no stalinismo tardio, entre os anos 1940 e 50.

 

Mas, tudo isso não tem mais nada a ver, como quer fazer acreditar a extrema-direita (e seu finado guru ideológico), com um “movimento comunista internacional”, hoje inexistente. Tem mais a ver com a sobrevivência material de regimes ditatoriais como o cubano e o chavista, e a própria sobrevivência política e física de seus dirigentes. 

Desse ponto de vista, Lula é um aliado objetivo, ou um “inocente” útil, de autocratas de esquerda e de DIREITA que se opõem atualmente a valores e princípios próprios a democracias liberais.

A História não o absolverá. 

Mas é pena que, diferente do caso da Stasi, documentos talvez não sobrevivam ao triste registro do verdadeiro itinerário da contrafação que representaram, no caso do Brasil, um amigo da ditadura militar e elogiador de torturadores, como o Bozo, e um amigo de execráveis ditaduras supostamente de esquerda, como faz hoje Lula, em relação a seus amigos cubanos, venezuelanos ou nicaraguenses. 

Dois relatos sobre dois casos, mas existem muitos outros mais…

 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 4428, 30 junho 2023, 2 p.

PS: Aproveito para indicar um outro pequeno texto sobre o Foro de S. Paulo, para quem possa se interessar pelo assunto:

4285. “As ‘internacionais’ do comunismo”, Brasília, 6 dezembro 2022, 2 p. Nota sobre as diversas associações do movimento comunista internacionais, Comintern, Cominform e Foro de S. Paulo. Postado no blog Diplomatizzando(link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2022/12/as-internacionais-do-comunismo.html).

Queda do muro de Berlim e desaparecimento da RDA: como reconstruir os arquivos da Stasi - WP

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a Stasi spy puzzle remains unsolved

Loveday Morris

The Washington Post, November 9, 2019

BERLIN — In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, East Germany’s secret police frantically tried to destroy millions of documents that laid bare the astounding reach of mass surveillance used to keep an iron grip on citizens.

As shredders that were available jammed or broke down, Stasi officers resorted to tearing the documents by hand, stuffing them into bags to later be burned or pulped. But the effort came to a premature halt when citizens groups stormed and occupied Stasi offices to preserve the evidence.

Three decades later, in the same rooms behind the foreboding gray facade of the former Stasi headquarters, Barbara Poenisch and nine fellow archivists are trying to piece those documents, and the history, back together. 

Poenisch calls it “a big puzzle game.” But at the current rate, there are still decades of work ahead.

The archivists have reconstructed more than 1.5 million pages contained in 500 sacks over the past 20 years. There are still around 15,500 more bags to go, stored in Berlin and sites in eastern Germany.

A single sack can take an archivist as long as a year and a half to reconstruct, depending on how finely the documents are torn. Attempts to speed up the process with digital technology have stalled.

The painstaking work, performed by hand, continues amid controversy over the future of the Stasi files.

The German parliament voted this fall to transfer control of the files to the Federal Archives, with promises to invest in preservation and digitalization. Some historians and former regime opponents have criticized the move, saying it is an attempt to draw a line under history and raising concerns that files will become less accessible.

Every German has the right to view the records that the Ministry for State Security, as the Stasi was officially known, gathered on them. More than 3 million individuals have applied to do so.

The agency used tens of thousands of employees and a vast web of informants to monitor every facet of society, causing many East Germans to live in terror. It kept files on 5.6 million people.

Reconstructed pages from the Stasi files have shed light on the agency’s investigations into a Nazi war criminal and into the peace networks in both East and West Germany. 

For Poenisch it’s a more personal document that sticks in her mind: a letter from a mother who pleaded to authorities to release her jailed son.

Poenisch spreads out paper fragments on a table. The sack she’s been working on is from the Abteilung N, responsible for communication within the state apparatus and with friendly countries. 

A memo from Oct. 1, 1986, reports that the political situation in East Germany is “calm and stable. . . . There have been no significant events in either the economy or transport sector.”

Another memo, from April of the same year, outlines a long-term plan for the Stasi to keep up with technological advances. The goal is to achieve a “uniform, integrated digital intelligence network beyond year 2000.”

For the year 2019, the project to reconstitute the documents is surprisingly low-tech.

There’s precedent for reconstituting shredded documents. In the mid-1980s, Iran pieced together and published intelligence reports and operational accounts that had been put through a shredder as Iranian militant students seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

More recently, programmers in California have promoted software that can do what the Iranians were thought to have done by hand.

But the Stasi project does not have the technology to deal with shredded material, said Ute Michalsky, the head of the reconstruction department. 

An “E-puzzler” software program, developed by researchers at Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute, had sounded promising. It was supposed to match scanned fragments together based on paper color, fonts, shapes and other details. But it turned out to be more time-consuming than the manual effort and has not been used for the past two years. 

The German government has dedicated 2 million euros to enhance the scan technology.

The archivists say they don’t bother trying to piece together material torn into more than eight pieces, even though they may be those the Stasi were more keen to hide. 

“I sometimes have the feeling that they knew exactly what to tear up,” Poenisch said. “Unimportant things only get a single tear, but important things: the more important, the smaller the pieces.”

Poenisch says the laborious work doesn’t get dull. 

“The responsibility is high,” she said. “Every document could be important.” 

William Glucroft in Berlin contributed to this report. 

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Stasi-DDR: memorias de uma ditadura que espionava o seu proprio povo...

Com uma diferença: tudo era feito para manter o monopólio do poder pelo partido totalitário, como em Cuba, aliás, tão admirada pelos companheiros.

Tentativas de "democratizar" a internet e a imprensa relevam do mesmo espírito...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

In Germany, legacy of Stasi puts different perspective on NSA spying

By Michael Birnbaum, 

The Washington Post: November 18, 2013

BERLIN — German officials have been quick to ascribe the fury of their citizens over U.S. spying to their own history with the excesses of the surveillance state. But victims of the fearsome Communist East German secret police say: Not so fast.
Allegations that the National Security Agency kept tabs on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone communications have threatened counterterrorism cooperation, a major trade deal and good relations between the longtime allies. Popular distrust of the United States also is widespread.
Officials say Germans are sensitive about the issue because their society is still grappling with East Germany’s Orwellian spying apparatus, which was dismantled upon German reunification in 1990 but whose corrosive effects continue to eat at people’s lives.
The secret police, or Stasi, roped in an estimated 190,000 part-time secret informants and employed an additional 90,000 officers full time — in total, more than one in every 50 adult East Germans as of 1990. East Germans who dared to criticize their government — even to a spouse, a best friend or a pastor — could wind up disappearing into the penal system for years.
In east Berlin sits the former Hohenschoenhausen prison, which was reserved for East Germany’s most politically sensitive cases.
Hubertus Knabe — a West German who smuggled banned books into the East and later discovered that he had been betrayed by a priest who had encouraged him to do so — now has a plate-glass view of the most perilous destination for victims of Stasi surveillance. He is the director of theHohenschoenhausen prison museum, which is hidden away in a Berlin neighborhood whose rows of imposing apartment blocks still house many former Stasi officers.
Knabe said the consequences of the Stasi’s excesses were far more devastating than anything associated with the NSA. “They forget what it’s like to live in a dictatorship versus a democracy,” he said of people who say that the NSA has behaved like the Stasi.
Former inmates lead tours of the dank, tiny cells in which they were incarcerated, and they say they sometimes run into their old tormenters on the street or at the grocery store.
Many Germans — from both sides of the border, because East German spying reached deep into its sibling country — can request to see the thick files that the Stasi kept on them. More painfully, they can also learn which of their friends or associates collected the information found in those files.
Thousands of collaborators have been chased from public life. Even now, new accusations of Stasi associations can dog politicians and celebrities in Germany.
“We hear that the Stasi was some kind of dilettante agency compared to the NSA,” because the latter is probably collecting more data overall than the East Germans did, Knabe said. “But East Germans know that the Stasi was a lot worse.”
Knabe said the East German system created a level of fear that few of his fellow citizens have about the American spying efforts. Nevertheless, he said, there were similarities. He has filed a criminal complaint about the NSA spying in a German court.
“The western system punished someone when they had committed a crime. The eastern system punished people when they were only thinking about committing a crime,” he said. If the NSA’s material starts being used not just for counterterrorism efforts but for other kinds of preemptive crime-fighting, he said, “that would be a completely different type of state.”
U.S. in low esteem
According to an ARD-Infratest dimap poll released Friday, just 35 percent of Germans find the U.S. government trustworthy, second only to Russia as a target of mistrust.
Many here want to give asylum to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked secret NSA files and is stuck in Russia without U.S. citizenship papers. Senior German officials have said that taking in Snowden would do too much damage to ties with the United States, but they are exploring whether he might testify about NSA programs from Russia.
Top German intelligence officials also traveled in recent weeks to Washington to push for a “no-spying” agreement, hoping to impose tough restrictions on U.S. spying operations in Germany.
The damage could last far into the future, jeopardizing the ability of European governments to muster support for military cooperation with the United States, said Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s ambassador to the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Germany opposed.
“What I’m afraid will happen is that there will be a lingering sense of anti-Americanism that will be hard to manage,” Ischinger said this month at a discussion organized by the Washington-based Atlantic Council.
He said the NSA scandal was a bigger threat to the U.S.-German relationship than the 2003 dispute about the Iraq war, the most recent low point between the two countries.
“This one is, at the personal level, at the political level, a bit more difficult to overcome,” he said.
Analysts say there are other explanations for why Germans are so upset.
“The older generation might be a little different, but I’m not sure how much of it can be explained by German history,” said Johannes Thimm, an expert on U.S.-German relations at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Some Germans may simply feel humiliated that their leaders have been treated with suspicion, especially because their country has been an unusually deferential and accommodating ally since immediately after World War II, Thimm said.
“The fact that we’re trying so hard to be good allies, in some sense, and then that this happens, is a complete breach of trust,” he said.
Deep suspicions
Germans also guard their personal privacy more jealously than do Americans, and Germany has robust data protection and privacy laws.
Many here are also deeply suspicious of spy agencies in general, more so than many Americans. Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt said this month that he never read a report written by Germany’s foreign intelligence agency during his 1974-1982 tenure. And Merkel had wanted a no-spy deal with Obama long before the NSA leaks, but she had been rebuffed, adding to the sense of insult that the United States had distrusted its partner, German officials say.
But for some, history still guides their reactions to the spying revelations.
Roland Brauckmann, 51, was locked away for 15 months in 1982 because he printed fliers for the Protestant church and the anti-nuclear movement. For him, the NSA memos brought back bad memories of the typewritten files the Stasi kept on him.
“Of course American services will not put us in prisons,” he said. “But the atmosphere of fear is coming again.”
Brauckmann said he trusted no government holding on to the minutiae of his daily life, because even the most harmless system could be replaced by a more dangerous one.
“No one knows which kind of people will take power in the future,” he said.

Petra Krischok contributed to this report.