This point is extremely silly. In the modern US, violence is an essentially omnipresent political tool, both at home on every level and abroad. In many cities across the country we just saw police violently crack down on protestors in universities protesting the US support of Israel's present massacre in Gaza, but this also happened at the protests against police killings and bigotry throughout 2020, or at Ferguson before that, or before that against students protesting the Vietnam war, or before that against civil rights protestors, and those are just the really famous cases in living memory. Relatively recently, an activist in Georgia protesting the demolition of a big chunk of forest for the planned enormous training facility for the already armed to the teeth police of that area was essentially gunned down by a whole firing squad of said police, extrajudicially, and you likely didn't even hear about it.
On a federal level, the FBI has been constantly deployed to attack political dissidents with national fame in more targeted ways, and the DHS and DEA were both essentially invented to do this with more impunity under very broad mandates surrounding very nebulous crimes. You could argue that ICE often functions this way too. The NSA's PRISM program is a surveillance apparatus the Stasi couldn't have dreamed of, and that's just what got leaked, and it was at this point like a decade of both capabilities growth and political unrest ago
Political violence is so normalized that when people are scandalized by our use of it abroad (usually via the CIA), it is when they use the tool of political violence for the benefit of American businesses rather than some perceived "pure" political motive, because it smacks of corruption of one of most important functions of US foreign policy, "necessary" political violence against the sovereignty of perceived potential threats
I agree that it is hyperbole to compare the modern US and its various forms of police to East Germany and its Stasi. The Stasi employed a much smaller scale of political violence than the modern US has, and had nowhere near the capacity nor appetite for widespread surveillance, which nonetheless is further dwarfed by that of its corporations, although of course these are often intertwined
This point is extremely silly. In the modern US, violence is an essentially omnipresent political tool, both at home on every level and abroad. In many cities across the country we just saw police violently crack down on protestors in universities protesting the US support of Israel's present massacre in Gaza, but this also happened at the protests against police killings and bigotry throughout 2020, or at Ferguson before that, or before that against students protesting the Vietnam war, or before that against civil rights protestors, and those are just the really famous cases in living memory. Relatively recently, an activist in Georgia protesting the demolition of a big chunk of forest for the planned enormous training facility for the already armed to the teeth police of that area was essentially gunned down by a whole firing squad of said police, extrajudicially, and you likely didn't even hear about it.
On a federal level, the FBI has been constantly deployed to attack political dissidents with national fame in more targeted ways, and the DHS and DEA were both essentially invented to do this with more impunity under very broad mandates surrounding very nebulous crimes. You could argue that ICE often functions this way too. The NSA's PRISM program is a surveillance apparatus the Stasi couldn't have dreamed of, and that's just what got leaked, and it was at this point like a decade of both capabilities growth and political unrest ago
Political violence is so normalized that when people are scandalized by our use of it abroad (usually via the CIA), it is when they use the tool of political violence for the benefit of American businesses rather than some perceived "pure" political motive, because it smacks of corruption of one of most important functions of US foreign policy, "necessary" political violence against the sovereignty of perceived potential threats
I agree that it is hyperbole to compare the modern US and its various forms of police to East Germany and its Stasi. The Stasi employed a much smaller scale of political violence than the modern US has, and had nowhere near the capacity nor appetite for widespread surveillance, which nonetheless is further dwarfed by that of its corporations, although of course these are often intertwined