PSA
I stayed out of the community for a long time for several reasons, but one of the major ones is blatant offensiveness some people bring to the table daily. It’s become an issue big enough I decided to speak up and bring your attention to it. Pray tell, why is it commonly preached to say “punch the nazi”, “fuck the nazis” and so on, and then applying the Nazi ideology to your muses?
Lemme just break this out to you: if you roleplay a German muse and make the Stasi a part of their personal history, you’re a Nazi apologist. Why you’d ask. It happened after WW2 after all! Wrong. The Stasi recruited ex-Nazis. They straight up recruited Nazis to control the people and prevent them from challenging the Soviet government. The regular folk was terrified of them. The spies could be everywhere, even among your close friends or family, given there was one Stasi agent per 30 people, statistically. My friend has another post with numbers here. They murdered people. They imprisoned those who dared to speak up. They used torture. They weren’t your quirky “muse as a spy” plot. They were murderers.
Psychological policing of Germany’s population—to root out dissenting voices and prevent people from challenging the government—had been the norm under the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s intelligence-gathering police. Nazis paved the way by using citizens as informers or denouncers. ( source )
The Stasi did the same, because shockingly?? they recruited the good ol’ Gestapo buddies.
Indeed, the Stasi was seen as a localized extension of the KGB, the Soviet Security Service that had arrived when the Russians had liberated Berlin from the Nazis in 1945. They were tasked with maintaining political support for the East German regime and for identifying perceived enemies of the state. After an uprising by workers in 1953 – campaigning for a state that was more like socialist which they had been sold by the authorities, with fairer wages and better conditions – was put down by the government and the Soviets, the need for a stronger secret police was clear to the DDR’s hierarchy. ( source )
In addition, I’m Polish. I’m not German, and I do not wish to speak on the account of the German people in the community & here on Tumblr in general. But my parents remember those times. They were young, true, but they remember the fear the Stasi made innocent people feel. What’s more, we had our own version of the secret police here in our country. It was not advised to confide in anyone, because the walls had ears, and you could end up killed, tortured, or threatened in any way. The cases of children spying on their parents weren’t something shocking. Making your country/city representation muse a member of the Stasi, joking about the Stasi, or making it into a funny joke XD makes you disgusting in my eyes, and I want you to block me immediately & hopefully rethink your ways. The Wall might be gone, but the people, especially the elderly, are still traumatized by the Stasi times. ( another source )
If my hefty post doesn’t speak volumes to you and the linked articles mean nothing to you, I just don’t know what to tell you.
