Quotes About Secret police

Whether the idea was taken from the Spanish Inquisition whose methods it so resembled or from the example of the Russian secret police, whether it sprang from Himmler's own zealotry, it was a deliberate policy designed to suppress by fear all actual or potential opposition or even criticism of the regime.

a "negative correlation," as David Apter put it,55 between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything—which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret police.

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, 'conscience,' watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a 'matter of conscience,' i.e. police business.

Volodya's happiness did not quite let him forget the horrors he had seen and the profound misgivings he had developed about Soviet Communism. The unspeakable brutality of the secret police, the blunders of Stalin that had cost millions of lives, and the propaganda that had encouraged the Red Army to behave like crazed beasts in Germany had all caused him to doubt the most fundamental things he had been brought up to believe. He

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever.

The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is that intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing. The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.

Private enterprise flourished in much of the economy. Intellectual life was far from completely regimented.[491] The secret police, albeit an object of fear for many, was not operating as the terror machine that it was later to become and was not yet one man's political instrument. Neither the population at large nor the tens of thousands composing the politically influential class could be described (in the language of the theory of totalitarianism) as an "atomized mass.

it is true that both the Red Army and the secret police traditionally gave vodka to soldiers who were being asked to do dirty work: empty bottles are almost always found inside mass graves.

Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others—Mao's China, for example—qualified too.

As Dr. Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1944, discovered about the German people in Nazi Germany "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."529

I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

In any decent police state, they'd be a lot more efficient. In Red Spain, for example, toward the end, the discipline we had achieved was phenomenal. The Spaniards made excellent secret policemen.

Lenin had just reflected that the revolution would never happen in his lifetime when in February 1917, hungry crowds in Petrograd overthrew Nicholas II while the revolutionaries were abroad, exiled, or infiltrated by the secret police.

No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The Tell the truth! imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie. The Tell the truth! imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation. It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him (which makes no sense whatever) than to lie to his face (which is the only thing to do).

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.

The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.

That clown is one of the very few that have seen him. I want him. He may be the proof I need – and I need something – Galaxy knows – to awaken the Foundation. 'It needs awakening?' broke in Bayta with sudden sharpness. 'Against what? And in what role do you act as alarm, that of rebel democrat or of secret police and provocateur?

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

in the first place, Majesty, a pyramid is power. It is repression,force,and wealth. But it is just as much: domination of the rabble; the narrowing of its mind; the weakening of its will; monotony; and waste. O my Pharaoh, it is your most reliable guardian. Your secret police. Your army. Your fleet. Your harem. The higher it is, the tinier your subjects will seem. And the smaller your subjects, the more you rise, o Majesty, to your full height.

There's a lot of hypocrisy and condescension in Israel's institutionalized support for Mubarak's tyrannical rule, in its backing of a corrupt leader who established a brutal secret police state to suppress his citizens and keep their mouths shut.