My comment on the article Piecing Together the History of Stasi Spying by Annalisa Quinn and Mustafah Abdulaziz in The New York Times 11 August 2021. It is highly significant that the comment coming from a person targeted by Communists for elimination has been rejected by the NY Times.
Lech Borkowski, London, UK
Methods used in East Germany, such as die Zersetzung, i.e. a subversion and sabotage of all spheres of one’s life were in widespread use in the entire Communist bloc.
I am coming from a family of Polish prisoners of Communist concentration camps in northern Russia after WWII. Contrary to popular belief, Communist methods, surveillance and social sabotage, are perfectly well in Poland today. NYT and other media isolate their readers from the evidence. My wife and I were expelled from state institutions in 2015 after long and extremely vicious state-sponsored campaign. Polish authorities declared, Soviet-style. that my wife is incapable of performing her job of the piano teacher despite being the best piano teacher of the school.
Unreliable narrators, such as Timothy Garton Ash quoted in the article, painted a fairy tale picture of the end of Communism. This is not true.
Reporting from Poland, for example, he never mentioned that his friend Adam Michnik, a leading activist of the so-called ‘democratic opposition’ in the 1980s was in fact a member of the Communist elite. His parents were high-ranking members of the Communist hard core in Poland, activists of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, Stalin’s agents. His half-brother was a Communist military judge issuing death sentences to anti-Communist resistance members. This is just one example, there are plenty of others.
@LechSBorkowski