Commentary Many, particularly those on the right, worry the United States is turning into China, but we are a Western nation coming out of a (mostly) Western tradition. I believe we should be as much concerned, if not more, that we are beginning to resemble East Germany with their State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst), better known as the Stasi. As Wikipedia reminds us: “One of the Stasi’s main tasks was spying on the population, primarily through a vast network of citizens turned informants, and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including hidden psychological destruction of dissidents (“Zersetzung,” literally meaning “decomposition”). It arrested 250,000 people as political prisoners during its existence.” I was reminded of this Zersetzung and its psychological destruction of dissidents—soon we may be all classified that way, if not already—by a photo I received this morning from a (necessarily anonymous) friend who works at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai …