The new Stasi: The eyes of Texas are upon you
The new Texas torment, a law that lets citizens sue anyone they suspect of performing, aiding or abetting a woman or girl’s abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, is a strange notion in a state that claims to worship personal freedom.
Edna Ferber once wrote: “If it’s freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.” Well, that’s out — the watcher has arrived.
In Texas, Big Brother isn’t watching you. Your little brother is, your incestuous dad, your nosy neighbour, your health insurer, the work rival of the taxi driver who takes you to a clinic, the bank teller who hands your boyfriend his cash, your mother who counsels abortion, your best friend’s mother who overhears, maybe even the store that sold you the laptop you used to google Planned Parenthood. Magic!
A stateful of watchers of women is worse than a stateful of bounty hunters. Watchers are the small, unimportant people who have propped up the worst tyrannies of modern history, in North Korea, the former East Germany, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union and many others.
The watchers watch. And then they snitch. In this case, they can extract $10,000 from everyone they sue, plus legal costs which can be bankrupting. If a pregnant woman has a loving family and a pile of friends, a watcher can really clean up.
Texas isn’t protecting women from abortion — it’s protecting lucky sperm that made it through. Hey there, little buddy, the watchers say. They say rapists can’t sue you, but unconvicted rapists can.
There’s a tiny spiteful watcher in the soul of every human, but it has always been the talent of tyrants to make an army of them. On a high school trip to the Soviet Union once, I was taken aback by the old women on each floor of those massive Moscow hotels, watching who came and went, who visited which room and at what time, what they did, what goods were exchanged, everything.
It may have been a make-work job in a failed economy, it may have been malicious, but it was 24/7 watching. Now it’s just Texas. People who make money selling junk on Facebook Marketplace have a much more profitable product to sell now: information.
When East Germany fell and Stasi secret police files were eventually viewed by the citizens they targeted, hearts broke. The watchers had been inside the house. The watchers had sex with you. You had given birth to your watchers.
The journalist Timothy Garton Ash saw his file. He described a land of watchers, recalling one particular October day in 1979 with that peculiar East Berlin smell of smoke and sweat, meeting a blond woman at a cafe. She was wearing a red beret.
Ash can’t recall her name. He knows now because the Stasi watched him non-stop and kept notes. In East Germany there was no need for personal diaries. The government did it for them, their watchers narrating millions of days. They had time on their hands.
Texas-style, they had suspicions.
China maintained its one-child policy in the 1980s by the meticulous urban and rural surveillance that was the hallmark of communism, followed sometimes by forced abortions and sterilization. Now aging China wants more children and can’t have them, being disastrously short of despised baby girls. The watchers look for different clues now.
North Korea painstakingly tracks every single citizen, partly through local watchers who report directly to a government network of watchers. Food is distributed to homes partly as a means of surveillance. Only when famine struck were people able to leave the house with impunity, unwatched.
Economic hardship has always been the enemy of government surveillance. What’s happening in Texas is even stranger. Texas is saving money by outsourcing police work. Citizens as bounty hunters do the watching, fill out the legal forms, and conduct the punishing.
There are no abortion exceptions for rape victims. Gov. Greg Abbott defends this by saying he’ll “eliminate rape.” But there is already a thin, shabby government system to end rape: it’s called policing.
Texas is on the same path as the communist nations, the ruination of individual lives by means of surveillance. Will all policing be outsourced? Will the bounties billow? Will watchers be watching watchers?
Everything’s bigger in Texas, everything’s worse.