With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many who lived under the communist regime of East Germany have taken the opportunity to go to the state archives and view the files which the Stasi secret police kept on them. Stasi files were not kept only on spies and political dissenters, but on ordinary people whose "offenses" were almost shockingly mundane, and whose betrayers were often friends or family...
Often we think of repressive regimes' primary evil being what they do to the people of a country, yet it's perhaps more important (and more disturbing) to think of how the tools of such a regime corrupt many of the people themselves.
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