In her well-researched book A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, Australian academic Alison Lewis observes that many of those who became informants for the East German Stasi had one thing in common: fatherlessness. The Stasi, the secret police under East German communism during the Cold War, were skilled at exploiting the vulnerability of people whose fathers had abandoned them.
It’s a phenomenon that is also evident in the rage of the modern American Left. When scholar Mary Eberstadt witnessed antifa riots and discovered how many of those arrested were without fathers, she dubbed their rage “the fury of the fatherless.”
By now the research is so abundant even most liberals accept it. Children with strong fathers in their lives are far less likely to wind up in prison, divorced, or with emotional problems. They are also less likely to join radical political organizations. In the late 1960s, the poet Robert Bly saw some radical students on TV rioting at a prestigious university. “They’re all out there looking for their fathers,” he said. It’s still true today.
Several years ago, I was a substitute teacher at a small Catholic school outside of Washington. I’ll never forget my first day. I was the only male teacher, and it’s no exaggeration to say that when I arrived, the boys went berserk. They dragged me outside to play football during recess, asked me a thousand questions, absorbed what I said, and just generally seemed elated that there was a caring and athletic male in the school. I wasn’t a father to these boys, but I did represent what used to be common in America – male role models at school and in the neighborhood.
All of the men in my town were married and had jobs, and the ones on my street felt comfortable giving me advice about how to be a man. Today’s boys don’t get that from video games.
Such a figure in school or especially at home can dissuade young men from radical politics — both on the Left and the Right. My own father, a brilliant journalist for National Geographic, taught me to read everything I could, have empathy and humility, strive to be great through practice, and think critically about politics. It’s no secret that I’m a political conservative, but I’ve also criticized the Right for their poor coverage and support of the arts. Poetry, cinema, theater, and literature were of crucial importance to my father and thus to us as children. We learned to think critically and have compassion for others.
Those without such fathers are often susceptible to radical ideology. In A State of Secrecy, Lewis notes that the German Stasi preyed on artists, such as Paul Wiens, Paul Gratzik, and Sascha Anderson, who lacked a strong father figure in their childhoods. Stasi officers knew that many potential recruits were susceptible to an offer of a father substitute. And if the offer was refused, Lewis notes, “the Stasi proved that its memory of past misdemeanors and transgressions was extraordinarily good.” Like the modern American Left, it operated like a gang, exploiting whatever weakness it could find.
In the secret police, as in the modern Left, some informants found the family missing from their own lives. One example was Helga M. Novak. A poet and novelist, Novak was born in 1935 in Berlin. Abandoned by her parents, she was placed with an adoptive family whom she didn’t like. After studying journalism in the mid-1950s, Novak became a Stasi informant in 1957. Like many others, Novak’s decision was based largely on fear. “I had no family, no blood ties at all,” she recalled, a reality that left her terrified of loneliness and isolation. The state seemed like a beneficent fairy godmother: “I thought that the appropriation by the state was right and that everything belonged to us,” she said in a 2006 interview. “I was seduced by the term ‘the people’s property’ by the community. I thought we had access to whatever it was that was being made in factories — whether cannons or seeing machines.”
Novak would stop being an informant when she witnessed the anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956. In time she turned against the Stasi, coming to “loathe its actions as much as she did her adoptive parents.”
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There is an analog in the Stasi to contemporary “woke” culture. The German artist Jess de Wahls recently commented on this in an essay that briefly got her canceled by the Royal Academy. Transgender activists complained about the 2019 essay, in which de Wahls argued that the intolerance of the LGBT community had made it impossible to criticize the LGBT community at all or even call a woman “an adult human female.” (The Royal Academy later apologized for its treatment of de Wahls.)
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, the implosion of the corrupt socialist media in America — none of that has seemed to bring kids to their senses. And until the fury of the fatherless is resolved, there will be no controlling the out-of-control Left.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
