Essay On Secret Police

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Many people don’t know there was such a thing as secret police, therefor people are uninformed of the roles they have. There were many different roles that the secret police had that abled them to control citizens. Although there were many roles that the secret police of a totalitarian government had, their main role was having the power to act outside of legal restraints. Instead of enforcing the rule of law, secret police organizations were specifically expected to operate beyond and above the law. Acts of terror and intimidation such as kidnapping, interrogation, torture, internal exile, forced disappearance, and assassination were not uncommon and were in fact very popular (Berman, Ilan para 1&2).
Secret police forces operated entirely or partially in secrecy. Almost all of their operations were concealed and hidden from the general public. Sometimes they were also hidden from the government except for the top executive officials. Even though most operations are hidden from the citizens they still in fact knew the laws and the consequences that came along with breaking those laws. The consequences for breaking laws in this type of government were cruel and could have been looked at as unreal in this day and age (“The Secret Police”).
Most of the time citizens in a totalitarian government were so feared by these consequences that going about daily life was difficult. Secret police had the power to watch and control anything a person would do. Therefor, people constantly felt paranoid and always watched what they did to make sure that their actions were not overly suspicious, even if their actions were legal and accepted by the government. All conversations over a phone could be recorded for the government to listen to, any mail...

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...ecret police would intrude in a home sometime between midnight and dawn to capture people suspected of conflict (“The Secret Police”).
A totalitarian government is completely different than the government in the United States; because of that secret police forces were unheard of. However, just because they are unheard of doesn’t mean that these forces did not exist. These forces played a huge part in totalitarian governments and how their society and countries were dictated. Some of the secret police forces could have been compared to the Nazis’ that Aldolf Hitler dictated but some were also different. Secret police forces had many roles in a totalitarian government, but their main role was having the power to act outside and above the law. This meant that some forces had unsupervised power to give any consequence, they desired, no matter how cruel it may have been.

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