Secret Police Essay

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Totalitarianism describes a Political system where the sate holds all the authority over the society and controls all aspects of public as well as private life. So to do this they would need an organization to enforce anything they want. This is where secret police step in, the role of secret police is to do the dirty that the public doesn’t need to know about. Secret police are intelligence agencies which operates in secrecy. Secret police were know in ancient Greece and Rome and pre-modern monarchies and they continue to function in modern republics. Secret police have been use in many types of governments. Secret police forces in a totalitarian state usually use violence and acts of error to suppress political opposition and also may use death squads to carry out assassinations and “Disappearances”. At times of emergency a democracy may lawfully grant its policing and security agencies additional or sweeping powers. Secret police have often been used as an instrument of political repression. States where the secret hold significant power are know as police states or counterintelligence states. In some cases certain police agencies are accused of being secret police. For example, political groups and civil liberties organizations in the United States have at various times accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of being secret police. Secret police not only have the traditional police authority to arrest anyone they please, but in some cases they are given unlimited amount of control, assigned to implement punishments independent of the public authority, and allowed to administer those punishments without external review. The tactics of investigation used by secret police make it to where they have so much power that they... ... middle of paper ... ...iques. They were also taught some of the practices that the doctors at Dachau would use to experiment on the prisoners with. Although the camps were ran by the SS they were under the control of the Gestapo. After the war the Gestapo was dissolved and declared a criminal organization. At the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminal the Gestapo was named as one of the chief institutional perpetrators of the holocaust but not very many officers were prosecuted (“Nazi perpetrators”). During the Cold War Soviet Union had a secret police called Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopanosit or KGB for short. The KGB was established in March of 1954. They were designed to be a state security committee and was attached to the Council of Ministers. The KGB was the world’s largest spy and state-security machine. They were involved in all aspects of life of everyone in the Soviet Union.

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