The special sensitivity that the Germans are displaying in the NSA spying affair on Angela Merkel in particular and the country generally is often explained as a direct product of the historical experience of the Germans in two dictatorships. The shadows cast by the memories of the Gestapo and Stasi, we are told, have made the Germans particularly neuralgic to the megalomaniac tendencies of the secret services—as though it wasn’t the Germans themselves who were carrying out the spying.
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