The Australian writer Anna Funder began living in West Germany in the ’80s, eventually working for the state television station answering inquiries from viewers. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she took it upon herself to interview both former members of the Stasi, the East German security apparatus, and the people they spied on. The result, “Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall,” is a mixture of personal and investigative journalism and a reminder that Orwell’s vision kept coming true. As the stories Funder hears bear out, the totalitarian logic of illogic was perhaps pursued more rigorously and completely in East Germany than in any other Communist dictatorship.

Funder relates the statistics: “At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees — more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR [German Democratic Republic] there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”

One of the worst aspects of culture shock for the East Germans who, overnight, found that their country no longer existed, was dealing with the revelation that the state’s spies were their neighbors, family, friends, lovers, co-workers. That’s what East Germans have learned from Stasi documents — and what they are still learning in a steady, painful trickle. When the Berlin Wall fell, one of the Stasi’s immediate concerns was to shred their voluminous files. Since then, a group called the “puzzle women” have been working to piece together the shredded files. Their story provides Funder with one more daunting statistic: With 40 workers reconstructing 400 pages a day between them, it will take 375 years to reconstruct all the files.

Like all the stories and statistics “Stasiland” relates, those numbers bespeak a paranoia that’s both comic and horrible. One former Stasi official tells Funder that by the end of East Germany, 65 percent of the clergy were working as informers. And 65 percent of the members of one particular East German resistance group were informers. The delicious irony was that these informers swelled the public support for these groups, making it look like there were more East Germans openly against the government than there were.

So we have here the ultimate absurdist spectacle, a state spying apparatus so far-reaching that it nearly ran out of things to spy on. Which isn’t a problem in terms of a totalitarian mind-set that can see enemies anywhere. The function of the Stasi was, as Funder relates, to arrest, imprison and interrogate anyone it chose, to open all mail, intercept phone calls, bug hotels, spy on diplomats, run its own hospitals and universities, and to train Libyan terrorists and West German members of the Red Army Faction.

Funder interviews people who suffered the worst of that — like Miriam, who put up anti-GDR placards as a schoolgirl prank (she was 16 at the time) and was then given a year and a half in prison for trying to escape. There is Frau Paul, whose son was born with severe stomach problems that threatened his life. After the Wall was laid out in barbed wire in 1961, she and her husband were denied permission to go to the West to obtain the medicine that was keeping him alive. “If your son is as sick as all that, it would be better if he [died],” the official she saw told her. The East German doctors who treated the baby were smart enough to recognize the seriousness of his condition and smuggled him into the West. Frau Paul and her husband attempted escape, were caught and given four years’ hard labor. She turned down the Stasi’s offer allowing her to stay with her son if she helped them kidnap the West German who was aiding refugees.

There are also the Stasi officials themselves: the man who insists all the revelations of the state spying apparatus are smears, the one who regrets what he did, the man who for years hosted a program broadcasting excerpts from West German television to show the decadence of the West. This last man, known to the entire population, seems to have earned a special place of hatred in the collective hearts of East Germans. But his words to Funder about how the Wall was necessary to keep imperialism from infecting the East finds a weird echo in the former Easterners who talk about how much better things were under Communism — how there were no drunks on the street, how their needs were taken care of.

The stories these people tell, particularly those of the victims of the Stasi, are the heart and drama of “Stasiland.” But what pervades and unites all of the separate narratives in this book, whether told by victims or victimizers, is that they form an overriding tale of pettiness writ large. The arrests and interrogations and tortures and kidnappings and murders are the horrors here. Those experiences — Frau Paul’s imprisonment for wanting to be with her sick baby, how impossible it was for those deemed enemies of the state to live their lives or find work even after serving time — are so deforming to these people’s sense of who they are (Funder writes that Frau Paul treats herself as if she were a criminal, instead of the victim of a criminal state) that to describe them as indignities sounds pitifully inadequate.

Funder does full justice to these stories without milking them. She’s a good listener and fine at channeling the voices of her interviewees. It’s their own words that ennoble or exonerate or damn them. But it is in the minor incidents that you feel what it means to live under a system of rigidly implemented derangement. It’s a picture of a land where Orwell’s newspeak was the common parlance. And when the people who survived the GDR, or those who still mourn it, talk of that time, it’s as if the dead officials and bureaucrats, and the ones still living, have risen to their former prominence to speak once more through them. For the residents of the former East Germany who appear in “Stasiland,” the disappeared Wall is a phantom limb. The memory of Communist “logic” is the voice they still lapse into, a type of dadaist fascism that feels less real than imagined. When they relate their stories to Funder, the subjects here speak as if, perhaps this time, it will finally yield some sense. One of Funder’s interviewees reports standing in line at the state employment office and asking the man behind her how long he had been out of work. All at once a state official swooped down on her insisting that there was no such thing as unemployment in the GDR. You are here, she was told, because you are seeking employment. The woman pointed out she was seeking employment because she was unemployed; it didn’t matter. And nowhere was that doublespeak more apparent than in the name this mingy sliver of the Evil Empire gave itself: the German Democratic Republic.

“Stasiland” is, in its way, a very modest book. It is not a detailed history of the rise and fall of East Germany. Funder does not delve deeply into the reasons why so many East Germans collaborated with the state to spy and inform on their neighbors and families and lovers and friends. Some did it for money, some out of fear, others for the narcissistic thrill of feeling themselves indispensable to those in power. Funder’s decision not to go too deeply into the reasons is not reluctance on her part or laziness. It’s an acceptance of the worst aspects of human nature, and it shows a deep respect for the horror of the irrational by its refusal to indulge in the sort of psychologizing that only ends up trivializing it. Funder understands that the motives for some horrible behavior do not necessarily go deep. She knows that there are some lands, some corners of the human soul untouched by Rousseauist enlightenment, and that it’s a fairy tale to think otherwise.

The crimes of Fascism offend our sense of justice and morality. And while the crimes of Communism do the same, the system Funder writes about here has a weird power to offend our intellect, our respect for logic, rationality, coherence, reason. At its mildest, that’s the tinny reductive thinking you find in Communist art (the thing, for instance, that beneath its incredible craft, makes “Potemkin” perhaps the most simple-minded and cartoonish of all great movies). At its worst it is the sense that to have an independent or logical thought, to insist on things as they are rather than as they are said to be, is to indulge in criminal activity. Orwell chose the phrase “thought crime” well — the crime isn’t just in what you think but in thinking at all. And this is the infernal, literally maddening state that Anna Funder depicts in “Stasiland.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Obama “a low-level socialist agitator,” said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is “a threat to the gene pool,” and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Apparently, he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or the discredited right-wing rocker Ted Nugent.

But this time, we shook our heads in disbelief: “78 to 81 Democrats … members of the Communist Party?” That’s the moment the memory hole opened up and a ghost slithered into the room. The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on its stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics.

Back in the early 1950s, the Cold War had begun and Americans were troubled by the Soviet Union’s rise as an atomic superpower. Looking for a campaign issue, McCarthy seized on fear and ignorance to announce his discovery of a conspiracy within: Communist subversives who had infiltrated the government.

In speech after speech, McCarthy would hold up a list of names of members of the Communist Party he said had burrowed their way into government agencies and colleges and universities. The number he claimed would vary from day to day, and when pressed to make his list public, McCarthy would stall or claim he accidentally had thrown it away.

His failure to produce much proof to back his claims never gave him pause, as he employed lies and innuendo with swaggering bravado. McCarthy, wrote historian William Manchester, “realized that he had stumbled upon a brilliant demagogic technique … others deplored treachery, McCarthy would speak of traitors.”

And so he did, in a fearsome, reckless crusade that terrorized Washington, destroyed lives, and made a shambles of due process.

Millions of Americans lapped it up, but in the end, Joe McCarthy would be done in by the medium that he had used so effectively to spread his poison: television. In 1954, the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow bravely exposed McCarthy’s tactics on the CBS program “See It Now.”

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent,” Murrow declared. “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a Republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”

Later that same year, for 36 days on live TV, during Senate hearings on charges McCarthy had made questioning the loyalty of the U.S. Army, we saw the man raw, exposed for the lout and cowardly scoundrel he was. The climactic moment came as the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, defending the Army, reacted with outrage when McCarthy accused Welch’s young associate Fred Fisher of communism. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” Welch said as he shook his head in anger and sadness. “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? … If there is a God in heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good.”

McCarthy never recovered. His tactics had been opposed from the outset by a handful of courageous Republican senators. Now they pressed their case with renewed vigor. One of them, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont, introduced a motion to censure Joseph McCarthy. When it eventually passed 67 to 22, McCarthy was finished. He soon disappeared from the front pages. Three years later, he was dead.

All of this came rushing back as West summoned his foul spirits from the vast deep. The ghost stepped out of the past.

Like McCarthy, the more Allen West is challenged about his comments, the more he doubles down on them. Now he’s blaming the “corrupt liberal media” for stirring the pot against him – a trick for which McCarthy taught the master class. And the congressman’s latest fusillades continue to distort the beliefs and policies of those he smears – no surprise there, either.

To help him continue his fight for “the heart and soul” of America he’s asking his supporters for a contribution of $10 or more. There could even be a super PAC in this – with McCarthy’s ghost as its honorary chairman.

Plenty of kindred spirits are there to sign on. Like the author of the book “The Grand Jihad,” who wrote that whether Obama is Christian or not, “the faith to which Obama actually clings is neocommunism.” Or the blogger who claims Obama is running the country into the ground “by way of the same type of race-baiting and class warfare Communism cannot exist without,” and that his policies are “unbecoming to an American president.”

From there it’s only a short hop to the kind of column that popped up on the right wing website Newsmax hinting of a possible coup “as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem.’” Military intervention, the author wrote, “is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for ‘fundamental change’ toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America.” The column was quickly withdrawn but not before the website Talking Points Memo exposed it.

So beware, Rep. West, beware: In the flammable pool of toxic paranoia that passes these days as patriotism in America, a single careless match can light an inferno. You would serve your country well to withdraw your remarks and apologize for them. But if not, perhaps there are members of your own party, as possessed of conscience and as courageous as that handful of Republicans who took on Joseph McCarthy, who will now abandon fear and throw cold water on your incendiary remarks.

Like many intelligent Russians who came of age during the closing act of the USSR, my ex-wife was a kind of stand-up comedian in reverse. Just as the talented comic artfully sets up a punch line, so too could she expertly build toward a release of sorts. But the punch line was never a joke. It was instead an opening up of a psychic trap door, showing foolish Americans that beneath their feet was not the security of a prosperous and powerful nation, but rather the void of the impending destruction that awaits us all. When your superpower homeland has been blown apart into 15 compromised statelets it’s comforting to keep in your pocket that great transnational equalizer: death.

And yet, once upon a time I found all her moody blueness charming. We had met at a university dormitory in 1990, the final year of Soviet power. I had registered temporarily at the dorm as part of the many bureaucratic sleights-of-hand the Westerner had to execute to stay in the country. Technically I was supposed to leave the USSR when my study abroad program ended. But while I was desperate to leave I also had a hankering to stay. And so through the machinations of the many machinators of the Perestroika era, I arranged it so that I would register in the Leningrad University dorm, pay some functionary a nominal $150 and then relocate to an old lady’s flat, far out on the Prospekt Prosveshchenie where for $7 a month I would have a room of my own. All I would have to do beyond these trifling payments was to stay a single night at the dorm. A bargain it seemed, until the future ex-Mrs. Greenberg walked in.

There was much talk and a lot of weak tea during that one legally necessitated sleepover. My East German bunkie who spoke much better Russian than I seemed in full control of the evening, artfully throwing out pogovorki — proverbs that seem particularly embedded into Russian and that irritatingly keep the poor student of the language in the dark. “The peasant doesn’t cross himself until the thunder sounds,” “chicken and girls are seized with the hands.” That kind of thing. But when her visit was over, the East German found himself oddly rebuffed and it was I who was slipped a phone number and an appointment that led eventually to a foldout bed pressed up against the thin wall adjoining her parents’ room. Half-understood, rolling under cool embroidered sheets, struggling to communicate things that should have come out as easy praises, I was only able to mutter blunt, minor words: “beautiful,” “interesting,” “very.” And in the end she took a breath and arranged herself and then turned to me and asked with yet another tricky Russian idiom:

“Did you finish?”

“Finish?” I said.

“Yes, did you finish? Are you satisfied?”

“Yes, I, um, finished.”

“Nu, nu,” she said, “then it’s time to go.”

I did go. Not only out of the room and out onto the empty dawn streets of Leningrad but eventually back to New York where I brooded, alone, in the broke and semi-employed way today’s shiftless post-boom 20-somethings would likely find familiar. It was the walloping recession of the early ’90s. There was very little to do or to hope for. And so I found my thoughts drifting to the stoic, vaguely sad woman I’d left in Russia. But if she was on the sad side, “tending toward depression” as a psychiatrist like my father might say, well, that was OK with me. I liked her melancholy abruptness. I liked the whole direct-but-gentle sadness of the Soviet Union. I liked how nobody went to a shrink and how people stayed away from shrink words like “depressed,” “depressive” and “depression.” Russians somehow seemed to understand that depression was just sadness and that sadness was just a mood. One of many lenses through which you can take in life’s light. Moods colored life, sometimes darkly, but they also gave life immediacy and freshness, allowing you to react sincerely to every new thing that came your way.

As luck would have it, I was given another chance to go back to that way of thinking. A few months after my return to the United States a small-time Siberian hustler posing as a documentary maker arrived in New York and cobbled together a film crew that consisted of a Dutch producer, an American camerawoman and, for reasons I don’t understand to this day, me. All of us were flown to Moscow, put on a four-day train ride to Lake Baikal, and then told to film a documentary about, well, I really have no idea. Vague pieces of Michael Moore-esque intervention were staged where we would storm into the offices of a Soviet bureaucrat, insult him, film him and then leave. We would gather random crowds on the streets of Irkutsk and make them sing the Lake Baikal ode “Slavnoe Morye” — Glorious Sea. We slaughtered and ate a sheep. And then toward the end of our stay, just as I was trying to figure out a way to get back to that captivating woman in Leningrad, our driver walked into our hotel room, told us breakfast was ready and, also, by the way, “Snyali Gorbacheva.” They took Gorbachev.

It was the infamous hard-liner military coup attempt of August 1991, although, of course, we at the time didn’t know it would turn out to be only an attempt. For three days we drove the back roads of Siberia debating whether we should turn south and head out through Mongolia. All of our hotel reservations were mysteriously canceled as the single thread of Soviet power gathered itself together and drew tight on a million different knots. At one point on a narrow muddy road our van pulled over and two taut-tummied Russian boys with a guitar jumped in. Apparently they were known to the Russians in the group. Once they were seated, the guitar came out and one of the boys spat out a fast-paced Visotsky-style ballad that ended (for my benefit?) with an English refrain “goodbye America, hello Siberia.”

It was during these three days of political vertigo that I found I thought of her the most. At one little outpost I sent (how quaint to remember!) a telegram. “Are you all right?” I scribbled on the toilet-paper quality telegraph form (though it should be noted that the coarseness of Soviet toilet paper and the flimsiness of Soviet writing paper were a good deal closer together on the spectrum of “paper” than the American variants). But it may as well have been toilet paper. Passing it through the telegraph window to the bored, platinum blond operator seemed akin to a flush.

But, alas, it wasn’t. Miraculously the coup ended. Boris Yeltsin emerged and stood on a tank. The hard-liners were imprisoned. One shot himself. The phones worked again. I called her and the creaky Siberian lines issued forth her voice. “I got your telegram,” she said. “Very sweet.” I flew to Leningrad, which now everybody was suddenly calling St. Petersburg, and we made love again and again in a tiny apartment I’d rented for another $7. We made love on an overnight train to Moscow. We made love again in the apartment of her pioneer camp counselor. On my final day in Russia we necked on the steps of Patriarch’s Pond until a young Soviet malcontent yelled a phrase at us that must be known the world over: “Get a room!”

And of course she came to New York. And of course we were married. And of course we were divorced. And of course all of it faded away as most passions tend to. Only our most intense moments of togetherness — unlike the world-stopping moments others feel when they launch a romantic connection — occurred when the world actually stopped. When two of the greatest powers ever to occupy the globe shrugged off their mutual enmity for a fleeting moment and actually paused to look one another in the eye.

All of this came rushing back to me as she pulled her hand away from my arm on Seventh Avenue and we retreated back into the small talk that is my national tradition and that she had seemed to have mastered in the last two decades. Children (me yes, she no)? Work (not so interesting). Travel (now and again). She had seen me in her dream and I was dead. And given that I had firmly closed the Soviet chapter of my life, the chapter in which I was young and impetuous, when the thought of intense, inexplicable coupling could fill my whole mind, the chapter in which I was open to the world and where she had come to know me most intimately, I guess you could say that her dream was right on the money.

On February 11, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the growing national debt was as serious as the Cold War. “It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of [red] ink,” he said.

On March 24, reports The Hill, House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling picked up the theme, but added an extra special Commie-baiting twist by bringing China directly into the conversation.

“The red menace for the 21st century is our public debt.”

Keeping with his communism theme, Hensarling implied that interest payments the U.S. is making to China alone could pose a national security threat.

“The interest we pay to China on our debt, they can essentially afford to buy a [Joint] Strike Fighter every other day,” he said, according to the Daily Progress. “Our greatest competitor in the world … we are building their armed forces with the interest we pay them on the national debt.”

Gosh, if I was a Chinese Politburo member, that kind of rhetoric would probably have me doubling-down on my military expansion plans, because everyone knows all too well what happened to the last aspiring evil empire that conservative Americans feared as the “Red Menace.” But to bring it all back home, it seems tombe that the Hensarling and Daniels have painted their party into a corner. Because if debt is the greatest threat to freedom, and China is leveraging itself up into superpower status on the back of American profligacy, then it should be every red-blooded American’s patriotic duty to bring down deficits as fast as possible. And I will further submit that the most sensible way to do that would be to cut a longterm budget deal that matches spending cuts with revenue increases.

I just think that if the richest Americans were asked nicely to pay a little more in taxes, because it would help us defeat the Red Menace, there’d really be no decent way for them to say no.

And that’s why he wrote, as the speech wrapped up, “Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.”

While there’s not really anything in the Constitution that precludes a little light Scandinavian-style socialism, Broun is a modern-day Republican moron, and so for him the “s-word” means some scary combination of the Third Reich and the Great Purge. (If you can find the passage in Obama’s relentlessly centrist address that sounds like a proposal for a Great Leap Forward, please let me know, because all I remember is the bit about cutting corporate taxes and something about smoked salmon.)

Broun is a crafty fellow — he knew that the “sit with someone from the other party” proposal was an elaborate ruse designed to oppress the opposition.

“I already believe very firmly that it is a trap and a ruse that Democrats are proposing,” Broun said. “They don’t want civility. They want silence from the Republicans. And the sitting together being kissy-kissy is just another way to try to silence Republicans, and also to show — to keep the American people from seeing how few of them there are in the U.S. House now.”

Broun says he chose to avoid the chamber and liveblog from his office “out of respect.” Respect for whichever unlucky member was assigned to sit next to one of the dumbest members of the Republican caucus, I imagine.