Politics & Power Quote by Walter Ulbricht

Nothing telegraphs secrecy like a man insisting he has none.

Ulbricht’s line is less a promise than a prophylactic: a preemptive narrative designed to inoculate the East German state against suspicion at precisely the moment suspicion was becoming structural. In the early 1960s, the GDR was hemorrhaging citizens to the West, and its legitimacy problem wasn’t abstract; it was visible in train stations and empty apartments. A regime that calls itself “Democratic” while policing speech has to perform democracy, and “we reject secret policies” is performance art with barbed wire offstage.

The phrasing does double work. “For the people, and only the people” narrows the definition of “people” to those who comply. Dissenters, border-crossers, critics: they’re quietly expelled from the moral category the state claims to serve. That’s the subtext of many one-party systems: the public is invoked as a sacred object, then ventriloquized.

The final jab - “like the warmongers” - is Cold War judo. Rather than defend the GDR on its own terms, Ulbricht offloads moral scrutiny onto the West, tying secrecy to militarism and implying transparency is a socialist virtue. It’s not just what he denies; it’s what he implies: that anyone asking for transparency is already aligned with the enemy.

Historically, the irony is brutal. The GDR built one of the most invasive surveillance apparatuses in Europe. The quote reads now as a case study in authoritarian rhetoric: deny, sanctify, accuse - and call it governance.