See This Movie
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- March
- 19
I just saw the German flick, “The Lives of Others.” It won the Academy Award for best foreign movie, and I recommend it.
I won’t give away the plot. But I will say that the movie centers on pre-Glasnost life in East Germany and how the secret police there conducted investigations into the daily lives of people under suspicion of disloyalty. Which was just about everyone.
The movie proves that in a totalitarian society, they can always get the goods on you, if they want to. Idealogy really has nothing to do it. Even the bad guys at the top of the heap fake the act of drinking the Kool-Aid. The true believers are the overly efficient lower-level functionaries who do the dirty work. Of course, in the end, they turn out to be pathetic suckers.
And in the end, the motives for “getting people” is mostly personal. Sex, power and money are the driving forces. It’s a cautionary tale, even for us who live in a free society.
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 6:01 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
