We've written about the film "The Lives of Others" before on this blog. A great film which you must see! I spoke to someone who saw it recently with his "Old Left" cronies. They loved the film too! Guess what? They thought it was an excellent critique of the Bush Administrations post-9/11 Domestic Surveillance program! UNBELIEVABLE!!!
This is more proof that some people are cognitively blinded by their ideological preconceptions.
This film is not an allegory or metaphor for anything! It is a gripping description of the social and cultural conditions of totalitarianism as it expressed itself in the DDR.
RELIAPUNDIT ADDS: THE DDR WAS A LEFTIST STATE, TOO. SO THESE OLD LEFTIES DENIAL IS ACTUALLY DENIAL SQUARED!
ALSO: THERE IS MUCH MORE SURVEILLANCE (WITH NEXT TO NO CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS!) IN EUROPE THAN IN THE USA, YET THESE LEFTIES NEVER BERATE, DECRY OR ATTACK THE GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE. NO: THEY HATE BUSH AND THE GOP AND THEY LOVE EUROPE - PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY HAVE "UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE" AND HIGH TAXES. WHICH IS WHY THEY LOVED THE USSR.
This is more proof that some people are cognitively blinded by their ideological preconceptions.
This film is not an allegory or metaphor for anything! It is a gripping description of the social and cultural conditions of totalitarianism as it expressed itself in the DDR.
RELIAPUNDIT ADDS: THE DDR WAS A LEFTIST STATE, TOO. SO THESE OLD LEFTIES DENIAL IS ACTUALLY DENIAL SQUARED!
ALSO: THERE IS MUCH MORE SURVEILLANCE (WITH NEXT TO NO CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS!) IN EUROPE THAN IN THE USA, YET THESE LEFTIES NEVER BERATE, DECRY OR ATTACK THE GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE. NO: THEY HATE BUSH AND THE GOP AND THEY LOVE EUROPE - PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY HAVE "UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE" AND HIGH TAXES. WHICH IS WHY THEY LOVED THE USSR.
the left was wrong then and they are wrong now:
ReplyDeleteNRO - today:
They Got It Wrong [Peter Robinson]
Rereading John Pod's review of "The Lives of Others" just now, I found one passage so powerful, and so just, that I could not resist offering it up. (And what better talisman with which to ward off bad luck on Friday the 13th than moral acuity and gorgeous prose?)
I think there may be another reason for the reluctance of the makers of pop culture worldwide to reckon with communism, and that is shame. The ideological struggle against leftist totalitarianism was something that did not arouse the interest or enthusiasm of cultural elites in the West during the Cold War. Far from it; from the 1960s onward, the default position of the doyens of popular culture was a presumption in favor of the Communist struggle, as personified by Mao, the Viet Cong, Castro, the Sandinistas, El Salvador's guerrillas, and the so-called African liberation movements.
This was not a reasoned, or thought-through, view. It was little more than fashion. And rarely, if ever, has history rendered a more devastating verdict on the wrongheadedness of fashionable Western groupthink than it did when the walls and statues came down, and Lenin was removed from his unholy pedestal.
They got it wrong. And though they may not know it, they are ashamed of it and do not wish to be reminded of it. Perhaps that's why it took a 33-year-old to make this masterpiece—a 33-year-old who was too young during the Cold War to have joined any camp in any meaningful way.