"This man says there is trouble with our telephone."

[gatorboy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGo3a3eU4Qc

[frazzled]

1. My film clip was much grimmer

I kept thinking of the movie "Das Leben der Anderen" (The Lives of Others), a drama about Stasi surveillance in East Germany.

Sorry, I don't have the exact clip where they dress as telephone repair guys and bug the apartment of the main character, but this trailer gives you the idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

[Duer 157099]

2. That was a disturbing film wasn't it?

I saw it a couple years ago when we were deep within the Bush downward spiral, and all I could think of was that this was what we had to look forward to.

I still think so.

[frazzled]

3. Yes, it was ... but

I kind of had a bit of the opposite reaction. I had really felt we were on the brink of totalitarianism for the first five or six years of the Bush administration. Seeing this film made me realize that as bad as it was, we actually were nowhere near to the situation people endured in places like East Germany. While we had the awful abrogations of the Constitution with respect to Guantanamo detainees (a problem we are still trying to unravel), regular citizens were not being imprisoned on a daily basis, and our neighbors weren't turning us in right and left for speaking our minds. We didn't have to worry that our best friend was a spy. I used to be scared a bit to post my political opinions on the Internet in the beginning, for fear that "they" were tagging me and starting files, but then I realized nobody really cared, and got quite bold about it.

I'm not trying to downgrade the real danger of things like secret evidence (which we had even during the Clinton administration) or indefinite detention. Those things are real and we need to guard against them with all our might. But this film made me recall people I have known from the former Communist countries who really suffered greatly. In my younger days, I used to discount the handwringing about the evils of these regimes. It was only much later that I realized my naivete, and how my ideological predilections should not get in the way of seeing realities.

At any rate, this was a really good film, very chilling and very beautiful at the same time.