Re: MM: Lives of Others


"MM" <kylix_is@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:t39rp3dagib34qdlt0mouv07motpk369dj@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:10:44 -0000, "DVH" <dvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Finally got round to watching this.

It's very good. Very serious - I spotted one joke - but then how else
could
they treat it...

It ties in with everything else I've read about the Stasi, which was
pleasing.

It remains a puzzle as to how a country can steer itself into such a
situation. The key, I suppose, is persuading the citizens that life can't
take place without the state's involvement. And the Prussian Virtues taken
to their logical conclusion, I suppose.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Okay. At Christmas I bought (in Hamburg's Saturn electronics
superstore) "Stunde Null", a double-DVD of the "zero hour" in several
German cities as the end of the war approached. In 1944 as the
Americans approached Aachen on one billboard there was the missive
attributed to Onkel Adolf: "Give me ten years, and you will not
recognise Germany" Well, after only five years the level of
devastation was so immense, when I see footage of it I just cannot
believe it could happen. When I see how Cologne was razed to the
ground just 25 years before I went there as a guest worker in 1969
still beggars belief. Hitler managed just through words initially, and
then through violence and kangeroo courts to persuade an entire
nation, with few dissenters, to bring about change, though probably
not like the Germans expected. And when I watched later a programme on
the BBC about the huge slaughter of American soldiers at Omaha Beach I
can barely watch it without getting choked up, especially when one
sees the beautifully tended cemeteries of the war dead and the
thousands of white crosses. That's how words can cause deeds that
hurt. Such films should be regular, mandatory viewing in all British
schools, in my opinion.

They probably are. The rub is, that there is almost a total absence of
similar coverage in respect to Leftist ideology (allowing for the fact that
the National Socialist German Workers Party are *popularly portrayed* as
being Right).


MM


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