Why Perfect Totalitarianism Is Impossible
As I was watching "The Lives of Others,'' Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's masterful Oscar-winning film, I couldn't help thinking how many Cubans, North Koreans, Iranians or Zimbabweans must have been performing little bits of moral heroism in the face of oppression at that very moment. Even their fellow countrymen will never know how many acts of defiance are being perpetrated today by ordinary people against totalitarian regimes -- ensuring that the human spirit continues to exist when everything seems bent on crushing it.
The German film focuses on Gerd Wiesler, a captain in the Stasi, East Germany's feared secret police, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is ordered to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend simply because the minister in charge of culture lusts for the lady and needs an excuse to put the writer away in order to clear the path. Through a tantalizing series of small twists and turns in which what is not said is more important than what is, the plot leads us toward the moral awakening of Wiesler.
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