Do the Westerners really, truly understand what they are looking at?

Rating: 10/10 (1 April 2007)

Let me start by expressing awe and admiration for the creators of this movie. My hat off to them. Whether the message they are attempting to convey is really heard by the Western audience as it was obviously intended by the creators is however debatable, at least for me.
Along the lines of my doubt, I was amused by one of the otherwise knowledgeable and coherent commentators' line who apparently sincerely believes that "The most recalcitrant" were being "(can be) kicked out of the country and stripped of their citizenship, like the singer songwriter Wolf Biermann." My God: I lived in a very similar system and my dream, all my friends' dream was to be "kicked out". They would not do it because they would have been left with very few people on their hands. Man, do you comprehend that these people were living in a prison? Yes a very large prison but well walled in. That's what the Berlin wall was: a prison wall, with guards and towers and all. Wolf Bierman like a very few others were exceptions and this is not the place to explain why.
It is however the place to express a certain doubt about the possibility of the "humane" Stasi so convincingly portrayed. Although I admit the necessity of the character for the drama to make it as captivating as it is, I cannot help knowing that people who were reaching the very important position of bugging such a key character as this great and popular playwright, were thoroughly tested, completely brain washed individuals, convinced to the bottom of their being that what they were doing was right, progressive, for the good of their people and their country, that they were part of the elite called upon to lead back to the right path those who had not yet seen the light that they have seen. His job was particularly important because he was supervising the very creators of the all-important brain washing, called euphemistically, "socialist education of the masses".
This is the terrifying thing about the entire system: it drags in intelligent, nay, brilliant people who become the blind tools of oppression. Most of those who have grown up in a free country are convinced that they are not going to be, cannot be victims of such a huge scale scam. To quote no other than the great Friedrich Hayek, what a "fatal conceit"!! He used it in a slightly different context but it is perfectly applicable here. Just read the comments of those who think that anti-terror surveillance and totalitarian oppression are comparable or even identical. These people are the ones who are most prone to become Stazis, the human material from which they were being recruited. Let's hope that they never get their way.