Based on that post, Hope's book has gross innacuracies. It is too "Hollywood". I would recommend "the life of others":
// __ „Das Leben der Anderen" (with english captions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C844bEAOv8
~
Like most people who know about the stasi first hand, I think it is a bit too romantic, untrue, distracting, "hopeful", but it is a very descriptive movie about the ins and outs of the stasi, life in East Germany. The story line kinds of feels like a B-movie but the depth of the dialogues and Martina Gedeck ;-) make the difference.
One of the most moving parts is the way in which the illusive loving poet/writer cries holding the face/body of his tormented, medicated girlfriend (Gedeck) after she committed suicide by throwing herself face on against a passing truck for having had snitched him (she thought). He loved her for the person she was, "even though" she was an actress with a stasi prostitute hobby, who, "hopefully", still had some sense of morality/humanity.
It has also hilarious parts like the one in which the little boy walks into the elevator and stared at the guy for a while to then start making fun of him: "you are by the stasi, right?" ..., "you are funny, soccer balls don't have names" ... ;-) and poetically charged dialogues, like when his friends are trying to make him understand that his love was stasi. They ask him "what is wrong with you?, what has happened to you?", "of course, you will be able to recuperate from her loss", poet's answer was: "it hasn't just happened to me, it has happened to the whole nation/everybody?" Towards the end the two men who had been double timing, loving "Christa Maria" (Gedeck) argued for a while about past and current times, about how much the stasi knew about every body and the poet tells him "it is disgusting that people like you rule nations". Moron had just a quizzical smirk that spoke volumes. On another apparently marginal moment of the movie, the stasi officer shows his colleague a book and tells him about the "kinds of personalities" of artists. "Personality profiles" were studied by psychologists during Nazi Germany and they have been used ever since by the stasis of the world, the "human rights" respecting police departments of the world in the U.S., Britain, ...
The silly hopefulness of all those poetic back and forths had an undertone that felt like Bertold Bretch's "Cartesian/we think; therefore we are ..." kind of poem: "General, your Tank is A Powerful Vehicle", but I think to see/feel that you have to know/be (East) German:
General Your Tank is A Powerful Vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
~
Bretch's poem when it comes to the stasi, has relevant connotations in regards to the fact that comparing the stasi to USG/the NSA/CIA/FBI ... is an odd and laughable joke. As you can see in that true-to-matters movie (made to ridicule and somewhat sublimize, downplay their deeds), the stasi had to actually wire people's homes, transcribe what people were talking about by hand!, didn't have computers, ... which made their attempt to "know everything" laughably absurd. Check out their recording/monitoring techniques:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-show-absurdity-life-under-stasi-east-germany
the fact that they had to use actual people made it all too inefficient, messy for them, too involved, but at the same time "hopeful". Nowadays not just our homes, one own's life comes prewired. Try living your life without a cell phone. I know how it is. I have been using myself as a guinea pig. In fact, USG/the NSA is past people. As I have thoroughly tested and other people have been talking about, they have been using AI for their repression. Girlfriend would initially not believe me, was amazed that each time she would say such words as "fly path" on my phone, the call would be dropped even if all she did was just saying "fly path".
USG has also helped me with my own guinea pig project: they would just phone me and I would do what I invariably did with the Cuban police and I would just put the phone down quietly and let them keep talking by/to themselves. Once they took my phone service away for three months. In the U.S. they were doing and I was being the same. They took away my phone and Internet access away for 8 months. I kept logs proving that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my Internet/Telephone and kept calling their tech support who would anxiously tell me: "they couldn't access my phone from their ends". I brought their rear end to court and Verizon's technicians admitted on record (in the U.S. you have the no-question-asked right to have a copy of the recording of the whole case) that: a) yes, I could not have made up Internet logs and they could check them from their ends; b) they could see my long list of complaints and calls for service; c) that I kept paying for the service I wasn't being provided with; d) they didn't know why my telephone and Internet wasn't working. However "the honorary judge" (lawyers idiotically refer to themselves like that) ruled the case against me, even though it was a symbolic $5000 against Verizon and ACE Innovations, "because" "I couldn't ‘prove' that the reason why I didn't have a job (which badly affect your finances) was because I didn't/couldn't use the telephone and Internet service I was paying for". Prospective employers, job hunters and my friends could not understand why I had to use theirs or the church's phone. There is something peculiarly sick about USG. When the Cuban police took away my phone service, they just did that. USG would incrementally take away my Internet access and phone service for half an hour, then hours, days, weeks, … until they took it off for 8 months and during that time my telephone rang a few times just fine as if it was working.
Something I generally like about German people is that they are not exactly "don't worry be happy". They do worry. Most people in East Germany, contrary to what you experience in the U.S. even if they were fully aware of their abuses and excesses, didn't live in fear/scared of the stasi. They cracked jokes about and ridiculed the stasi/their government mercilessly (which you can also see in that movie) as I'd wish "we the people" would do in the U.S. and I think they have plenty of reasons to do so, but they don't. Why not? In fact, "we the people" in East Germany (in kind of a
BLM reaction, but the whole country) in their Bastille day against the stasi, rebelled protesting on the streets in a coordinated way throughout the whole country and stormed their buildings in mass (not really against the government buildings). Some of the heads of that movement (to me as irrationally as it gets, but I would like to know more about it) were amazed at how unbelievably easy the whole government crumbled down at once after they dealt with the stasi.
Something very interesting that happened as East German people had their Bastille day against the stasi is that when the freedom loving, "responsible" Western spy agencies learned that we the people had decided that everyone would get their own dossiers, they screamed a cosmically loud, stealthy "NO!" and went about their business to stop that from happening, even finding the collaboration of the stasi helpful when they were at it. Why? What was the problem? Wouldn't that have proven to we the people how crazy, bad the stasi/communists are?
Now, what did we the people in the U.S. do when they learned first hand that their government was way farther up their rear ends than the stasi could have ever had it in their wildest dreams?:
// __ Government Surveillance: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
~
// __ 'State of Surveillance' with Edward Snowden and Shane Smith (VICE on HBO: Season 4, Episode 13)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucRWyGKBVzo
~
Could you imagine a Bastille day of we the people against the NSA in the U.S.? I know it is hard, but as Lennon sang just try to "imagine!" Something amazing about gringos is that the NSA actually used Snowden revelations to out themselves, become "social", "cool". Now they even have facebook pages!
Part of why such things happen the way the do in the U.S. is due to the difference between what I call "honest lies" and gringo style persuasion, but are we the people really so stupid that such manipulations would have such an impact?
