The Lives of Others - FILM REVIEW

In the GDR during the era of the Soviet Union someone became an enemy of the German socialist state first by questioning the system then finally by crossing over the Berlin Wall and defecting to the West.

In the New Labour era of todays Britain someone becomes an enemy of the British corporate fascist state as soon as they begin questioning the society we live in and then by crossing over to the BNP and defecting to the real world. In a moment of historical irony the same week that saw new laws on surveillance come into force that were signed into power as statutory instruments by the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, without any parliamentary scrutiny, that allow 795 public bodies and Quango’s to tap and monitor our mail and phone calls, the film The Lives of Others was released.

The film is set in 1984 during the Cold War and concerns the life of a dissident writer Dreyman who is being monitored by the East German security service, the Stasi. A repulsive reptile of a politician, the GDR Culture Minister, is abusing his power and political office by forcing Dreymans actress girlfriend into having sex with him under threat of her suffering a ’career ban’ the same as experienced by Dreymans stage director friend Jeska. Jeska has been banned from working in the GDR for life because he had once signed a letter with other dissidents demanding political change. In the GDR only those who espoused the same ‘democratic’ values of the government were allowed to work or succeed in the German socialist society. Talent had to be submissive to the will of the politicians or talent would have to be suppressed and consigned to the dustbin of history. As Stalin once said ‘ The poet is the engineer of the soul’ and only socialist poets, and socialist souls, were allowed to exist in the GDR.

The GDR was a typical socialist system. In the palaces once owned by Emperors and Princes lived the government ministers and party bosses. The individual under socialism was seen simply as an adjunct to the system, and their worth based solely on their utility to the party. The party bosses were portrayed by the subservient media as pioneers and heroes, but in reality were just rapists and perverts, molesting anything or anyone they desired with utter impunity. When one watches the fat Culture Minister pawing at the terrified actress girlfriend of Dreyman in his limousine like some vile Jabba the Hut on Viagra one recalls with disgust the antics of John Prescott and his secretary.

The Culture Minister orders the Stasi to monitor the home of Dreyman, so bugs are fitted in every room and the senior Stasi intelligence officer Wiesler is ordered to tape and record everything that happens so that it can be used against Dreyman. The film then chronicles a journey into the life of Dreyman by the Stasi agent Wiesler and the affect that Dreyman has on the Stasi agent monitoring him. The Stasi agent Wiesler begins the film as a conditioned monster, a Blairite clone, who unthinkingly obeys the dictates of the party even if it means he is destroying the lives of others. He is simply a functionary, a machine, designed to reveal the inner secrets of whatever prisoner is placed before him. He psychologically tortures the ‘enemies of socialism’ until they finally crack and reveal to him the secrets they hold and that he wishes to know. Suddenly though he is confronted with a direct insight into the lives of those he had been told were simply the enemy. Instead of the monsters he had been taught to expect he was confronted with truth, beauty, honest, passion and idealism. He then began to realise that he was working for the monsters, not monitoring them. It was the state that was the criminal, and the criminal the patriot.

The ideological indoctrination of the State is broken down as Wiesler lives Dreymans life vicariously, hearing him in his headphones making love, playing the piano, arguing about politics with his friends and reading aloud his writings. Faced with a truth he had never suspected, and sickened by a system based on hypocrisy, privilege and lies, he begins to reject the conditioning that he once believed in and once insinuated and propagated into the young minds of his students. Little by little the life of Dreyman brings the stasi agent to life as well. The art, beauty and truth he discovers vicariously in the life of Dreyman awakens in him his latent soul, and eventually the Stasi agent decides to also metaphorically cross the wall. There is one moment when the Stasi agent is overwhelmed by emotion and weeps with the beauty of Dreymans playing the piano when finds he out about the death of his friend Jeska.

The rest of the film is a suspense story concerning Wiesler attempting to protect Dreyman, even though Dreyman ironically is totally unaware that he has a guardian angel protecting him who he ironically regards as his greatest enemy. The final part of the film is set just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Dreyman is investigating what happened when he was being investigated by the Stasi. He returns to his old apartment and discovers the web of wires and bugs that once listened in to his life. He resolves to find out more and embarks on a journey into the past.

The film is strangely, if not disquietingly, familiar to the present situation we live in today. In Britain today you are free to say what you want , as long as the government have not passed a law to criminalise it. In the GDR, that also wore the mask of democracy, dissent was also a criminal offence. There was one law for the people and one law for the politicians. Whilst the politicians can have total free speech in Parliament and not be arrested or censured, we cannot have free speech even though we vote them into power. If we lie in our jobs then we get the sack, but no laws exist to punish politicians for telling lies to the people that vote them into power.

In the GDR one could be the subject of a career ban just for associating with democratic dissidents and in the UK people still lose their jobs for being in a democratic opposition party - the BNP. The constant monitoring of dissidents, the police phone taps, the letters that are opened before they are delivered and the suspicious van parked outside in the street. These are the ways in which our democracy has been subverted. The casual telling of a joke in the work canteen that destroys a career, the zealous functionary in the diversity department who is gutless before political correctness, the walls that always have ears and the ministerial limousine for the political pervert whose merest whim can destroy our ancestral rights. That is how our society has been poisoned. It is now merely a haven for perverts and political prostitutes.

In the GDR forbidden art was the only opiate that could dull the pain of a sterile socialist existence. A forbidden picture in a forbidden book, or a line of banned poetry or a hidden religious icon, could possess a beauty as heavy as any cross. Like an evanescent sunbeam through the bars of a prison cell window, such moments could only be treasured for their transient nature. Frightened hands would hide away their precious books in secret nooks and crannies as soon as they had turned a few pages for fear of discovery. Because the state was a rapist such beauty could only be captured for a moment in the mind and then left to linger in the soul. The phone line that clicks when no-one on the line was the soundtrack of a life lived in fear. In the GDR any jumped up official of the Stasi, at the behest of some parasitic politician, could remove an individuals right to privacy and freedom of conscience and destroy their lives at a whim.Under the new surveillance laws of the Labour Party any jumped up jobs worth in the council can violate an individuals life.

The film raises an important and timely point that many Labour politicians should ponder. Dreyman has no power, he is just a single fragile straw of a man about to be broken by the power and might of the German state. But it is he who wins in the end. It is his moment of resistance to the tyranny of the system that in the end forms part of the totality of the social struggle that brings down the corrupt GDR state. But his most important victory is in the liberation of the Stasi agents soul. Every day that the Stasi agent spent immersed in the life of Dreyman, was the triumph of truth over lies and beauty over ugliness. Dreymans greatest victory is not the collapse of the Soviet Union but the salvation of just one man, Wiesler, who in turn saves him. Wiesler saves the life of Dreyman, but Dreyman saves the soul of Wiesler. Dreyman wins because of who Dreyman is. His victory is the triumph of light over darkness, of the dawn over the night and the victory of the individual over the system.

Dreyman wins because in the end the thrall of winter must pass and Spring return. Nothing in violation of nature, beauty, art and truth can exist for long. Sooner or later the sun will rise and the night will pass away. The people will wake up as if from a spell with their eyes blinking, wipe the crusted sleep from their eyes, and step forth into a new day. The nightmare will be over.

Deprive a people of art, culture and beauty and you deprive them of life. They may exist but they are not alive. This is why the Labour Party today has passed laws that tell us where we can dance and where we can sing, where we can smoke and drink and socialise. Our culture is at their service. In their ill fitting suits and cheap shoes these minions of the system sign away the things that mean nothing to them and yet mean everything to us. Our liberty, free speech, constitutional rights and national sovereignty, each are signed away when it suits them. They steal from the lives of others, from OUR lives, what matters most to us. The grey men in grey suits with red and blue ties, the myrmidons with their pens that murder with forms and contracts and agreements the infant souls of our people. Each is a Herod or a Pharaoh in their own pernicious and pathetic way, the pen pushing accomplices to the crimes of their masters. As a result of their conspiracies our people our denied their right to attain their innate potential and their souls are left unnourished and starved. They then become as mean and spiteful as the men in grey suits and spawn their own myriad tiny crimes. Hope is their prey, and they hunt it with the black dogs of their mistrust and fear. They let their superiors do their thinking for them and surrender their souls for cash and status. Such systems as the GDR, and the present political system, don’t end with a bang they end in a whimper. They fall when people refuse to believe in them anymore and then they begin to collapse from within. It is the spiritual crisis within a civilisation that causes the collapse. When the systems fall then the grey men in their ill fitting suits always scuttle away into the dark shadows of anonymity to live with the burdens of their crimes.

What is most interesting are the strange affinities between the Socialism of the GDR and Islamism today. Just as Socialism invented its own language to dehumanise its oppenents, the heirs of Socialism are now inventing new phrases in order to demonise the opponents of Islamism and Eurabia.

“Islamophobia”is a meaningless phrase. It encompasses a bogus and artificial concept, which is that those who criticise Islam are ‘racist’ for doing so, and it implies that Islam and Islamists are beyond any criticism. Islam is not a race, it is a religion. Islamaphobia is nothing more than an example of the Marxist-Leninist technique of the Terrorism of the Word, which is designed to destroy any opportunity for rational debate by employing ad hominem attacks on the participants in the debate.

The word Islamaphobia is primarily used in order deflect attention away from the violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam by seeking to conflate criticism of Islam with an attack on Islam and Muslims. The Tyranny of the Minorities that dominates the Liberal West is predicated on the basis that ‘ Victim status equals privileged status in the West ‘. Minorities self designate themselves as ‘victims’, and claim victim hood status, as they know they can then be free from criticism, censure and ordinary scrutiny. Those who are designated as ’victims‘ however spurious are the new elite in Western Society.

Our societies are then engineered in order to ’redress’ the wrongs society has supposedly perpetrated against them and Positive Discrimination is used to award them extra rights above that of the rest of the population. The Cult of the Victim is the central dynamic at the heart of our social malaise. Islamaphobia is just the latest manifestation of the Cult of the Victim.

Islamaphobia is used to demonise opponents as ‘racists’ and destroy rational debate. Whilst our tube stations and airports are being blown apart, the Police, Media and Government waste their time hunting down ’ Islamaphobes’ instead of hunting the terrorists in our communities. They pass new laws banning ‘Islamaphobia’ but fail to even bring into law their own recommendations after the 7/7 bombings to ban Imams who don’t speak English from entering the country or deporting radical Islamist preachers present in the UK. The proponents of Islamism are protected by the law, the opponents of Islamism are criminalised by the law.

The best way to counter genuine hatred of Muslims would be for the sections of the Islamic community that actively support Islamic extremism, Sharia law and terrorism to end their support for the ideology of Islamist violence or simply leave the country. It would also help the reconciliation process if it was the Muslims who spurn and who have renounced all forms of violence against the British state and people who took the lead in extirpating those who support terrorism from their own communities and actively assist their removal from the country.

The greatest supporters an appeasers of Islamic extremism in our society today are those members of the Left that once supported regimes such as the GDR. Just as they once supported the Soviet Union against the West, they now support Islam against “the West”. There is a deep ideological affinity and political methodology between the Communists and the Jihadists. They form what is known as the Sharia Socialists, the heirs of Saladin and Stalin. Whenever the hard Left gained political power, and the Islamists have gained power, they have both instituted a reign of terror in order to create what they envisaged as a just society, one that was usually brought about by force and murder. Just as the Socialist system regarded opponents of the regime as ’Enemies of the State’ and accorded them no rights, the Islamic law of Dhimmitude works in much the same way : it seeks to impose a utopia through the application of violence.

The links between the two ‘faiths’ is remarkable ;

The Global Caliphate is mirrored by the International Communist State.

Both Islamists and Revolutionary Communists and Socialists believe in the redemptive power of violence - Trotskyite ‘ Permanent Revolution’ until the International Communist state is built and the Islamist Global Jihad until the Global Caliphate is built.

Neither Communism nor Islamism have any respect for race, ethnicity, national borders and national cultures. Each of them is to be submerged into the Islamist / Communist mass and both believe that only after their ’revolutions’ will the New Humanity be born - the Communist New Society and the Islamist New Spciety.

Both Communism and Islamism are ’semitic ’ in origin - Marx was Jewish and Mohammed was Arab.

Mohammed was the ’prophet ’ of Islamism as Marx was the ’prophet’ of Communism.

Both Islamism and Marxism create political dictatorships.

Both Islamism and Marxism reject free speech.

Both are collectivist and both reject individualism.

Both are ‘faiths’ in the metaphysical sense that both posit an earthly paradise coming into existence after the fulfilment of their respective revolutions.

Both are supposedly based on equality, but both are run by those who are more equal than others. In Communism the party bosses run the state, in Islamism it is the Imams who run the state.

The General Secretary of the Communist Party is mirrored by the Ayatollah of the Islamist movement.

Both are rootless and cosmopolitan creeds that reject the notion of a people or culture rooted in one place and both seek the extirpations of the natural and organic and its replacement with the ideological or the theological.

Both despise the West and Western Culture.

Both regard the West and Western Culture as their greatest enemy.

Both have now united in order to use the word 'Islamaphobia' in order to ensure that anyone who wishes to preserve their indigenous culture is villified. The Far left see in the Islamist movement the revolutionary base that will topple the Capitalists that run the system. Where the White Working Class failed, the Islamists will succeed. The Far Left think they can then reach an accord with the Islamists and build their communist society alongside the Sharia Society of the Islamists.

Those in the grip of such delusions lead the people either into gulags or death camps.

There are those such as Adam Krzeminski who say that Communism was an outgrowth of European intellectual history. This is false. Marxism is an outgrowth of semitic consciousness, not European consciousness. Communism as an ideology could only be considered as 'scientific' by saying that False Consciousness was not applicable to Communism as Communism was scientific. This is tautalogical nonsense. Saying Communism was scientitic did not make it scientific. Communism is a faith, not a science. It is based on the belief that certain events will occur in the future (The International Communist State)due to some 'divine' plan ( Dialectical Materialism)that is the basis of reality. Communism is itself as much an example of False Consciousness as those religions it condemned.

Just as scripture based religions, such as Islam, are based on faith and revelation -so did Marx base communism on faith ( that the class society would one day arrive ) and his revelation that communism was the historical inevitability he said it was.

The concept of a global “religious struggle” has become united with the idea of a global class struggle. The Muslims and the proletariat are engaged in the same battle against the evil Christians and Jews (capitalists, imperialists). This is why Anti-Semitism is now emanating mainly from the Far Left and Islamists in British society. Most attacks on Jews these days in Britain are by Muslims and far left activists not the Far Right. The fiction that the Far Right are the main cause of attacks on Jews is a lie peddled only by the Far left media, such The Guardian - which happens to be the paper read, and quoted, by Osama Bin Laden in his latest video message. It appears that reading the Guardian and formenting murder is the main job of Osama Bin Laden these days.

The whole basis of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood was to take the revolutionary methodology of Lenin and apply it to Islam.

For Marx the global communist revolution was as inevitable as the Islamists see their global caliphate.

Just as Islam has had its schisms, and so has Communism, the fact is that regardless of the schism the desire to attain absolute power and the strategic goals always stay the same. They differ only in tactics.

Islamism and Communism both seek to become a ruling ideology, a co-ercive blueprint for governing societies. Islamism and Communism are both revolutionary ideologies for seizing state power and running all aspects of a country.


As the writer Barry Rubin wrote in The Turkish Daily News http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=40219

" The Jihadists are the Trotskyists of the Islamist spectrum, very active but smaller in numbers, advocating permanent revolution and disdaining compromise or tactical maneuvers. For example, the Jihadists reject elections as an unwarranted human usurping of God's prerogatives and focus almost completely on armed struggle. The Muslim Brotherhood in its various manifestations (including Hamas and Hizballah) use terrorism but also put more emphasis on political organizing. They are happy to participate in elections once they have come to understand that they can actually win them. Finally, this type of Islamism/Communism parallel explains a lot of the appeal of radical Islamism to Western atheistic, hedonistic, leftists. Marxism-Leninism is dead, and the proletariat is often conservative or at least is seeking to enjoy middle-class lifestyles. Where are the foot soldiers of the revolution going to come from, the “masses” who will bring down the power structure the Western left hates? Here is where the Islamists come in, real revolutionaries willing to put their lives on the line who take up the gun and have an ideology they believe in passionately. Sure, it's true that they believe the opposite of what their Western groupies think, and indeed those leftists would be the first ones to be “put up against the wall” by Islamist terrorists. Unfortunately, though, it isn't the first time the Western far left revered totalitarians. At any rate, it seems as if Islamism is the 21st century's equivalent of Marxism-Leninism in the 20th century. Politics makes strange brain fellows. "