The Lives of Others
I’ve previously expressed some surprise that conservatives, who are strong believers in unrestrained state surveillance power here at home, seem to have greatly admired The Lives of Others, a film about the evils of unrestrained state surveillance in East Germany. What I’d forgotten until rewatching the film yesterday is that in the opening scene they show the Stasi using sleep deprivation and stress positions during an interrogation:
Admittedly, relative to Bush-era techniques this is pretty mild stuff. Being made to sit on your hands for an extended period of time would be uncomfortable and nobody would want to be subjected to continuous interrogation for this long. But compared to accomplishing this stuff by shackling people’s arms to the ceiling for days on end, the East Germans were being downright humane.
16 Responses to “The Lives of Others”
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May 17th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Sadly, you fail to see (or at least note) that most conservatives seem to think that the indefensible is worthy of defense if we’re the ones doing it.
The disassociation going on among many on the right wing scares me. For a group of people who distrust government so much to magically trust that very same government to only detain and torture those who would deserve such, well, it’s intellectually dishonest at the very least.
May 17th, 2009 at 10:28 am
OT:
If this is true . . .
Via TPM.
“Kotz’s report also found that the SEC “has essentially no compliance system in place to ensure that … employees, with the tremendous amount of nonpublic information they have at their disposal, do not engage in insider trading themselves.”
May 17th, 2009 at 10:52 am
plodding pacing and a spooky score is no substitute for actual gravity – terrible corny dumb ponderous movie – conservatives deserve it
May 17th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I think the polar opposite of Jimmy, I think this is one of the all-time great writer/director debuts, and that this film is nearly perfectly dramatized and realized.
May 17th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Especialy notice: because your prisoners are enemies of socialism, therefore all techniques used in dealing with them are justified.
Sounds more or less like a standard Republican argument.
May 17th, 2009 at 11:15 am
An enjoyable picture and a bit of a fantasy. The Stasi protagonist could not have accomplished what he did because someone would have been spying on him too. That’s how the system worked: No one was trusted; everyone was watched.
May 17th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Everything conservatives think they know about torture they learned from movies. Sugar coated, asymmetric Hollywood crap is exactly how conservatives imagine torture.
A brisk slap across the face, a solid body slam to the wall, a quick splash of water and the weak, effeminate bad guy can hardly wait to tell where the drug deal is going down.
But a quick zap of the jumper cables just makes Rambo and Braddock mad. The car battery gives them superhuman strength to yank their shackles out of the wall, snap the interrogator’s neck, steal some high explosives and blow up the whole terrorist prison camp.
Did you ever notice how many Hollywood Republicans are washed up eighties action heroes?
May 17th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Reaper0Bot0 said… The disassociation going on among many on the right wing scares me. For a group of people who distrust government so much to magically trust that very same government to only detain and torture those who would deserve such, well, it’s intellectually dishonest at the very least.
What you need to grasp is that they don’t trust DEMOCRATS in government. It is the classic GOP double standard. If a Democrat has some amount of power, it must be mistrusted and constrained. If it is a Republican, well they’re the good guys so we can trust them with unlimited power.
The statement that they mistrust government is a smoke screen for their partisan loathing of Dems. I don’t mind the loathing, that’s politics, but the hypocrisy used to justify their double standards makes me sick.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Aatos said… Everything conservatives think they know about torture they learned from movies.
And “24″, which they think is a documentary.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Isn’t there a more realistic depiction of “enhanced interrogation” in Le Petit Soldat”?
May 17th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
If I recall, the sitting on hands wasn’t a “stress position” as such (though I’m sure it gets tiresome after a while) but was used to collect the sweat from the palms of the subjects so as to use that for the dogs to hunt them down later if they fled and hid. I’m not even sure that the length of the interegation in the film got to the point of “sleep deprivation” or not yet. Certainly not at all like what we were doing.
May 17th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I’ve always thought the depiction of Winona Ryder’s torture in The House of the Spirits captured something about the moral reality of the thing, even if it wasn’t very graphic.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
” …. conservatives, who are strong believers in unrestrained state surveillance power here at home …”
So you casually toss out an enormous lie and none of your followers even bother mentioning it.
This is because they come here with the wish to be misled, I guess.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
OK, am, I’ll bite.
Describe to me the restraints you, and/or a majority of American conservatives, were willing to place on the President’s authority to gather information on terrorism suspects inside the United States between during the years 2002-2008.
And by “restraints”, don’t just say “I don’t want the President to spy on anyone except really real terrorists.” Describe the legal mechanisms you wanted in place to restrain this power.
May 17th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Who needs the Stasi. We’ve got something better. Remember, “the eyes of a Ranger are upon you.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW1tIpE95kc
May 18th, 2009 at 9:53 am
So no one here thinks that conservatives thought the movie was tragedy since the whole torture and surveillance regime ended up being torn down? It is possible that the movie was sad for them in a different way than it was sad for normal people.