Angles and Sides

For the most part of the history of humanity, we as evolving beings who lived in communities have had some type of system to govern us and help control the populations. So with this, along with the creation of governments, various different ideologies developed. Such ideologies were that of capitalism, democracy, autocracy, socialism, imperialism, communism, etc. It was through this that later, new emerging governments began to take up, adopt, and merge some of these ideas to create governing systems, parties, and such.

In the movie, The Lives of Others, that we watched in class, we were able to learned a bit about East Germany's government, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The movie revolved around the lives of a playwritter, an actress, and the Stasi. While the movie was not so much informative in my point of view, it was certainly a touching storyline. I just wonder, why was the East German government put as something terrible, and the Stasi as something even worse? Sure that the Stasi really did ruin some innocent peoples lives because of false tip-offs, and suspicion, but among those there were also many who were attempting against the German Democratic Republic.

In the movie, the extremes were very well shown; as they served their purpose, exaggerate somewhat the negatives. One can't really say "oh, the stasi were horrible people, how could they live spying on others, and interrogate, etc." But I think that in order for us to really be able to form an opinion on something, we must be shown, or learn about both the pros and cons of it. Although I don't know all that much about how things really were in East Germany, I refuse to believe it was all that bad because the ideals that the East German Communist Party was based on, were really good, even though in the application of those ideals, the country took a more socialist form and up to some point deprived it's citizens of their rights to privacy. But of course I think the invadance of Dreyman's home and life was a bit tooo invading. I understand that governments have to keep track of what it's citizens are doing, just about every government that wants to maintain their reputation and their political views intact, are forced to try and control to a certain extent, it's citizens freedom of speech. Not even here in the United States do we have total freedom of speech, even with all the rights that are made to protect us.

While I watched the movie, I made a connection between what the Stasi did and what the CIA and FBI do. Their jobs are to protect the country, and remove threats. Sure it isn't very common to hear about the CIA or FBI going around bugging homes and assigning special trackers/ spies to know about all you do, but that's because it isn't all that public either, because possible threats must first be proved threats, right? But, it is still done. From what I've heard, there are files kept on each and everyone of us, sure not extremely detailed but that's because most of us are very happy with our government so why would we talk bad about it or try to make a change in the way it works? For one, I think that there is a thin line between thinking of ways to improve the way in which a government works and in the way it is run, and dis liking the government to the point of bashing it and criticizing it in a non-productive way. I think that these two can be easily confused with one another, which is why many times, injustice is committed in many places around the world, no one wants to be talked bad about.