Jay Nordlinger wirtes, "If you have not seen The Lives of Others, I urge you to do so at the first opportunity":

This is the movie about the Stasi, the East German secret police. Since the dawn of film, there have been about two anti-Communist movies. And that’s because the people who make movies are — um, let’s just say not anti-Communist. At any rate, if you’re going to make one of the precious few anti-Communist movies, it had better be good. And this one is great.

I couldn’t help being amused at the information given at the beginning of the movie. We are told that the year is 1984, long before Gorbachev, when life in the Soviet bloc is dark, hopeless, and grim.

Well, I myself came of political age about this time, and East Germany was always portrayed to me as a quite benign state. Even an admirable one! You see, we in the West had “political rights,” such as those to speech and assembly; and those in the East had “economic rights,” such as those to food and shelter. And East Germany was something of a model: socialist but not Stalinist. Why, in Erich Honecker Land, a form of justice had been realized!

Do you remember, you old television-watchers, how Bob Novak used to tease Al Hunt about loving East Germany?

In any case, we’re all anti-Communists now, which is to be welcomed. Although some of us are lagging behind on Cuba, aren’t we?

You read (honest) materials about East Germany, you read (honest) materials about Cuba — very, very similar. The Germans shot would-be escapees on a wall; the Cubans shoot would-be escapees in the water. Once the Cuban people are allowed to see The Lives of Others, they will effortlessly recognize everything.

Nordlinger's thoughts on the universality of The Lives Of Others (and surely the 1984 time period of the movie is no accident) reminded me of something that Theodore Dalrymple recently wrote about George Orwell. The bulk of the article is now behind The New Criterion's pay-to-read firewall, but fortunately, this excerpt was quoted elsewhere:

Insofar as it is possible for an intellectual in a liberal democracy to be brave, Orwell was brave.

Perhaps the most genuine and moving encomia to him I ever heard were in Romania in the dark days just before the downfall of Ceausescu. Nineteen Eighty-Four circulated clandestinely, and several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves, so that the meaning of their own experience became clearer to them as a result of reading him. And this they found immensely consoling, the very opposite of Primo Levi’s terrible nightmare that after he was released from Auschwitz no one would listen to him or believe him because what he had to say was so utterly at variance with all previous human experience. Orwell’s book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone, and also that the political conditions under which they were living were highly abnormal and therefore, however apparently durable, historically temporary. Dismal and pessimistic as the book may have seemed to a reader in the west, it was read with immense joy in the east. Few authors have ever been loved and venerated as Orwell was loved and venerated by the people to whom I spoke in Romania.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that there are a few samizdat copies of 1984 floating around Fidel's island gulag; I wonder what his imprisoned citizens think of it.