It's in the movie. The Lives of Others (The Lives of Others) a great scene in which a Stasi representative gives a lecture to future security students and teaches them how to deal with intellectuals, primarily writers. He shows them interrogation techniques and how to deal with suspects. The most interesting thing is how the regime divides and segments intellectuals, what is the methodology of control and pressure on people. They are not all the same, that is the first important piece of information.
Intellectuals are divided according to how loyal they are to the regime and of course how much danger they pose to the regime. Of course, the regime identifies itself with the state. Anyone suspicious, immediately under surveillance. The term “soul engineers” is used here, a communist coinage with which the state justified pressure on artists as people who are capable of shaping the masses with their work, of inducing the consciousness of a large number of people.
Intimidation, psychological pressure, these are all methods to break the will of suspicious people. Of course, the film The lives of others has its parallel here, the film In the name of the people Živka Nikolić. Here we see pressure, wiretapping, poking at women, meanness and cruelty. It is only important to say that someone is “under measures” and that person is finished, because they will never prove themselves and publicly say that they are innocent. Fear has entered people's blood and bones. Complete dehumanization, that is the point, because it is not a person, it is a thing, an object that creates a problem. After such actions and activities, absolute control of the intellectual and artistic elite follows, which will produce mediocrity in the future and will not criticize anything. Everything becomes commonplace, as it has become.
Whoever is not useful is dangerous. There is no empathy. Only cold-blooded and with a bare foot. Freedom of thought does not exist, creativity is overrated and suspect. That is how a totalitarian regime does it, carrying out repression using manipulation.
One of the most important scenes in politics was a by-the-way one. That's when Migo Stijepovic mockingly addresses Miodrag Lekić in the debate, when he imitates him, he puts his finger on his head and says "You are here like some philosopher". To be a philosopher for Migo is to be a futile person, a person who is of no use, wastes time and is constantly philosophizing about something. What an exposure of an "elite" that was.
It's been a while Dusko Markovic answered questions before the Security Committee. He also found himself on the other side of the table. Nothing new was said, no one expected to hear anything important except generalities. All the main actors claim that they did not interfere, that everything happened without them. Duško turns out Kostunica.
But at one point he blurted out something important. Addressing Milan Knežević, with a smile, he said that Knežević is a poet, and that poets are emotional. What a category! Poets are written off as emotional, because, well, they show emotions, react instead of being cold-blooded. Emotional and poets, what losers they are, unworthy of positions that require cruelty. Intellectuals are emotional, and emotionals are weaklings. Njegoš, Leso, Ratko Vujošević, Ratković i Zogović, these are all emotional.
It's easy to forget that this country sprang from poetry, that Njegoš shaped it more than various strongmen, and it's easy to forget that a baton is not the same as a magic wand.
I Ana Ahmatova She was made of emotions, unlike the one who tried to break her and her team of emotional people. “Soul engineers”, we haven't moved far from that term.
Bonus video:
