A beautiful opening paragraph from a review of one of my favorite movies, Brazil:
In Brazil, Terry Gilliam asks the audience to imagine a world where the government wages a never-ending war with shadowy terrorists, a world where civil liberties are being destroyed in the name of security, a world where torture becomes official state policy in order to conduct more efficient interrogations of suspected terrorists. What’s more, in Gilliam’s fictional world, the central government is not just secretive but incompetent. Mistakes are made, leading to the imprisonment and torture of innocents. Most offensive of all, Gilliam implies that such a government could exist without its citizens staging an armed revolt. I’m usually willing to suspend disbelief, but this goes too entirely too far.
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Scary, but not as scary as the fact that americans in general only recently seem to have woken up to this fact. Many people in many countries around the world have seen this pattern before, and not many have stood up in armed revolt. My bet is, not many americans will either.
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