Comrade Detective, Information Silos, and the Danger of Shared Belief

摘要

In August 2017, a television series, Comrade Detective, debuted on Amazon Prime Video. Billed as a restored lost video from a detective show sponsored by the Communist Romanian cultural affairs department, it showed eastern European communism at its virulent best. The series seemed so real for a couple of reasons. First, the original version was in Romanian, and it had been filmed in Romania, although dialogue had been dubbed by American actors. Second, it rang true to what most of us believe about 1980s communistic societies. But it wasn't real. It was a clever American creation. Comrade Detective is a fake, a spoof created by a team led by actor/producer Channing Tatum. Yet it is instructive on two levels. First, on its face, it models a society dominated by the shared belief that communism had made it a place of perfection, only marred by incursions from the West. There was only one way to think, and anything else was evil. Of course, children should inform on their parents, and people should be arrested for having foreign goods in their homes. We must protect the purity of our society, even if it means that police interrogations are brutal, and smugglers of Western products are executed.