Die Welle Film Analysis

After watching the movie “Die Welle”, also known as “ The Wave” in English, which is a German thriller film that talks about a high school teacher who has to teach a class on autocracy, despite being an anarchist. I started questioning myself whether another dictatorship in the Arab world could be possible, such as the ones that were ruled by prominent leaders such as “Saddam Hussein” and “Muammar Gaddafi”. In the movie, the teacher starts an experiment to show how a country’s citizens can be manipulated easily. He uses certain tactics to guide them which results in the construction of a new ideological belief. These tactics he used were very similar to the tactics Hezbollah have been trying to use ever since they were officially established

Even though the students were adopting fascism, they were not aware of themselves, and started harassing people who were not part of their group. These ideological motives also made some of the students really attached to the group, such as one dysfunctional student called Tim who was so attached to the group to an extent that he committed suicide when he found out that his teacher wanted to stop the movement. Hezbollah used similar tactics to make people strengthen their beliefs in them. At a time when South of Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, and it seemed almost impossible for them to be driven out of Lebanon, Al-Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah who succeeded Abbas Al Mussawi after Mussawi’s assassination in 1992 convinced men and women of Lebanon that Israel could be defeated in a short period of time. Hezbollah built on an ideology, and identity by being the only party in the Arab world who responded to their follower’s demands such as affordable health care, electricity, and community policing. Their ideology of Islam which portrays the religion as peace and tranquility really inculcated many people from neighboring Arab countries into its ideology of Islamic resistance, unlike other Islamist groups in the middle east who portray Islam as hate and revenge such as