Holocaust Revisionism – Taki’s Magazine
Posted By admin on July 26, 2015
I should first admit that it took quite a lot for me to actually go see Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantinos latest about a special Army unit of Jewish avengers, led by a half-Cherokee Good Ol Boy, who rampage through German-occupied France, killing, scalping, and/or branding top Nazis, eventually slaughtering no less than the German Fhrer. Im certainly not against counter-factual reverie, or blood splatter, and I dont hold any reverence for the Nazi regime or feel uncomfortable with the Kill Adolf premise. (Indeed, Id love to watch a filmic portrayal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or one of Claus von Stauffenberg that didnt devolve into a shallow action flick la Valkyrie.) The problem is, when I saw the preview for Basterds, I simply sensed that it wasnt made for someone like me, that I didnt have the right disposition to enjoy it.
There I was in the theater watching a clip of Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt sporting a cartoonish moustache and Southern accent) telling a Wehrmacht officer, If you ever want to eat a Sauerkraut sandwich again, take your Wiener schnitzel of a finger and point out on this map what I wanna know. Raine, of course, wants to know the whereabouts of more Nazis, whom he and his boys could brutally torture (though its clear by the context that Raine is terrorizing Army officers.) The stoic German honorably refuses, and Brad Pitt summons one of his basterds with the line, Gots a German here who wants to die for country. Oblige him. A thug in a sweat-stained wife-beater emerges and proceeds to bash the officers head in with a Louisville slugger. (This basterd is portrayed by a one Eli Roth, the man behind Hostel, a classic in the genre of torture porn, so Im told. And his character is named Bear Jew, an evocation of the gay slang term for the fat, hairy, leather-clad men whore on top in S&M.)
Obviously, the scene is, at a basic level, puerile gross-out. But my question while watching it, both during the preview and the real thing, was this: With whom, exactly, are we supposed to be sympathizing? As weve all been repeatedly told, and as Aldo Raine reiterates at one point, the Germans acted with such inhumanity in their conquest of Europe that they deserve no humanity in return. (These days, if you so much as hint that you might think the firebombing of civilians in Dresden, or the nuking of the Japanese in Hiroshima, was a bit much, eyebrows are raised and its only a matter of time before youre accused dark predilections or else moral relativism.) So, I guess when watching a Jew bash the brains out of a Wehrmacht officer, we Americans are all supposed to instinctively cry Yay!, just like when the home team scores a touchdown. But as I saw that repellent torture-porn auteur whale away at a dignified German officer, needless to say my sympathies werent where they were supposed to be or so I thought. But after experiencing Inglourious Basterds, I began to wonder whether the basterds were really supposed to be the Good Guys, and whether Tarantinos latest is far more equivocal, or rather far more subversive and nihilistic, than most in the MSM have recognized.
Now, if you brought this up with Tarantino himself, Im sure hed say something coy about how his films dont really mean anything, hes just former video store clerk, yadayadayada Dont believe him. Basterds isnt just Tarantinos homage to B-grade WWII shoot-em-ups of yesteryear, like The Dirty Dozen (which includes, by the way, a scene of American soldiers murdering a cocktail party of German officers and their innocent wives, A Bridge Too Far (1977), and, of course, the Italian Spaghetti-Western-Front drama, The Inglorious Bastards (1978).
At its core, Basterds addresses that uncomfortable question asked by all serious World War II historians, and many grade-schoolersWhy didnt they fight back? Why did the Jews allow themselves to be rounded up so easily? Why werent there more revolts at Auschwitz? To what degree was there actually Jewish collaboration in the Konzentrationslager? (The persistence of such nagging questions explains the intense interest in events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising, without question an important battle, but one thats taken on a special aura as one of the very few instances of an organized Jewish assault on the Wehrmacht.)
Tarantinos response to all this is to make a Lady-doth-Protest-Too-Much-Methinks tale of muscle-bound Jewish badasses shooting up Germans. Profiling Tarantino, Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg couldnt help but indulge in his own Freudian dream-wish of how the Second World War should have turned out:
Early in the spring of 1944, when I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland as the leader of a team of Brooklyn-born commandos. We landed in a field not far from the train tracks that fed Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My team laid explosive charges on the tracks, destroying them utterly, and then I moved quickly on foot to the death camp itself, where I found Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, in bed. I shot him in the face, though not before lecturing him on his sins. Before I killed him, he cried like a little Nazi bitch.
Goldberg reports that Roth called Basterds part of the new subgenre of Kosher porn
Okaaay. But whats so striking about all this, again, is the depictions of victim and perpetrator. Though the Nazi Top Brass are evil buffoons, the average Germans who appear in the filmand usually end up tortured or hacked to piecesare, to a man, upright, honest, and handsome. Teen heartthrob Daniel Brhl (famous for his sensitive, cute portrayal of Alex in Goodbye Lenin) is given a starring role as Fredrick Zoller, a German propaganda film idol. And its made clear by Tarantino that hes genuinely in love with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewess who runs the movie theater, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent). In turn, the New York Timess Manhola Dargis could barely put a lid on his unease over just how attractive Christoph Waltz was as an anti-Semitic mastermind of the SS: Mr. Waltzs performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment [when his character talks about how Jews are all rats] if you choose.
The Jewish basterds, on the other hand, are all lowlife sadists straight out of the rogue gallery of Pulp Fiction, and they possess about as much moral fiber as the famous Gimp of Tarantinos 1994 masterpiece.
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Holocaust Revisionism - Taki's Magazine
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