We are fast forgetting how to be guilty about the past

Alexander

Let's remember that "The Producers" musical is based on the movie of the same name. Not only was the movie produced in 1968, well within the lifetime of people who faught in the war, but was produced by Mel Brooks who is Jewish.

You may want to slightly rethink your premise.

Erasmus de Frigid

Hollywood chooses to portray nazis because they are safe. They could do films about the Soviet attrocities, but then they would have to confront their
own flirtations with communism; they are scared to death to take on Islamic extremists. Some of the Jewish comedians take on anything nazi has the feel of someone whistling past the graveyard, and I don't blame them. The cinema will not regain any respect until they do a decent adaptation of something like Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". Don't hold your breath.

Thoman Jerry

Once again, Kate Williams spots a nail and then goes round blindly banging everything else on the head instead. To paraphrase Hitchcock: "Kate, it's only a movie" - and a Tarantino one, to boot. (And, given your actual lack of reference to anything specific in it that couldn't be gleaned from preview reports, is it a movie you've actually seen, Kate? Or is it just one you've heard chatter about at a dinner party and thought you must vent your righteous - or lefteous - anger on?) BTW, Inglourious Basterds has not won "prizes". According to IMDB, it's won just one: best actor award for Christoph Waltz at Cannes.

terence patrick hewett

Why did ordinary people allow evil to triumph? G K Chesterton spotted it long before the Holocaust was ever thought of. Because ordinary people chose to turn their backs and ignore it. Which is one very good reason to continue to spit roast our authoritarian political classes over a slow fire until they scream for mercy.

David Short

It's almost impossible to criticise this piece - it's so silly, unobservant and wrong-headed that you'd have to take it apart sentence by sentence.

I'd just make one general point. The 'obsession' with Nazis is rooted purely in the two situations that there is a very vocal and very influential Jewish lobby in the United States and that the Jewish people have a strong and far-reaching nation state.

There was nothing unique in the Nazi regime as far as 'the nature of evil' is concerned. All human beings are capable of extreme cruelty and mass murder, as we saw in the former Yugoslavia.

I have seen the aftermath of a Hutu-on-Tutsi massacre in Burundi, a small reminder of what happened next door in Rwanda when the Hutus saw off almost a million Tutsis, much more energetically and quicker than the Nazis' despatch of six times that number and without trains, death camps, modern weaponry and Zyklon B.

But there is no glorification of the Tutsi mass murderers, although some are being asylumed here in Britain for fear they might get the death penalty if returned to Rwanda.

As another contributor said, it's only a film.

Can't the Speccie hire any intelligent, thoughtful writers any more?

Why do you continue to print junk?

Kennybhoy

Miss Williams,

With respect, what age are you...?

Further to Alexander's insightful comment above, have you never seen "Dad's Army", "Hogan's Heroes", "Our Miss Fred" or "Allo Allo"..? British comedy in particular, has a long and honourable tradition, dating back to World War II itself, of mocking the Nazis in the manner of "The Producers". Mel Brooks as a historical revisionist! God give me patience!

Regarding “Inglorious Bastards”. Have you really never seen “The Dirty Dozen”(1967) or “Kelly’s Heroes”(1970) or “Play Dirty”(1968) or “Too Late The Hero”(1970) or even the classic TV series “Combat”(1962-1967)....?

Regarding “Valkyrie”. Have you never seen “The Night of the Generals”(1967)?

None of the examples you cite illustrate your main point!

The moral relativism and creeping revisionism to which you make belated reference above ARE very real and pregnant with danger for the future of us all. And they can indeed be found in popular entertainment. The left-liberals who so dominate our culture have long made use of popular entertainment media to mainstream and legitimize their world view. But long before such poisonous ideas filtered down into popular culture they had gained all but total control of academia. Particularly in the “Social Sciences”. Particularly in your own discipline!

“And why see thou the mote in thy brother’s eye, and see not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Kennybhoy

Erasmus de Frigid,

"The cinema will not regain any respect until they do a decent adaptation of something like Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". Don't hold your breath."

Ahem. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"(1970)....?

Kennybhoy

Erasmus de Frigid,

"The cinema will not regain any respect until they do a decent adaptation of something like Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". Don't hold your breath."

Ahem. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"(1970)....?

K Elliot

This article is based on false premise that is too say it is based on the premise that no one has treated Hitler and the Nazis as figures of fun before relitivly recently. The is not the case. What of Chaplins The Great Dictator (1940) Leslie Howards Pimpernel Smith (1941) (both of which show awareness of the plight of the jews and highlight that plight through humour) and numerous other films made during the war. I am 25 so I refuse to cut you slack for ignorance do some bloody research before you write an article we are expected to read.

Michael Parsons

If Hitler had passed away peacefully in 1938 he would be seen today as the greatest leader Germany had ever known. The pretence that the war was somehow about the "Jewish question" is a convenient fiction set to obscure the way all sides were involved in brutality (not least the French in their post-war zone of occupation); and that Poland was betrayed at the start and at the finish, and that Britain was destroyed as a world power.

The pretence that "our side" was inflicting "humanitarian" force and the other was merely brutal is absurd: witness Churchill's anthrax experiments, or the thousand bomber raids on civilian targets.
In that war - as in eartlier conflicts - mass extermination and uprooting was widespread, from the destruction of the ancient German presence in Eatern Europe to the burning of Tokio and the slaughter of Ukranians returned by UK to Russia.
Human beings are always capable of amazing ferocity - so much so that nothing on this planet has successfully stood against us, not for thousands of years. The "concentration camp" saga is one tiny incident in humanity's long and normal course of conduct.

As one who lived through it all I am nauseated by the current moralising. Time to end the combination of ignorance and self-righteousness that passes for morality and constantly latches on to "anti nazi" proclamations to conceal its own the political futility. We need to see through these hopes tnat somehow the world is getting more easy-going and benign, and quickly.

Montock Point

Oh dear, what a terrible article.

It's not just that I disagree with Kate Williams' point of view, it's more that what she's written is so shallow and melodramatic: like a child over-reacting for attention.

There are probably two good points Ms. Williams makes in the piece but these two points are sadly drowned in a sea of petulant exaggeration.