Hollywood should give Nazis a break

By Salaam Abdul Khaliq, IFN Columnist
Thursday, 25 March 2010
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/44293/1366/

Nazis have been Hollywood’s favorite bad guys since WWII started. No filmmaker could possibly go wrong depicting the Third Reich, Hitler and his Guestapo henchmen as the exemplars of evil. Quentin Tarantino’s latest Academy Award Best Picture Nominee “Inglorious Basterds” is a case in point. Basterds is an anti-Nazi film with a special flavor. It takes what amounts to perverse license to distort history and depict Nazis as subhuman vermin. Tarantino wrote a fictional story about a band of Jewish American soldiers who hunt and kill Nazis. Most critics did not take Basterds seriously but their opinion did not matter because Hollywood’s movers and shakers reward anti-Nazi celluloid gusto with lavish publicity and Academy Award bonanza.


But why does Hollywood keep constantly picking on Nazis 65 years after WWII ended? If Nazism were a horse it would’ve been beaten to death a million times over already. Some critics argue that by constantly portraying German-speaking folks as the ultimate bad guys one wonders whether today’s Germans are ever going to shed the mantle of guilt-by-association they have been forced to wear for decades. On the other hand, German taxpayers are still paying up billions of dollars in reparation annually to the apartheid state of Israel for the sins of their ancestors, and for crimes they did not commit. This money is ironically earmarked for land theft, settlement building, apartheid walls, and maybe an occasional genocide or two against women and children in Gaza and Lebanon. And thus it seems, Nazism feels like a viral contagion passed down from one people to another.

Apparently this subtle historical irony wasn’t on Tarantino’s mind when he set out to make Basterds. His mind was most likely set on box office tallies and Oscar night kudos. He knew that a mentally conditioned audience would dance to the Pavlovian tune of anti-Nazi propaganda and tired cinematic clichés. It is also a de facto doctrine among Academy members that Nazi-bashing tell-tales are guaranteed golden statue nods. In that respect, Tarantino’s effort amounts to nothing more than a pseudo artistic shoe-shine job at the expense of the ubiquitously maligned Nazis (for the record, Inglorious Basterds is a heavy-handed, contrived work of pure fiction, a film that cannot possibly be taken seriously as art or entertainment. It’s pure Tarantino hogwash with possibly the worst Hitler depiction since Mel Brooks’ The Producers).

Shortly after WWII ended, Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine of its indigenous population to make room for Jewish immigrants. If it took Nazis over five years to commit their atrocities, Israel’s crimes have been over sixty years in the making. Why hasn’t Hollywood made a single movie about the Palestinian Holocaust? Why doesn’t Tarantino lens a movie about the four hundred and fifteen children that were massacred by U.S. made weapons in Gaza only a year ago? At a time when genocide could be broadcast on television and on the Internet, it’s become visually easy for viewers to draw parallels between Zionism and Nazism. No Hollywood anti-Nazi hokum can top the images of Palestinian babies laying dead with gaping gunshot wounds. The war crimes being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories make the discourse about Nazi crimes rather anathema and irrelevant. For Hollywood to keep denouncing an evil that has been interred for over six decades while turning a blind eye on an evil that is still playing before our eyes smacks of hypocrisy and overt bias.

This argument should not undermine or belittle Jewish suffering or defend Nazi crimes against Jews but rather remind survivors and those who stand for justice that Zionist Jews cannot build their future on the blood of the Palestinian people. Anyone who claims to immortalize the memory of those who perished in the death camps of Auschwitz by building an edifice literally over the bones of dead Muslims (as is the case with the Simon Wiesenthal Center that is currently trying to build a Museum of so-called Tolerance on the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem) cannot expect to sell sympathy by demonizing Nazis. Israel vehemently rejects comparisons with Nazi Germany but its actions and policies speak louder. By blockading Gaza from land, sea and air and starving its people then going in with the most technologically advanced weaponry and massacring men, women and children, it cannot claim a higher moral ground than Nazi Germany. The lives and blood of one people cannot matter more than the lives and blood of another people.

Hollywood should seriously give up its ridiculous infatuation with anti-Nazism propaganda films and start embracing the reality of current events. The evil of Nazism still lives. With impunity it rears its ugly head all around us, particularly in the Middle East where it claims might makes right. All that is left for Hollywood filmmakers to do is turn their cameras on it and yell “Action!”