The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: Roger Ebert's review

[IndianaGreen]

Other than what "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is about, it almost seems to be an orderly story of those British who always know how to speak and behave. Those British? Yes, the actors speak with crisp British accents, which I think is actually more effective than having them speaking with German accents, or in subtitles. It dramatizes the way the German professional class internalized Hitler's rule and treated it as business as usual. Charts, graphs, titles, positions, uniforms, promotions, performance evaluations.

How can ordinary professional people proceed in this orderly routine when their business is evil? Easier than we think, I believe. I still obsess about those few Enron executives who knew the entire company was a Ponzi scheme. I can't forget the Oregon railroader who had his pension stolen. The laughter of Enron soldiers who joked about killing grandmothers with their phony California "energy crisis." Whenever loyalty to the enterprise becomes more important than simple morality, you will find evil functioning smoothly.

There has not again been evil on the scale of 1939-1945. But there has been smaller-scale genocide. Mass murder. Wars generated by lies and propaganda. The Wall Street crash stripped people of their savings, their pensions, their homes, their jobs, their hopes of providing for their families. It happened because a bureaucracy and its status symbols became more important than what it was allegedly doing.

Have I left my subject? I don't think so. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that survives like a virus. Do I think the people responsible for our economic crisis were Nazis? Certainly not. But instead of collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in rewards for denying to themselves what they were doing, I wish they had been forced to flee to Paraguay in submarines.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081105/REVIEWS/811059987

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. I love it when Ebert gets political.

:thumbsup:

[n2doc]

2. Error: You can't recommend threads from this forum

Wish I could- plz post to GD!

[IndianaGreen]

3. Thanks for the suggestion

I just posted it to GD.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Nope, Paraguay's gone leftist, like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil,

Uruguay, Chile, and soon Peru, and, in Central America, Nicaragua, Guatemala and soon El Salvador (and probably Mexico, next election cycle). Honduras is also leaning left. Paraguay just elected Fernando Lugo--the beloved "bishop of the poor--as president. Lugo--who is closely aligned with the social justice goals of the Bolivarians (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador--enjoys a 92% approval rating. Paraguay has rescinded its non-extradition law; also its law immunizing the U.S. military.

Where else could our corpo/fascists flee to? Well, there's Colombia, larded with $6 BILLION in Clinton/Bushwhack military aid, a country that tolerates the murder of hundreds of union leaders by rightwing death squads with close ties to the government and the military. Our looters and plunderers could possibly flee to Colombia and join the cocaine industry at its source. Funny, Colombia's latest scandal--after huge death squad scandals, with discovery of thousands of bodies but no perps--is a ponzi scheme, that caused riots last week, apparently perpetrated by the same folks who put up the money for a campaign to keep the former Medellin Cartel go-to guy as 'president-for-life' (Alvaro Uribe, now the Bush Cartel's go-to guy). Our looters and plunderers would feel quite at home in Colombia.

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"...instead of collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in rewards for denying to themselves what they were doing, I wish they had been forced to flee to Paraguay in submarines." --Roger Ebert