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

To Ebert's point, I will add how could a Congress allow Bush to get away with human rights abuses and war crimes, warrantless searches, Guantanamo, rendition, torture, military trials of civilians, the entire "enemy combatant" and "Bush Doctrine" outrages?

[alphafemale]

1. Wow. That was pretty damn powerful.

Thanks for posting this.

I am going to try and see this movie now. I saw a trailer for it and was interested but now I am even more so.

I'll probably have to wait for the DVD though. Does this have a wide release?

[Sarah Ibarruri]

2. Wow, I agree!

"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."

The above quote from the article says it all!

[IndianaGreen]

3. This is what Jonathan Turley told Rachel Maddow yesterday

posted here by kpete:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4545232

Jonathan Turley on The Rachel Maddow Show: We're all complicit in Bush's war crimes if we ignore them

Turley makes a critical point in the interview -- namely, that the moral burden of torture is on the backs of each one of us until these people are brought to justice. And it will be profoundly immoral to let them go:

"We have third world countries that when they have found that their leaders committed torture war crimes, they prosecuted them. But the most successful democracy in history is just, I think, about to see war crimes, do nothing about it. And that's an indictment not just of George Bush and his administration. It's the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime and say it's time for another commission."

Turley lays out a powerful case that's pretty hard to argue with. A wave of reconciliation and forgiveness seems to be sweeping Washington, but sanctioning torture and destroying America's moral credibility around the world is something that can't simply be ignored. I'm not opposed to a commission per se, but the commission MUST be granted sweeping investigatory powers and a mandate to prosecute any and all wrongdoing found to have been committed. Anything less is unacceptable.

Full transcript and VIDEO:

http://crooksandliars.com/node/24280

[Sarah Ibarruri]

4. My mom told me yesterday, "The rich almost always go unpunished."

This reminds me of that.

My mom is right.

When are we going to make sure this isn't the case in this situation?

[stevedeshazer]

5. Thanks for posting this

Very powerful.