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Population-Centric Cowterinsurgency
I subscribe to few magazines, but aside from Soldier of Fortune and the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic is one of them. In this issue, I chuckled my way through a hand-wringing Jeffrey Goldberg piece on Quintin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and what it means for Jewish identity -- because there are exactly ZERO of us East Tennesseans dwelling on the character of Lt. Aldo Raine and what he means for East Tennessean identity. We pretty much accept who we are in the popular imagination -- cruel-yet-just, ignorant-yet-clever, ridiculed-yet-humorous -- for what it is.
But there is another reason to read this issue of the Atlantic, and that is for Graeme Wood's dispatch from Fallujah, where the United States is teaching the widows of insurgents to milk cows for a living. Graeme is the kind of adventurous reporter this blog's editor and readership admire, so I'll be following his travels in both Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of the next few months.
Love the Falluja article. I
Love the Falluja article. I can just imagine what the Marines in that rifle company think of the project.
Let's try something: lets
Let's try something: lets make certain substitutions to the movie Inglourious Basterds and see what we get. Let's substitute African-Americans for Jews in this revenge fantasy movie, and replace the Nazis with southern Whites during 1910's Mississippi. With all that personal violence, how would such a film be received? Or have a similar revenge fantasy film where the Palestinians replace the Jews, and the Jews replace the Nazis, in a contemporary Gaza setting. Complete with all the personal violence and popular music soundtrack. How would that be received?
The fact that Hollywood is so throughly dominated by Jewish producers (Inglourious Basterds is produced by four Jews), and that Jewish perspectives already make up the majority of Hollywood's recent films depicting World War II, it's difficult not to be repulsed by this current manifestation of brazen Jewish empowerment. Those Jewish producers ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Being part Native American myself (like Tarrantino claims), I also found the stereotypical representation of NA war fighting practices, with all its stereotypical atrocities, offensive as well.
Visitor, if I were (for some
Visitor, if I were (for some reason) to make comments exploring the borders of anti-Semitism (for the sake of plausibility, let's replace that with anti-Aryanism), I'd have the balls to use my real name. That's Alex Schindler (no relation to the namesake of a Christian-redemption movie that happened to show some Jewish suffering along the way, for the sake of winning an Oscar, Steven Yid Spielberg notwithstanding).
Moral hand-wringing about whether it's wrong to carve swastikas into the foreheads of those who tattoo numbers on the arms of the Jews they plan to gas (amid gays, russians, jehova's witnesses, gypsies...) is, apparently, interesting to people who can't enjoy a movie like normal human beings. For my part, SS Colonel Hans Landa had that coming and more. The 'just following orders' crowd may have been entitled to more civilized, though harsh, treatment. But all this is besides the point of whether those uppity Jews dominating the media are getting too brazen.
so
a) Tarantino wrote and directed this. The Weinsteins, Lawrence Bender et al had as much to do with the savage behavior depicted as I did.
b) Fuck you, and in case you you didn't catch that, FUCK YOU. Maybe that was too brazen or empowered of me?
As for the attempt to switch roles, it's pretty damn difficult to find a regime that embodies evil in the popular mind more readily than the Third Reich. And so if you're gonna make a revenge fantasy film that crosses all the lines of decency, and still have people identify with the vengeful, Nazis have to be the 'unfortunate' victims. And Tarantino, no fool, preempted anyone who might feel bad for his victims with that (incredibly well done) first scene.
as for the dispatch, which I also read in my hard copy (I caved and subscribed two months ago), this part bothered me:
"Despite optimistic estimates, the economics of the program remain unproved. Although local dairies can meet as little as 5 percent of demand for fresh milk, its low price (a few cents per liter) means that a single-cow operation seems unlikely to support even a widow alone. But Gary’s insistence that owners give the cows shelter and fresh water should guarantee increasing yields, and higher-quality milk should in turn command higher prices."
I understand training Iraqis for gainful employment that doesn't involve Semtex. but if dairy's an operation that promises to go bust, then why all the hubbub? and since when do poor people spend more money for better milk? If I'm low on cash I switch from Skim Plus to generic-hormone-treated-milk. Am I silly to assume that most Iraqis would sooner buy the latter than shell out cash for (still totally hypothetical) premium local stuff, no matter how tasty?
I think it's more
I think it's more interesting to question why only the Nazis ever get the revenge fantasy treatment. Why not Ukrainians under Stalin? Tibetans under China? Cypriots under Turkey? North Korea under North Korea?
The point is, while Visitor defo went overboard on the Jew thing, it's not all that out of line to question the obsession with World War II and killing Nazis. We've kind of done that to death at this point, and the term "Nazi," more than any other evil regime we've fought or struggled against, has become a synonym for "evil." And it's carried to ludicrous extremes, like how the bad guys i the Ben AFLAC version of the Sum of All Fears were changed from Muslims to neo-Nazis, just because everyone loves hating Nazis.
I mean, just from an aesthetic perspective, I'd like some new enemies.
Did they make that change in
Did they make that change in Sum of All Fears b/c everyone loves hating Nazis, or b/c they were afraid of offending Muslims...or both?
"Let's substitute
"Let's substitute African-Americans for Jews in this revenge fantasy movie, and replace the Nazis with southern Whites during 1910's Mississippi."
1) As the resident German on this board let me state that while I have not (yet) seen the movie, I have no problems with films making fun of and / or killing Nazis. Torturing the average conscript or killing civilians would cross the line for me.
2) Your comparison is therefore off. You'd have to imagine a movie where blacks specifically go after white hooded KKK members, not normal (if racist) Rednecks of the 1910s. And even then it would be a bad comparison, as the crimes of the KKK pale against those committed by the Nazis. On the other hand, a movie showing Kulaks (sp?) going after Stalin or Tibetian Kung - Fu monks taking Mao apart would be fine with me ...
New visitor, that's granted.
New visitor, that's granted. I tire of WWII films and Nazi-as-default-bad-guy themes as easily as the next guy (though it takes a Tarantino to make it fresh again! lol). But it's precisely because "Nazi" has become synonymous with "evil" that the moral ambiguity which leads to annoying morality debates and ruins movies can be avoided when they're your default enemy.
for example, Noah Pollak in a lousy Commentary piece suggested a similar movie with Hizballah in the role of Nazi (that is, the receiving end a la Tarantino). Would that fly? Not even close. Because moral clarity is rare, and for some reason there's nary a regime besides Hitler's that an overwhelming majority of people are willing to use the word "evil" to describe.
Get some Armenians besides System of a Down into filmmaking, and maybe we can see a good, kickass revenge fantasy where Ataturk gets a cap busted in his ass. But until then, Nazis are the only unambiguous villain we have.
if they make a prequel where
if they make a prequel where Lieutenant Aldo Raine leads some black guys from the Smokey Mountain region to kick some KKK ass, Konsider me in! let 'em lynch and scalp the hell out of them, too.
Tibetan Kung Fu monks is awesome and something I was thinking about before lol. The problem with a Tibetan revenge film is that the details aren't as well-known. Because remember, when its conscripts, it's not satisfying or even something we identify with morally. Your average Chinese oppressor is as brainwashed as your average 40's German soldier. That's why Mao has to be in the movie as Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and the comic book villain Hans Landa had to be figured prominently. (I wonder if they kept Eichmann out of it to leave something for the Mossad? :-) that's already a revenge fantasy in its own right).
they actually DO kill one or two average conscripts, and those are (if i cared for moralizing about Tarantino films) the more morally interesting scenes. Like, if it weren't necessary for the final mission, then what happens in that tavern with the privates (you'll see) would bother me more. But there was no torture there.
Frankly, even the swastika-carving isn't torture, from Tarantino's perspective. It's a Cain's mark, and a punishment parallel to the numbers tattooed on some of my older relatives' arms. From the Basterds' perspective, the lives of anyone they marked were already forfeit (that's the nature of their mission), so I'm not sure that marking them (decidedly amoral though it was in the case of the cooperating foot soldier) was a worse fate. Besides, their mission was highly terroristic, and so anything that increases the fear of them and breaks enemy morale is part of it.
Saddam Hussein remunerated
Saddam Hussein remunerated the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Did Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith see themselves as modern versions of the Basterds? Even better, Wolfowitz and Feith would not have to do the killing themselves because they employed goyishe Basterds named the Marine Corps and Army. Did David Frum coin "Axis of Evil" so that Americans would falsely believe that all muzlims are America's enemies? Was Tommy Franks the neocons version of Aldo Raine?
Jeffrey Goldberg and Robert Kaplan left America to serve the IDF. These men took out their dreams of vengeance on Palestinians. After doing so, they returned to America as journalists and promoted American preventative war against muslims. Are Israel's enemies Amnerica's enemies? Goldberg would say do.
After billions of dollars wasted, why must we entangle ourselves in other peoples religious wars?
We pretty much accept who we
We pretty much accept who we are in the popular imagination -- cruel-yet-just, ignorant-yet-clever, ridiculed-yet-humorous -- for what it is.
Tiresome? It is for me, anyway.
Thanks for demonstrating the
Thanks for demonstrating the hard job the trainers of COIN will have - if, that is, the comments are representative of US/NATO troops. One sees from these comments that AM is talking about a popular image of the military held by some of those in it : "cruel-yet-just, ignorant-yet-clever, ridiculed-yet-humorous."
"...people who can't enjoy a movie like normal human beings."
All normal human beings are like me. If you don't enjoy this movie, you are not "normal."
"As the resident German ... I have no problems with films making fun of and/or killing Nazis. Torturing the average conscript or killing civilians would cross the line for me. Your comparison is therefore off."
Nazis weren't real people (like me.) They were 'the bad guys', not the "average conscript" or "civilians". It is OK to torture and kill bad guys.
In stereotypes such as 'the Nazi', people are presented as not having emotions or feelings common to human beings. 'They' aren't seen as real people, like 'us'; they are 'the bad guys'.
Some people, brought by such a stereotype to consider 'the enemy' to be as bad as the Nazis, find it easy to accept the inhumane treatment of others - rendition, torture, imprisonment for political beliefs rather than because of criminal actions.
Some, but not all people, react that way. Others recognize that 'the enemy' are real people, who do think and feel, just like us. Most of 'the enemy' are conscripts or civilians, or volunteers who believe in a different version of what is good and true.
Questioning one's actions and one's own morality is the first step to *not* acting like a Nazi. Unquestioning confidence in one's own moral superiority is several steps down the path to being a Nazi, in deed if not in name. Assuming that one's opinions, how one acts and feels, all are what is "normal", and how others should act and feel, starts one down that path.
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