I could not imagine how a film of Hitler's last days could possibly be better done.



wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for fact that kershaw is probably the best biographer of AH i've read... fuck...

although;

"Does it help us to understand Hitler any better? My own feeling is that, brilliant though the portrayal is, it does not. It is hard to see how it could - or, indeed, what great enlightenment it would bring if we did know him better (whatever that means). Would we then have a clearer grasp of his hold over the German people, or why so many intelligent individuals in positions of authority were prepared to put his wishes into practice? At any rate, no amount of intuitive acting is likely to make him any more intelligible to audiences which cannot possibly enter his warped mentality. His life has been scrutinised as scarcely no one else's, but an inner core is still unfathomable. Hitler will always remain in some senses an enigma."

is encouraging since the apparent uniqueness/central enigma/fuhrerkontakt magick/whatever of AH distracts and clouds the issue of the collective will manifested - and the parallels between the same ignorance of collective responsibility then and now - sound as if they remain elusive.

i don't think AH's mentality was more fundamentally warped than GWB or kissinger or macnamara and the many others who've waged aggressive wars without regard for civilian life. that doesn't mean he wasn't a less moral and more cupable individual than the others - but distinguishing in kind between a man who kills 1,000-10,000 people and between a man who kills 1,000,000,000-10,000,000 seems to me to be missing the point. the institutions and mechanisms that made possible these crimes are virtually continuous and lessons have been drawn from one generation of tyrants to the next - as to the fine tuning of urban combat, "counter"-terror (a phrase coined by the nazis), reliable rather than purely sadistic torture techniques (many of which are legal and admissible under UK and US law) and how to sell wars to their pliant, suppressed and enslaved populations.

whether the mechanism is used to murder 30,000 iraqi civilians or 6,000,000 plus jews, communists, gays and other regime enemies

(potential "enemy combatants" if you like, in the sense that they are categorised so as to be in some sense sub-human, note AH on jews and cheney on "terrorists". in both circumstances the non-believers are to be killed, since they are apparently impossible to negotiate with since they are sub-rational and hence sub-human 'fanatics' - pot kettle anyone? - on the one hand and criminal parasites on the other, always sub-human, always a threat)

to point to one crime and call it worse is trivially true - but both crimes are of a such a horrific magnitude that one cannot emotionally fathom their relative scale.

is the correct response to simply deem one crime beyond comprehension and thus one that cannot be sensibly discussed (cf. finkelstein) or to look at the construction of these crimes and the complicity of many thousands of apparently blameless folk going about their lives making barbed wire, guarding doors, couriering orders about BUT NEVER QUESTIONING OR THINKING FOR THEMSELVES.

the parallels between the type of society where industrial war slaughter takes place and not between the relative scale of various industrial war massacres is going to tell us something useful about how and why these events do and are able to occur. mitigating responsibility for the events that occured from the collective to some exhaulted and now denounced tyrant is part and parcel of the process where responsibility for oneself in the world, and one's actions, is subjugated to such snake oil salesmen in the first instance.