Posts by Joe Wylie
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Here you go, specially for the school hols. -
. . . a ploy by the authorities to illustrate just how normal, despite his narrowly held fundamentalist ravings, Top was.
Once again, just their way of handling the nuances of dealing with a demanding media?
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How can a cruel death be a reason for joy for people?
Even make-believe death in a movie? I can clearly recall my surprise, back in 1975, at the way a Chinese-Malaysian audience laughed uproariously whenever someone fell to their death in The Towering Inferno. Or how the cheerful betel-chewing crowd at an open-air night screening of The Godfather in West Sumatra cracked up en masse each time someone was blown away. Yet in both cases, when the show was over, they were the happiest people in the world, none of whom gave the impression that they were in the mood to hurt so much as a mosquito. No-one seemed to lose sight of the fact that what they were experiencing was a shared illusion that briefly transported them from their everyday lives.
I have no idea whether the audience that Anke's correspondent describes had anything in common with these. All I know is that when you're 'different', mass cultural behaviour in others can become starkly apparent. Perhaps I should fess up that I did walk out of an Australian screening of Blazing Saddles back in the day, during the baked bean sequence, because of the high-decibel teenage braying of the audience. The more Tarantino plays for laughs, the more he resembles Mel Brooks. No amount of art direction or retro-fanboy geekery can disguise that. I don't know whether Inglourious Basterds encourages the "uneducated" to treat real-life Germans as less than human. Anke's correspondent appears to be much better equipped to make that call.
My best friend is a native German speaker, from a nation that gave the world the present Governor of California, along with a certain failed artist who later switched to politics. Just the other week a German noticed her accent and interrupted her conversation with a group of English speakers, attempting to have her switch to their native language. She declined out of consideration for those present who didn't speak the language, and because there was little point in making the acquaintance of someone so annoyingly bumptious.
Like any nation, Germany has the usual human spectrum, from delightful people to insufferable fools. If we replace the nazi stereotype with one of a people unfairly demonized to carry the sins of the world we simply exchange one political myth for another.
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There was some interesting correspondence in the Listener in the 80s where people recollected having seen Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will at screenings in NZ in the years prior to WWII. The film was invariably presented in a positive light as evidence of healthy developments in a world attempting to emerge from the great depression. While I can't recall all of the distributors, the Catholic Church certainly imported and exhibited at least one copy.
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The mad Imams are saying it's all because Indonesia is not devout enough....
Perhaps they've been reading David Keys's Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World, in which he suggests an earlier eruption of Krakatau as the culprit behind the historical global climatic catastrophe of around A.D. 535. With the climate-induced collapse of agriculture in Yemen, Muhammad's forebears upped stumps and moved to Mecca.The breakdown of civilisation in the ensuing decades created ideal conditions for an enterprising prophet, and to cut to the point, no Krakatau, no Islam.
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. . . bear in mind also that Germany had a large airforce and a not-insignificant navy (mainly U-boats), and generally those branches of the military weren't involved in atrocities against civilians (arguments aside about the morality of bombing towns or sinking merchant shps - activities almost every side engaged in).
True. Großadmiral Karl Dönitz received his ten-year sentence for war crimes on the basis that he'd ordered unrestricted submarine warfare in violation of treaties in force at the time. That both the British Admiralty and the US Navy had acted at times under essentially the same orders was expediently ignored. In practice, the hapless Dönitz received victor's justice for his largely titular role as Hitler's successor, a position he never actively sought.
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Apart from the Crusaders' name there's the strange practice of having them dress up as Freddie Krueger. Hardly a masterpiece of PR to fit David Bain up for his post-prison photo op in a crusaders jersey.
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Back in 2003 there was a move by local residents and developers to bulldoze the dunes along Christchurch's Brighton-North Beach foreshore in order to 'enhance' the area. Since the tsunami event of 2004 they've been rather quiet.
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I suppose one has to give the RSL the benefit of the doubt and assume that because of the cold war the widespread participation and complicity of the Wehrmacht in genocide and crimes against humanity in the East, the Balkans and Italy was not known.
When I was first in Australia, in the early 70s, I spent time in a pub in Sydney's Haymarket that appeared to have a resident German veteran as some kind of inhouse roustabout-cum-resident crazy man. The guy had an Afrika Corps palm tree and swastika tattoo, and did a kind of garbled tomorrow belongs to me party piece for the amusement of the patrons. When I left he'd climbed to the roof and was making a lot of noise. He'd have gone down a treat at Lincoln.
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For whatever it's worth, WW2 Wehrmacht veterans have been accorded associate membership status of the Australian Returned Services League since at least the 1960s. Perhaps understandably in the light of Australian experience, a similar arrangement has never been accorded to Japanese.