La Chute

[SaligoBay]

What a film.  Excellent.  BUT I feel like I've been sandpapered all over, rolled in salt, and then put through a wringer.   It's about the last days of Hitler.  All this tension builds up, interspersed with various bits of pure horror, and you think it's going to end with what you knew all along, Hitler and Eva Braun committing suicide.   But that's where you'd be wrong, and I can tell you now that it just gets worse after that. 

Lots of controversy about this one.  Should you even try to present such a monster in a film?   How do you portray the immensity of what he did, without actually putting horns on his head?   I think Hirschbegel got it right - you present him as a human being, which is all he was.  It was actually deeply shocking to see the "real thing" in front of your eyes, a human like the rest of us, nice to his dog and all that, but who could conceive and execute such atrocities.  Because after all, THAT was the truth, and THAT is what is seriously scary.

Very moving at the end, the interview they pop on there, just when you think it's all over. 

I couldn't believe he was so callous about the citizens of Berlin, said they deserved all they got (being bombed and killed by the Russians).   Then I remembered that Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, said exactly the same about the victims of all the purges - "we got what we deserved".    And so it goes.

Don't take the children, okay?

[SaligoBay]

Grabbed a couple of passing Germans the other night and discussed this (among other things, like the parlous state of German education, how familiar does that sound! ) over a beer.

One of them has an uncle in his 90s who is still a confirmed Nazi supporter.   General opinion (yes, all two of them!) was that this film is a Good Thing, because people should know this stuff, and it doesn't get taught in Germany.

In't it a foony old life?

 

[Plato comes homePlato]

Well its easy to find propaganda against Hitler but not so easy to delve into the corruption of the Allies who gave up the jews, and who wouldn't aid their pact allies until they saw a real threat to UK. Japan didn't just suddenly turn up in new Guinea for example Japanese businesses and residents had been there for decades. Pearl Harbour was allowed to happen, all the deaths and destruction of (only) old shipping  to bring USA in against the presidents' enemies'. The unwarranted and brutal invasion of Japan to force it to trade with USA (It had said "No...we know how you work and we don't want you here") late 20th century was a massacre and totally unjustifiable. The USA deserved Pearle Harbout, it was tit for taat and I think Japan planned it to be..USA knew it was coming but hushed it up...

USA likes to wait til the ground work is done to see how its going and take the adulation but in anything since it has had its butt kicked...can't do it alone even against stone throwing locals...as the Marines found a few years ago. Thus it sucks in he weak Governments of other countries to commit us all to the abuse of other Nations and even democracies it "doesn't like"...don't think we are friends with ardent democrats!!

Hitler, leader and great statesman who made the US President look like a twit was a man highly motivated after his WW1 experiences and the people he detested were a corrupt business class...but like so many empowered men (you cannot usually call them leaders...a leader directs by good example...that lets all of the West out!!) he got in too deeply anbd lost perspective and injustice became benchmark. 

Only cowards commit troops rather than findout the problems and work mutually on them....and only cowards of today's order will invade against a virtually defenceless and starved people (as in Iraq) including all ours today.

Hitler took people head on but also through sickening deceptions and murders..bit like the US state department in el Salvador and Chili.All the same he did take the risks...

Australia was run for a while by a US miltary lulu in WW11 as we fawned and grovelled when UK deceived us, UK wasn't the slightest bit interested in Australia's likely demise.......and deception and top end incompetence was our Military lot until Eichelberger arrived and the other one was turfed thank God. Balmey wootten Vasey, Macarthur Onslaw Broadbent and the great Australian commanders then showed the brilliance they had in every other theatre ..though Greece was a tragedy for 6th Divvy.  It was Australian troops with some Americans UNDER AUSTRALIAN COMMAND who sorted out the japanese at Milne Bay..the beginning of their end...but propaganda has a different story.The Americans were pinned down for months until the Australians very unhappily took command of them..the American soldiers rallied and great victories were won. The major Air war in the pacific was drafted by an Aussie also using US materiel.But propaganda tells a different story. In the South of France and the midi the average joe has never HEARD of the allied saving of France...better kept a National secret....other than in the North where that's impossible...I haven't met other than a resistanc parachutiste who had ever even heard of the allied rescue or the great australian resistance leaders...never heard of Australia in France WW1....incredible propaganda...

There is no doubt Hitler was represented by many  sadistic savages but perhaps those who hate him could tell me why he released thousands of jews as payment for his remedial massages which got rid of his headaches...not publicised recently as it makes one think! That orador sur Glane has never been "worked out" comeon...this was on the agenda when the officers and men still lived!! Someone wants something hushed up. The melancholic site and its eteral focus on Germany is both liberating and depressing...when will this guilt be allowed to fade..? I note there that the sensitive American journalist who interviews the survivor drives a Peugeot/Renault/British Tricycle??...no she drives VOLKSVAGEN to these evocative and troubling interviews....you wonder..

Sixty years later we support a regime,the most invasive in the world today other than USA and vastly better organised in subversion and destabilisation and responsibe for the Iraq invasion for which not a single justifying reason existed... which has fed off the deaths of those poor jews unceasingly and initiated the politics of guilt...yet the other 6 million catholics, prodos, german people including an officers wife and children who discovered Treblinka by acciden, "criminals" such as homosexuals gypsies, retarded and mentally afflicted,  priests  etc and other innocents were alo slaughtered and NO-ONE goes chasing THEIR rights and missing monies and land...that would make the other lot less effective.A few years ago a great wail was heard about not being able to "celebrate Auschwitz" becaue of the "catholics there"...well for dozen years the nuns were in cotemplation there as I recall and that didn't seem to be a problem...propaganda, propaganda...its nauseating manpulation and we just lap it up like babies taking anything offered into their mouths...that's how it is designed...

Propaganda and lies are the reason we are loathed by so many countries today and we luxuriated in it...mocking the downtrodden but now we are involved in "terrorist" paranoia beyond any reason as the world is reorganised into groups of for and against by a madman who "gets my orders directly from God via his angels" (quote). Aussies were once welcome anywhere..regarded with friendship but...no more..we are despised because a weakling prime minister wanted to curry favour. Truth was available and it was hidden..though if I knew the facts then so did ASIS MI5/and our Governments...but truth was not to gt in the way...this was Hitler all over again...

The 'enemy' has become empowered now, found courage to strike out and defend themselves even with miserable weaponry whch might ee us tough allies rmarching in "leve les mains" and though clowns like Letterman mock him bin Laden is no fool. In terms of say Straffings of fleeing civilians in Korea(recently exposed) , leaving the French to rot at Dien Bien Phu and later abusing Vietnam,  or even looking at Kissinger'd history  he is a choir boy.

So when you sit and feel very uncomfortable with Hitler use it as a springboard to question our own megloamaniacs and torturers and executioners (how'd you like to be put in a shipping container in the desert...I can tell you what it would be like..) or have fuel poured into the cellar you are hiding in an have a soldier light it.."to see if anyone is there"...so you can entertain them with your dying screams. Hitler became diseased but today, with that knowledge we do as badly...and his greatest demeaners are equally as murderous. The CIA has long sed drugs to have people 'forget" they were tortured and abused...so anyone who says "I wasn't" has to be suspected as a receiver of such treatment.

Just a thought to think..and prompt some reading OUTSIDE propaganda. Read up on the evils of  "Promis" and "Echelon" on the web too and read "The Other Side of Deception"(Ostrovsky 1994) Profits of War "(ben Menashe 1991)  and The Blood Dimmed Tide"(Amos Elon) to see where it was all starting from...and prepare for a shock, especially with the first book...learn the truth about how bad we are ourselves and how we let horrors happen daily to innocent poor peoples.Learn just how corrupt the western approach has been and how the USA has been a pawn in a great game to free the world's most corrupt regime of them on its borders. It isn't fiction but Mossad fact.

I am from the family of one of he greater commanders of WW11 and say....."don't forgive

[SaligoBay]

Thank you, Plato, just what I need first thing on a Sunday morning! 

Everything you've said is true, but I was only looking at La Chute from a cinematic point of view.   And from a Western European cultural point of view, it's almost heresy to even suggest that Hitler wasn't the Devil incarnate, and that what he did overshadows every other act of atrocity ever committed.

As you so rightly said, we carry this communal burden of guilt about what happened to the Jews, and while that has its place, it works as a smokescreen so that we don't see the other awful things happeneing.   

Girly bit coming up....... try baking ANZAC biscuits for French people and explain to them what ANZAC means.   Australia and New Zealand, in the wars?    Jamais!!   Why ever would they?  And indeed, you might well ask.

The only thing I felt uncomfortable about in your post was its focus on Britain.  ALL countries have corrupt leaders, ALL countries do bad things, it's just a question of how much power they have at the time, that's all that stops them.   France deals in arms, de Gaulle is up there in the top 10 modern mass killers, admittedly lower than Stalin and Pol Pot, but still nothing to be proud of.

All these things will keep going, because humanity itself hasn't changed, we have better technology but we're still just mixed-up kids.  You only have to look at the vitriol that gets thrown about on these civilised forums from time to time, it's only the same as what Hitler and Bush get up to, they just do it on a bigger scale.

 

 

[Patf]

I've done a lot of reading about the years leading up to WW2 , trying to understand how a nation, not just Hitler and his cronies, took part in or condoned the atrocities. What had most impact was a video that a Jewish friend lent me about a history teacher in a high school in USA who wanted to show his pupils how such a change can occur. He slowly changed the ethos of his classes from liberal and democratic introducing more and more rigid rules and sanctions until he had a tightly regimented authoritarian regime. A few pupils hated it and excluded themselves, but the majority tried to intimidate them. The weak and disabled were humilated and excluded. Towards the end of the experiment the teacher told the pupils that they were going to meet their leader. They were presented with a film of Hitler ranting and raving and the full lesson of what they had been brainwashed into became clear to them. With a certain type of leadership many of us could become like the followers of Hitler. And have done at times.Pat.

[letrangere]

Pat, how interesting, and also disturbing.  Thank you for posting this.  Margaret

[SaligoBay]

It is interesting, Pat.   I've heard of experiments like this before, not to do with Hitler, but to do with torture, where people find themselves surprisingly willing to inflict torture on others if the circumstances are right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it!).

[Catalpa]

[quote]It is interesting, Pat. I've heard of experiments like this before, not to do with Hitler, but to do with torture, where people find themselves surprisingly willing to inflict torture on others if t...[/quote]

I think there was a tv programme recently based on this premise, possibly commissioned in the US, but I'm not sure. As I recall, it had to be cancelled a few episodes in because the participants showed themselves far too willing to inflict escalating levels of pains on each other. Criteria for participant selection might have had something to do with this, of course. I don't think it was subsequently broadcast but can't at the moment remember any of the details about the channel, production company, etc to back up my recollection.

[SaligoBay]

Found it!   The original experiments were done by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the early 1960s.

[Plato comes homePlato]

Hi sorry about souring your Sunday croisant Salingo but there was no need to spit it onto the table!! ..but I might draw your (site's) attention to the carbonated-conquest influence of USA even in its own site adverts..."3 issues FOR Free" it flashes relentlessly  This appalling use of English shows how people are seduced by intellectual ignorence. "Free" is an adjective..."how when where and why" are the common adverbial classifications and an adverb is called-for here...one should say "3 free issues" or 3 issues sent freely (though exactingly examined seems ambiguous ) or use an entirely different approach. Ignorence is highlighted when anyone says "for free" and this world wide ignorence commenced in USA.

Re your comments on Britain. Maybe ..I thought I gave the "second coming of Christ..the USA and his archangel GW Bush "..a reasonable serve.  In Iraq over 2 million innocent people have died directly through invasions and sanctions since 1990 against a regime, very bad certainly but no worse than britain and America and france or most other killing field seekers since ad1600, but in fact Sadam was grotesque only in a narrow band of activities under the direct manipulation of Mossad and USA.  He was used..he was abused..and those poor poisened kurds were found by Israel's directions using US satellites. "The other side of deception" will explain clearly the diabolical plot to have USA kill as many Arabs as possible..one of hundreds of staggering exposures by a Mossad employee. That was exposed in 1994 and took a mere 10 years to impliment...even AFTER its exposure...the psychology of the 'short memory" was invoked.

Needing US power has brought us all into cringing serfdom with those who stand up like men and women of class being demeaned and samaged. I have one great admiration of Tony Blair ..he has been very ill since the world saw the great lie exposed...that's no coincidence...I admire that he still has a conscience..I despise him for continuing the lies. I add that the British

I admire tremendously Powell for resigning but despise him for his previous cooperaton in a matter he knew was totaliarian hogwash. He was nearly in tears reading the lies in UN re "fuel rods" and "nuclear power" so upset was he with his own weakness, as he lied to the world.

The british Labor party, a mob of cowardly, a-moral fakers it seems,  refused to read any emailed protests or publish any contra letters which were potent during the lead-up to the invasion.Whilst this International genoicidal mafia exists we will never have peace or justice for all.  Mohammedans,to me a group raised on the flimsiest of religious judeo-christian interpretations...much of which is farcical, yet who have a right to beliefs and their way of life, happiness and a fair share of the planet's cake and a right to not have Israel's expansionist policies supported and encouraged by people living in wonderland...viz us. In turn we have been tightened up into for USA and aagainst USA by definiton and are now experiencing terrifyingly Orwellian based "politics of fear". Its so easy...elevate paranoia and close down people's rights. The finsih of the 'cold war' has elevated nuclear weaponry to huge arsenals...not diminished them as we are told by our national Liars. Helen Caldicott  might be the better person to read for truth...easy on the web...

So who has now read the books or the web exposures of Echelon and Promis and will it be just another cigarette warning or will we act......???

[SaligoBay]

Hey, it's not me who's doing the spitting! 

I think we're talking at different levels here.   I was talking about a film about Hitler.  It doesn't mean I am unaware of other issues, and I do feel a bit taken aback at suddenly being on the receiving end of a diatribe about the woes of the modern world.

I hereby retire from the fray.

 

[letrangere]

Don't retire, SB, just ignore the trolls.  M

[0BRIAN WOODHEADI,m here in franceddMMyyyy0Falseen-USI,m here in franceTrue]

Hey life on a plato,the US of A deserved what they got in a hawaiian port?I have been to pearl harbour and there is not much of a target.

What you posted is a load of crap and not even in the slightest anything to do with this forum.What it is is your inability to deal with your deluded sense of the world as you see it from where you are now.

[Miki]

I hereby retire from the fray

Retirement not accepted SB, so it's back in to the fray for you, we are right behind you. I am the one behind that bush to your left.........or is it to the right ?

I am with outie on this..............now I am going for a drink and a quiet sit down to get over it.

It's been a long day Arkwright (OK, my mind is wandering, it's the flu)

 

[Tresco]

The film SB talks about has been the focus of a massive amount of discussion in Germany. What SB said, I can understand and relate to. It makes sense to me, I understand what she says.

Plato, you clearly have a lot to say, and strong views, but I really have a lot of trouble understanding your 'flow' of thought. Actually, I just cannot follow it at all. I just can't understand your point(s), and I don't like that. It makes me feel stoooooopid. You are mr 'stream of consciousness/intelligence' guy, and I am this ordinary person who wants to understand what the other guy is saying. Help me out. Be your own editor.

tresco