Beds are burning!

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2008)

When we were very young, we used to think the world of our parents. They were the strongest, the brainiest and the smartest. Somehow, they knew everything and could do no wrong. Slowly, we grew older and started hating their guts. We view their world viewpoints as archaic and promise never to be like them. We abhor their un-PC statements and over-glorification of the good old days.

And yet with the passage of time and dents from the School of Hard Knocks, it soon dawns upon us their wisdom and ability to juggle so many things despite their limited resources. 

This film is historical fiction from the point of view of Bruno, an 8-year old son of Army Lieutenant, in Nazi Germany. His father is stationed in the countryside to take charge of a concentration camp. The young boy befriends Shmuel, an 8-years old Jewish inmate, on the other side of the concentration camp. Bruno burrows himself into the camp to help Schmuel locate his missing father. Little do they know that their little adventure ends up in the gas chamber that Bruno's father has been commissioned to run. In the cruel twist of fate, Bruno (and Schmuel) succumb to the Zyklon B poisoning. 

In a poetic way, the film questions whether the death of an enemy is any less painful than one of our own flesh and bone? Can we sing when others' beds are burning?

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights before the dark hour of reason grows. John Betjeman.

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Eternal vigilance is King!

Hannah Arendt (German, English; 2012)

Hannah Arendt, a political thinker, who is famous for her assessment of the Eichmann trial and the coining of the phrase 'banality of evil' is depicted here. The film depicts the time surrounding the trial and the controversies of Arendt's articles in the New Yorker and her subsequent book, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' in 1963.

First of all, the trial was considered an illegal exercise. Eichmann was charged in the Israeli Courts for cruelty against humanity as if Israel had jurisdiction over this; there was already the Nuremberg trial for that, and the International Courts would be the appropriate platform to try war crimes. Furthermore, the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad,  apprehended him in Argentina through clandestine methods. Prime Minister of Israel then, Ben Gurion, thought it was apt that the world should hear the plight of the Jews during the Second World War. It was an opportune time for the Jews to showcase to the whole wide world their sufferings through the Holocaust survivors and 200 over witnesses during the trial.

Many of the trial scenes were actual footages of the actual proceedings. Interestingly, it is said that, at a time when Israel did not have TV transmission, the hearing was transmitted live the world over. It mainly drew viewers from the USA. 

Rather than seeing a monstrous person, the epitome of evil, Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann who was tasked with the logistics of transporting Jews to be terminated turned out to be an unimpressive chap. He had no personal hatred towards the Jewish people. He did not perceive his job as morally wrong and was not remorseful. He portrayed an image of a bureaucrat who was just interested in carrying out diligently the orders given to him by his superiors. With a smirk on his face, he gave the impression of victimisation, speaking in a bureaucratic language, comparing himself as a steak being grilled.

Arendt posited that totalitarianism is an absolute evil that is no longer related to human victory but its destruction. In the words of her somewhat tainted mentor and ex-lover, Martin Heidegger, thinking is a lonely business. It is easier to follow orders than to think. People feel that it is their job to just carry out the instruction and that judgement can be done by history or God in heaven.

Like a caged animal.
Eichmann in a bullet-proof glass enclosure.

As it appears, the whole stage was set for the world to sympathise with the Jewish, for the world to look at the accused with contempt. Arendt's article, on the other hand, did not vilify Eichmann but instead put him just as a vessel of a greater narrative. Eichmann was just a diligent civil servant, a non-thinking fool with no ill-intent but just carrying his designated duties. That is terrifying enough, worse than any atrocity carried out by evil regimes. The worse kind of evil is done by nobodies. And the act of evil becomes a banal affair.

Arendt got a lot of brickbat for that; accusing her of being as anti-Semantic and a closet Nazi supporter. Whatsmore with her past intimate liaison with Martin Heidegger, a Nazi party member. She was also ostracised for criticising the Jewish leadership for allowing such an event to happen in the first place. But that responsibility also fell on the people themselves for their inability to choose a capable one for themselves.

A pessimist outlook on the whole of humanity. The lesson we get here is that this type of mishap can happen anywhere. No part of the planet is immune from it. It is our duty as thinking individual to be wary Eternal vigilance is King. When a person is stripped of his name, identity and personality, he is no more a person, he is just a piece of flesh, a number.

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The stage we look up to!

Denial (2016)

It is said that the Holocaust is a sensitive word. Firstly, the term has been hijacked only to denote one event, to what happened in Auschwitz and the many concentration camps during WW2 to the 6 million Jews there. True, there were many other equally bad, if not worse, atrocities were done by Man to his fellow kind; this event always took centre stage. Perhaps, Hollywood helped to sell this story too. After all, many of the pioneers of the silver screen were disgruntled Jews who themselves were movie doyens who escaped Hitler's tyranny to settle in America.

Human history is marred with many bloodbath events and senseless deaths. What comes to mind are The Indian Partition, The Bengal Famine, death under the Stalin regime, Russian deaths in WW2, Rape of Nanking, hunger deaths during the Cultural Revolution in China, Communist witch-hunt in Indonesia, the Armenian genocide and the World Wars, which may have been actually started off by the Russian Revolution. War is a bloody event and brings out the worst in mankind. So, to single out the Jewish Holocaust as the sole savagery to happen in our civilisation is as if it is the most singularly important in history is an overkill, so say the non-sympathisers. It is not to say that these events did not occur, but rather, too much romanticism and emotions are placed on it. These people who do not conform to the general train of thought are termed 'Holocaust Deniers' to mean that they do not acknowledge its occurrence!

This movie's crux is the real-life legal spat between an American Jewish Professor, Lipstadt, and a Nazi-Germany scholar, Irving. Irving sued Lipstadt for libel as she labelled him for being a Holocaust denier in her book. As the publisher of her book, Penguin, is British, Irving sued her in the English courts. In the English legal system, the burden of proof lies with the accused. Hence, it is up to her legal team to convince the judge for a favourable outcome whilst dodging pressures from the media, Holocaust survivors themselves and their pushy client.

If one were to follow the courts' proceedings, one would realise that the last thing that the legal system is trying to find out is the Truth and to mete justice. It has become a stage, like life itself, a place for people to seek publicity, to set precedence for the rest of society to use as a yardstick to follow and an avenue to apparently showcase their high culture to the world. On this stage, the actors, the histrionic performers act out their roles to create a shadow play and smokescreen to hoodwink the jury or the presiding judge to look at the case from their (the lawyers) own rose-tinted lenses. This can happen as things in life are not so straightforward. No one is either so bad or angelic. The truth is multilayered and can be viewed from many perspectives. It is the role of the directors of this stage to create the props, set the mood and sell their story.

The victors can then write the ensuing story any way they want!

(N.B. There is plenty of literature in cyberspace on the Holocaust, put up by its deniers. They question the validity of much of the evidence put forward by the sympathisers. They deny that there was systematic planning of the Jewish genocide. They posit that it was the usual atrocity of any war, and the planned gassing of people in Austwick is an exaggeration or even a blatant lie. They claim that there is no documented proof. The Jews, in rebuttal, reply that the pieces of evidence were destroyed by Hitler. The debate will never end.)

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Diversion to maintain sanity or wrong priorities?

Son of Saul (Hungarian; 2015)

Just how far would you go to maintain cultural and religious practices? Even went your life is in danger? In a World War 2 concentration camp when Jews are shovelled into incinerators by Nazis? Well, this is what Saul does. In this disturbing Hungarian movie, set over two days in one of those camps, Jews are lined up, 'processed' to be killed, burned alive, shot and buried in mass graves, emptied their coats of their belongings, and have their ashes spread unceremoniously by the river. It is just a banal activity that goes on there. Saul is a sonderkommando, a run-around helper of the Nazis, who is threatened with death if they do not help the German soldiers in their nefarious act.

Probably to avert his attention from the stresses of yells, screams, and cries of dying people around him, he goes around looking for a rabbi to do the last rights of a young Jewish whom he tried to help and died.

His search for a rabbi amongst the captured Jews in the midst of the morbidly tense atmosphere of the camp and the imminent uprising by his colleague set a high-wire drama of the Holocaust.
Being a Holocaust sympathising film, there are no surprises here. It had been feted with many accolades including the Oscars and Cannes.

Don't blame me, I am just following orders!

Experimenter (2015)

Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps.

The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart.

Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to show that most people would perform immoral things if ordered to do so by an authoritative figure. Not many would stand up against the majority to fight for what he feels is just. He went on to show this in other planned experiments. We are followers and can be easily triggered to go into an agentic state where we behave like an agent of the people in authority without taking any responsibility for the consequence of our actions. We blindly follow the order of someone in authority.

Many of his social experiments made it to the telly as seen in 'Candid Camera' series. The movie ends by saying that we are just puppets but with perception and awareness. Perhaps we can achieve liberation if we are aware of the strings that tie us down!

In order to get things running in an orderly fashion, the society needs to have appendages that ease administration. It cannot have all its officers having a mind of their own and doing things their way. Pandemonium would be the order of the day. Unfortunately, people is power may abuse this privilege to fulfil their own self-agendas. Herein lies the danger as seen around us. Charismatic sweet talking politicians and wayward theologian have a way to the heart of the followers to turn them into automatons to perform their dirty job. Philip Zimbardo's notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Study showed findings of the same effect. In that experiment, it was the situation rather than their individual personality that determines the participants' behaviour.

Good people do bad things through omission, coercion, with the desire to conform to society and not rock the boat!