An Inglourious Basterdization of History

In one of the most memorable scenes from Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt's character gives his army of Jewish soldiers a pep talk so rousing audiences can't resist whooping with excitement after he says, "We're in the killin' Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin."

But audiences aren't the only ones cheering. Critics are eating up Tarantino's revenge fantasy just as eagerly. Roger Ebert gushed over the film, writing, "He provides World War II with a much-needed alternative ending. For once the basterds get what's coming to them."

Even the actors have gotten in on the retribution game. Melanie Laurent, who plays the film's main protagonist, told reporters she was happy to be "the face of the Jewish vengeance," while Eli Roth, who plays the head-smashing character known as "The Bear Jew", described the film as, "kosher porn, something I have been fantasizing about for a long time."

Tarantino, however, has shirked the "revenge fantasy" label, saying, more generally, "I like that it's the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis." He's clearly not the only one in the film industry. Over the past year Hollywood has treated us to an assassination attempt on Hitler and an armed Jewish uprising in Poland.

We have become enchanted, perhaps more so than ever, with the idea that the Nazis could only have been defeated by brute force, when it has been argued by a number of historians that the horrors of war itself may have been what sparked the Final Solution. Chronology suggests that it was not until the end, when Germany was suffering great defeats on the battlefield and seeing its cities torched to the ground, that extermination programs were enacted.

Movies, arguably more than any medium, reinforce the belief that superior violence was the only way to take down Hitler. For instance, the Hitler in Tarantino's film becomes a confounded and frustrated mess when he hears of the Basterds brutal exploits. In reality, however, Nazis were actually relieved when the resistance turned to violence because it gave them an excuse to use more drastic and suppressive measures. According to military historian Basil Lidell Hart, who had the unique opportunity to interview German generals imprisoned in Great Britain after the war, "other forms of resistance baffled them" because "they were experts in violence, and had been trained to deal with opponents who used that method."

Such a finding suggests a surprising truth about WWII: nonviolence, of the kind Gandhi practiced, was used successfully against the Nazis. For all the films about WWII, only a handful have depicted nonviolent resistance. Some of the best stories, however, have not yet been told on the silver screen, though not for lack of drama.

One such story begging for a film adaptation, is told in a book by Philip P. Hallie called, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. The setting, much like the opening of Inglourious Basterds, was a small farming community, nestled in the mountains of south-central France. But unlike the French farmer in Basterds, the people of Le Chambon openly and successfully protected Jews and other peoples fleeing from Nazi oppression. By the end of the war, they had saved an estimated 5,000 refugees, approximately 3,500 of whom were Jews.

Their success was in large part due to a charismatic young preacher named André Trocmé, who led an operation that hid Jews in the homes of peasants and poor farmers, as well as seven boarding houses located in the center of town. Financial aid came from outside the village and in most cases Jews and other refugees were housed for the entire German occupation.

Trocmé also founded a private school on his strong belief in nonviolence that taught, among other things, conscientious objection, internationalism, fellowship and peacemaking. As a result, when a representative from the Vichy government came to visit the town, he was met with a letter from students declaring their intent, as Trocmé would later put it, "to protect persecuted people whenever and wherever they could."

The Chambonnais made good on that promise. When Vichy police arrived to start arresting Jews, they found themselves outsmarted. A plan to hide the Jewish population in the thick woods that surrounded the village had already gone into effect. The police scoured the area for three weeks and managed to make only two arrests before leaving. Over the next three years, under complete German occupation, the Nazis carried out only one successful raid, thanks to the townspeople's dedication.

Most, if not all, European countries have their own stories of nonviolent resistance, but they so rarely get attention. Thanks to Tom Cruise, more people know about the failure of Operation Valkyrie than the actually successful Danish resistance. It's not as if the story of ordinary people systematically stifling the Nazis through acts of industrial sabotage and general strikes, as well as saving 8,000 Jews by covertly sailing them to neutral Sweden is lacking in excitement.

The same goes for the story of a Bulgarian bishop, who along with local farmers, threatened to lay down on the train tracks to prevent Jews from being deported, which in turn convinced the Bulgarian government to back down from Nazi demands, saving 48,000 Jews from the concentration camps. Not even the grim ending of Defiance, which claims that the destructive actions of the film's protagonists and their guerrilla movement helped ensure tens of thousands of Jewish descendants, can truly match those bloodless results.

Clearly, people love watching movies about WWII. It gives them the chance to see good triumphing over evil. But nothing says we have to stick to the same stale and misleading storyline that violence is what saved us from the Nazis.

Tarantino once said, "I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie." Perhaps it's time for him to do us all a favor and next time indulge his love for history instead of his fantasies of revenge.

Comments

[Hedonist]

Farrell states: "Chronology suggests that it was not until the end, when Germany was suffering great defeats on the battlefield and seeing its cities torched to the ground, that extermination programs were enacted."

What absolute nonsense. The Wannsee Conference was held in January, 1942 when Germany occupied nearly all of Europe and was deep into Russian territory. The Final Solution was enacted when the Nazis were at the peak of their barbarism.

[jcwtts1]

I also thought that the conference codified and ratified plans and actions already taken place. I'm not an expert on WWII but I really think this sounds like a Pat Buchanan type apology for Hitler... we drove them to it....or some such nonsense.

J

[Hedonist]

Absolutely. The Einsatzgruppen had already been hard at work for 6 months prior to Wannsee, massacring hundreds of Jewish communities by machine gun fire. Babi Yar, for example, occurred on September 29-30 of 1941. This was long before any German battlefield defeats or fire-bombings of her cities. Wannsee was essentially a co-ordinating strategy meeting to expedite matters before the Germans moved on to other matters.

[LMPE]

Anyone who complains about IB apparently forgets that it's intended as a joke. Rather than a take-no-bullshit, authoritarian commanding officer, we're treated to a hip, fast-talking one. Rather than an evil Hitler, we're treated to a jittery one.

I loved IB.

[BlackJAC]

I'm no Tarantino fan--the guy is too steeped in '70s dreck to be given money--but even I shrugged this off as historical fiction. I own a book in which Fidel Castro is assassinated, another in which he's overthrown from within, and two books in which Saddam Hussein is also overthrown from within--nobody's screaming about how "revisionist" (which actually means reinterpreting history to suit a political agenda) those are.

[hunterrd]

WWII was won by violence. It had to be won by violence. You say yourself in your article that German WWII generals were only trained to deal with violence. And they did so....by being violent. If they slaughtered Jews who did not fight back, slaughtered CHILDREN, the most innocent and helpless members of society, what makes you think they would hesitate to destroy defiant adults who stood in their path, or lay in front of their tanks, or whatever? The examples you give of "nonviolent resistance" were people hiding Jews from the Germans. That is not resistance, resistance implies conflict or confrontation. Hiding is avoiding confrontation. Hiding was good when it was possible, but it was not possible to hide all the jews in the world. The small isolated incidents of supposed "nonviolent resistance" you give were only possible because they were able to wait out the war's end. If there had been no Allied war machine to combat that of the Nazis, Hitler would have easily taken over the world. (Certainly Europe). With an all-powerful and uncontested Nazi regime in control for an indefinite time period, do you think those same cases of Jews in hiding would have lasted? Those people would have all been eventually found and killed, or else live out their lives in basements, attics, and remote forests.

[eshesh]

If the concern is that the movie is reinforcing troublesome social perceptions re WWI, violence, etc. then singling out Tarantino seems counter-intuitive. Inglorious Basterds is the most radical re-visioning of all the recent WWII movies mentioned, it quite obviously disclaims any historical accuracy, and like all Tarantino (more so recently), it's a vehicle to reference his fascinations with other films and pop-culture, not the history books.

Shouldn't this be the reason why Inglorious Bs should be considered less harmful, pernicious and misleading than works such as that terrible-looking Tom Cruise flick and Defiance, which still fetishize the themes of violence/retribution while totally lacking the self-awareness of Tarantino?

Love him or hate him or in-between him, Tarantino is an artist. More particularly, he is a stylist, an aesthete AND NOT a moralist. Calling him out for perpetuating harmful stereotypes sorta misses the point.

[galaxian]

While I don't see the need to go after Tarantino here since his film is a complete fantasy---I do think your point on non-violence is apt. Too often these stories are reserved for the gods of civilization and good works, MLK, Mother Teresa, and Gandhi.

Thanks for the short stories/examples. But don't blame the movies for a collective ignorance of the underground. Had our history classes actually taught us anything worthwhile, we'd feel a lot more at ease when the kids run out to see the cinema's latest revisions.

[aznurse]

I just got back from seeing the movie. I thought it was really great. Sure, it's not what happened and peace is the answer, blah blah blah, but lately I want revenge.

[larry278]

Back when TV was destroying movie theaters & Hollywood by taking their audiences wholesale, Hollywood came up with the slogan, "Movies are better than ever.". It was a lie then & movies have been getting worse since then.

[Sinick]

C'mon Bryan, lighten up. Every once in a while you have to dial back your brain a bit when watching films. If you insisted that every film was 100% accurate, you would never watch a single one.
Moreover, you have set the reality bar awfully high for Tarantino, unless you've never seen his other films.

[Joshik72]

Here's what Gandhi said on November 26, 1938, concerning his view of the Jews in Germany:

"If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep..."

The "massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving"? You know what? I think I'll go with Tarantino's historical imagination and vision of the world.

[galaxian]

Ever heard of a day of remembrance? They're kind of universal.

[BlackJAC]

Considering there was no similar freakouts over historical accuracy regarding WILD WILD WEST or the Antonio Banderas ZORRO movies, can we please just call Tarantino's works fanboy pastiches to '70s dreck and be done with it?

[caphillprof]

Both the West and Zorro are legends, not history. The Nazis and WWII are history, not legends.

[BlackJAC]

The Will Smith WILD WILD WEST featured a steampunk science fiction and Ulysses S. Grant creating the Secret Service in order to protect the President even though Lincoln created it and didn't protect the President until much, much later. THE LEGEND OF ZORRO featured talk of Confederate secession at the time California became a state. And don't even get me started on those Billy Boyle mystery novels that James R. Benn writes.

This is all called "historical fiction." Nobody complains about it. And I don't even like Tarantino.