“Inglorious Basterds”

The Holocaust. Representations of  the Holocaust, what it’s possible to say about certain things. Jews as natural allies of native Americans and blacks, an ode to miscegenation.  Do people who prostitute art and especially cinema, deserve to live?  An exploding, orgasmic, revenge fantasy. References to dozens of other films. Some excellent jokes. Spoken in English, French, German and Italian. Beautifully shot and great art direction. Very violent and about the redemptive and necessary parts of violence. Against  proportional violence. if violence is necessary only too much is enough and then it’s barely enough.

Bayer on Alfonsín

Using an argument that bears the hallmark of his intellectual dishonesty, Osvaldo Bayer here criticises Raúl Alfonsín for not having carried out policies similar to those concerning denazification implemented in Germany after the end of World War II. According to Bayer the enacting of these measures showed that the German people had finally said,

Never again to militarism, to wars, to racism and totalitarianism.

This is nonsense and Bayer knows it. The German people remained loyal to the Nazi state until that state was utterly crushed and the country it ruled laid waste to by the victorious Allied armies. The prosecution of war criminals and the – rather tepidly applied – policy of denazification were imposed on Germany by the occupying powers. Those powers granted Germany a limited degree of independence only in 1949 and continued to maintain substantial garrisons on its territory for decades after.

No valid comparison is possible between what it was possible for the occupying Allied powers to impose on a broken and crushed Germany in 1945 and the options available to Alfonsín when he came to power in 1983  after winning a general election in which the Peronist candidate  had garnered 40%  of the vote with a manifesto that called for the validation of the amnesty that the armed forces had granted themselves before leaving power, and with those very forces still in a position to decide the fate of his government if he pushed them too far.

Bearing in mind these impediments, Alfonsín’s achievements in dealing with the legacy of state terrorism in Argentina  look respectable indeed and can be unblushingly compared with what was done in the postwar period in Germany.

Habermas on the crisis

What worries me most is the scandalous social injustice that the most vulnerable social groups will have to bear the brunt of the socialised costs for the market failure. The mass of those who, in any case, are not among the winners of globalisation now have to pick up the tab for the impacts of a predictable dysfunction of the financial system on the real economy. Unlike the shareholders, they will not pay in money values but in the hard currency of their daily existence. Viewed in global terms, this avenging fate is also afflicting the economically weakest countries. That’s the political scandal. Yet pointing the finger at scapegoats strikes me as hypocritical. The speculators, too, were acting consistently within the established legal framework according to the socially recognised logic of profit maximisation. Politics turns itself into a laughing stock when it resorts to moralising instead of relying upon the enforceable law of the democratic legislator. Politics, and not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.

Read the rest here.

A Un Cierto Nivel De Vida…

Encontarse en posesion de la verdad es suficiente para justificar el derecho a un cierto nivel de vida.

Walter Benjamin, citado por Gershom Scholem en Walter Benjamin, Historia de una Amistad. p90

Cry Babys

here