Richard Spencer on Inglourious Basterds

“Holocaust Revisionism”
by Richard Spencer
Taki’s Magazine, August 29, 2009

I should first admit that it took quite a lot for me to actually go see Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s latest about a special Army unit of Jewish avengers, led by a half-Cherokee Good Ol’ Boy, who rampage through German-occupied France, killing, scalping, and/or branding top Nazis, eventually slaughtering no less than the German Führer. I’m certainly not against counter-factual reverie, or blood splatter, and I don’t hold any reverence for the Nazi regime or feel uncomfortable with the Kill Adolf premise. (Indeed, I’d love to watch a filmic portrayal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or one of Claus von Stauffenberg that didn’t devolve into a shallow action flick à la Valkyrie.) The problem is, when I saw the preview for Basterds, I simply sensed that it wasn’t made for someone like me, that I didn’t have the right disposition to enjoy it.

There I was in the theater watching a clip of “Aldo Raine” (Brad Pitt sporting a cartoonish moustache and Southern accent) telling a Wehrmacht officer, “If you ever want to eat a Sauerkraut sandwich again, take your Wiener schnitzel of a finger and point out on this map what I wanna know.” Raine, of course, wants to know the whereabouts of more “Nazis,” whom he and his boys could brutally torture (though it’s clear by the context that Raine is terrorizing Army officers.) The stoic German honorably refuses, and Brad Pitt summons one of his “basterds” with the line, “Gots a German here who wants to die for country. Oblige him.” A thug in a sweat-stained wife-beater emerges and proceeds to bash the officer’s head in with a Louisville slugger. (This basterd is portrayed by a one Eli Roth, the man behind Hostel, a classic in the genre of “torture porn,” so I’m told. And his character is named “Bear Jew,” an evocation of the gay slang term for the fat, hairy, leather-clad men who’re “on top” in S&M.)

Obviously, the scene is, at a basic level, puerile gross-out. But my question while watching it, both during the preview and the real thing, was this: With whom, exactly, are we supposed to be sympathizing? As we’ve all been repeatedly told, and as Aldo Raine reiterates at one point, the Germans acted with such inhumanity in their conquest of Europe that they deserve no humanity in return. (These days, if you so much as hint that you might think the firebombing of civilians in Dresden, or the nuking of the Japanese in Hiroshima, was a bit much, eyebrows are raised and it’s only a matter of time before you’re accused dark predilections or else “moral relativism.”) So, I guess when watching a Jew bash the brains out of a Wehrmacht officer, we Americans are all supposed to instinctively cry Yay!, just like when the home team scores a touchdown. But as I saw that repellent torture-porn auteur whale away at a dignified German officer, needless to say my sympathies weren’t where they were supposed to be … or so I thought. But after experiencing Inglourious Basterds, I began to wonder whether the basterds were really supposed to be the Good Guys, and whether Tarantino’s latest is far more equivocal, or rather far more subversive and nihilistic, than most in the MSM have recognized. . . . Read the whole article.