Article:
How Aldo Raine Somehow Eased Up Musings of the Holocaust

What I will be writing (or ranting) about in this post may seem a bit sensitive, as it will touch on something that shouldn’t be discussed or brought out at all. On the other hand, if the movies and TV shows and documentaries are showing it to the whole world, why not talk about it just for a bit?

Anyway, I was up late the other night watching the National Geographic Channel, and the show was a rerun from last year, titled “Nazi Scrapbooks from Hell”. The documentary was about the discovered photo album of Nazi SS officer Karl Höcker, showing the other side of life for the Nazi SS after a hard day’s work selecting and killing Jews at Auschwitz.

I do not want to enumerate or describe the horror of “that past”. It’s over, and nothing can be done about it. There’s nothing the world can do that will bring back to life the gazillions of people who died during those dark days of humanity. And no one in the world can bring a faint smile to us not affected in those events more than half a century ago; no one except from Lt. Aldo Raine and his bunch of “Inglourious Basterds”.

Director Quentin Tarantino definitely has outdone himself this time with this movie. Well, yes, Inglourious Basterds was released three or four months ago. But what I am writing about is not really a review, but something like a “thinking-out-loud” piece after I watched and pondered on the documentary I’ve just seen.

The Holocaust—it was bad—all of it and everything about it. But we somehow saw a different take on the matter with the film Inglourious Basterds. Amid the atrocities we came to know of the Holocaust, watching Lt. Aldo Raine, Staff Sergeant Donny Donowitz a.k.a. “The Bear Jew”, German psychopath Hugo Stiglitz, Smithson Utivich a.k.a. “The Little Man”, and Omar Ulmer, among others, scalp their ambushed Nazi soldiers, with the finale of Raine carving a swastika at the foreheads of soldiers being released (one left alive in every ambush) to tell the tale of the Basterds, is such a funny retribution for everything that have happened—cinematographically.