Watch this.
I have been on a documentary kick, of late. It began with me revisiting an old favorite, Brother's Keeper. I've since gone through Capturing the Friedmans, A Certain Kind of Death, and Bukowski: Born into This. All of these are worth the watch, if you want my opinion.
The other day (Wednesday, actually,) I watched a very well-done documentary called Forgiving Dr. Mengele. It's about this little old real estate salesperson in Indiana, named Eva Kor, who was one of Mengele's twins. (If you don't know who Joseph Mengele is, you're either stupid or 8 years old, so I won't be giving a history lesson.) And she decides to forgive him. Him and all nazis, actually. So you watch this, and you see the reaction... I swear, if she had gone to the Holocaust Museum and taken a shit in the shoe room she would have gotten a better reception than what she got from a lot of people. But she's not the kind of person to be put off by that. She sticks to her guns.
It is a fascinating study of the nature of both suffering and forgiveness, and it makes the viewer think about both suffering and forgiveness, which is very good. The point that I think people should come away with but that no one (hardly any of the survivors interviewed at least) seems to want to accept is that we CAN have forgiveness without forgetting. We can. I think that might be the key to healing, right there. I don't just mean healing from the nazis. I mean healing from abuse, from rape, from murder, from anything that humans can throw at one another.
I spent most of this film wanting to hug Eva Kor. And then (I forget why she was doing this. Which is stupid of me) she had a meeting with some Palestinians, and I found myself wanting to put Visine in her Metamucil. She was unforgivably rude to these people. We spend more than an hour hearing Eva's story, in her own words, and then when a Palestinian tries to share some of his story with her, she flat-out says "I don't want to hear this." I was appalled. Afterward she kept referring to the experience as "being in a room with angry Palestinians," when the only person in that room who was at all angry was HER. The whole thing was filmed; I'm not bullshitting, here.
It really pisses me off that we are supposed to believe the the holocaust was the most horrible thing at has ever happened in the history of everything, period. Armenia? Fuck 'em. Cambodia? Fuck 'em. The Soviet Union under Stalin (Stalin beats Hitler if we want to play a numbers game, by-the-by)? Fuck 'em. Sudan? Uganda? Somalia? How about the Aztecs, remember them? What about the Irish? All the native tribes in America? No, sorry folks, the holocaust still wins. Why?
Well, the first reason is that the Jews have a persecution complex the size of Jupiter. The other reason is that the Jews? --We have Spielberg.
There I go, getting angry. This is one of my pet peeves, you'll have to excuse me.
Suffering = suffering.
Death = death = death.
Forgive. Don't forget- but forgive. It's something to work toward, anyway.
The other day (Wednesday, actually,) I watched a very well-done documentary called Forgiving Dr. Mengele. It's about this little old real estate salesperson in Indiana, named Eva Kor, who was one of Mengele's twins. (If you don't know who Joseph Mengele is, you're either stupid or 8 years old, so I won't be giving a history lesson.) And she decides to forgive him. Him and all nazis, actually. So you watch this, and you see the reaction... I swear, if she had gone to the Holocaust Museum and taken a shit in the shoe room she would have gotten a better reception than what she got from a lot of people. But she's not the kind of person to be put off by that. She sticks to her guns.
It is a fascinating study of the nature of both suffering and forgiveness, and it makes the viewer think about both suffering and forgiveness, which is very good. The point that I think people should come away with but that no one (hardly any of the survivors interviewed at least) seems to want to accept is that we CAN have forgiveness without forgetting. We can. I think that might be the key to healing, right there. I don't just mean healing from the nazis. I mean healing from abuse, from rape, from murder, from anything that humans can throw at one another.
I spent most of this film wanting to hug Eva Kor. And then (I forget why she was doing this. Which is stupid of me) she had a meeting with some Palestinians, and I found myself wanting to put Visine in her Metamucil. She was unforgivably rude to these people. We spend more than an hour hearing Eva's story, in her own words, and then when a Palestinian tries to share some of his story with her, she flat-out says "I don't want to hear this." I was appalled. Afterward she kept referring to the experience as "being in a room with angry Palestinians," when the only person in that room who was at all angry was HER. The whole thing was filmed; I'm not bullshitting, here.
It really pisses me off that we are supposed to believe the the holocaust was the most horrible thing at has ever happened in the history of everything, period. Armenia? Fuck 'em. Cambodia? Fuck 'em. The Soviet Union under Stalin (Stalin beats Hitler if we want to play a numbers game, by-the-by)? Fuck 'em. Sudan? Uganda? Somalia? How about the Aztecs, remember them? What about the Irish? All the native tribes in America? No, sorry folks, the holocaust still wins. Why?
Well, the first reason is that the Jews have a persecution complex the size of Jupiter. The other reason is that the Jews? --We have Spielberg.
There I go, getting angry. This is one of my pet peeves, you'll have to excuse me.
Suffering = suffering.
Death = death = death.
Forgive. Don't forget- but forgive. It's something to work toward, anyway.