Seth Rogen has walked himself into serious trouble by doing what American right-wingers hate most of all: pointing out the obvious. All he did was observe, correctly, that American Sniper is the same story as Stolz der Nation, the Nazi propaganda film within Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but that was enough for the non-thinking stratum of American life to rise up and attack him for hating the military, as if armies are above reproach.
There isn’t, or shouldn’t be, anything to argue about. American Sniper is about a soldier who kills hundreds of enemies during a war of aggression, while Stolz der Nation is about a soldier who kills, eh, hundreds of enemies during a war of aggression. Both soldiers become national icons. Both are obsessed with killing and both are glorified to justify the actions of their governments.
Stolz der Nation depicts sniper Frederick Zoller as a hero, a killer of Germany’s enemies, while American Sniper does precisely the same for Chris Kyle.
Both films, the real and the fictional, are set in a context where the snipers kill on behalf of the aggressor nation, and both depict people who lived by the gun and died by the gun. Both characters are murderous psychopaths. The quasi-real-life Zoller dies when the French Jewish girl he becomes infatuated with shoots him in a cinema. In a life only slightly more real, Chris Kyle was shot dead on a Texas shooting range.
All Rogen pointed out was that he saw similarities between Stolz der Nation and American Sniper, but that was enough for thousands of chest-thumping NRA rednecks to descend on him like the Bible-bashing fools they are. What did Rogen do to deserve widespread abuse from people who consider shit-for-brains a valid form of intellectual discourse? Nothing. He didn’t even say what I’ve said here.
And these are the people who think the Middle East is full of dangerous religious maniacs.
So much for the Land of Freedom.
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UPDATE
Apparently, some clowns have attempted to put words in my mouth, suggesting that I called everyone who fights “fundamentalist Islamic terror” a murderous psychopath. However, in the absence of a definition of “fundamentalist Islamic terror”, I decline to engage with idiots.
On the positive side, it’s gratifying that the same clowns are regular readers of this little website. How else, after all, would they know what I’ve been waffling about here, and even more perplexingly, why would they care? Maybe I have more influence with clowns than I thought.
The reality is that I called Chris Kyle a murderous psychopath because that’s exactly what he was, no matter who he thought he was fighting. In a previous life, he’d have been slaughtering Indians.
What Iraqis think of American Sniper