VIDEO OF THE WEEK (Hitler Included!)

The, "Video of the Week" moniker is more of a joke, as it's something Clayton and I discussed doing when we first started this blog. Back then the plan was to have a post every single day, but as I'm a lazy procrastinator, and as Clayton is evidently at least a thousand times worse than I am, that clearly is nowhere near the reality of the situation. However, here's a video I wanted to share.

I recently heard the movie, Come and See mentioned on the podcast, "The Film Vault" as a, SUPER INCREDIBLY DISTURBING MOVIE or something of that sort. That piqued my masochistic interest of course, and that, coupled with the fact that I found out it was about the Eastern Front of WWII, was enough to get it in my Netflix queue. The Eastern Front of WWII (basically Hitler's fatal mistake of invading Russia) is something I don't know nearly enough about. It's not a huge part of American curriculum, as it began before America entered the war, and America had little to nothing to do with that front of the war. My thirst for knowledge always un-slaked, I've recently been studying the Eastern Front (or interspersing the studying of Belorussia (my new favorite word to say) along with the reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and it's all very interesting and very, very, horrible. Like, concentration camps don't have nothing on this aspect of the war. Imagine being a poor farmer and knowing you will either be tortured and killed by Stalin, for not fighting, or tortured and killed by Hitler, for resisting. The atrocities committed by German soldiers against the Russians, and then repaid upon German citizens by the Russians, boggle the mind.

Anyway, Come and See. It's the story of a very young Belorussian boy who joins the partisans to resist German invasion and basically wanders around for a few days witnessing all sorts of horrors. He narrowly escapes a bombing, his family is all killed, he's captured and rounded up into a barn which he gets out of in time to watch the entire village burned to death locked in that barn. The Germans who burn them are caught and he sees them all executed by the Russians. This entire time he's been carrying around a rifle that he finds in the very beginning of the movie, and rarely ever speaking (I think he goes deaf when he's almost hit by the first bomb or something). Anyway, after stumbling around in a PTSD daze the entire movie he finds a picture of Hitler lying in the mud, pulls up his rifle, and fires it (for the first time ever) into the picture. The movie itself was sort of boring, and not really all that disturbing (after reading the much more disturbing actual facts of what happened), but I found the last four or so minutes of the movie really moving. As he shoots the picture we see old newsreel footage of WWII, playing in reverse. Paratroopers fly back into planes, people run out of prison camps, Nazis goosestep backwards, Hitler gives speeches in reverse, burning books fly out of the fire back into the hands of those who threw them. The movie ends with a picture of a baby Adolf sitting in his mother's lap.

The problem is, shooting a picture of Hitler can't reverse evil any more than shooting Hitler himself could reverse it. I'm an eternal optimist who feels the mere concept of evil is proof that man is inherently good. If we were all evil, evil would be called, "normal," not, "bad." I feel we're progressing as a species, but at the same time - why have serial killers only existed for less than two hundred years? Why is racial extermination still a fairly new concept? How far back do we have to go to stop WWII? To before the invasion of Russia? Do before the Nazi Party? To the end of WWI? To the very birth of Hitler? Once evil is loosed into the world, it can never be taken back. If some guy kills my teenage daughter, and I catch him, torture him, and kill him slowly - it doesn't matter. Justice hasn't been served. My daughter is still dead. No matter what we do in revenge, or for punishment, evil has been done, and can never be undone. As Shakespeare once (kind of) said, "The good that men do is oft interred with their bones, but the evil men do lives on and on."