Thunderhawk wrote:Seems a little inappropriate given that the German extermination industry wasnt cheery and light hearted like the song is. Then there all his fellow campmates who didnt survive, his dancing and prancing seems more like he is rubbing his status as survivor it in the "face" of the memory of those who died.
I will refer to my esteemed colleague Slavoj Zizek. During a talk about revolutionary theory and praxis, he makes a joke from 15th century Russia, in which a Mongol warrior (part of the occupying force) stops a peasant man and his wife. The warrior prepares to rape the woman and orders her husband to protect his genitals from the dirt on the ground. After the horrifying act is concluded, the warrior rides away on his horse, and the man begins to giggle. When his wife asks why, he replies: "I didn't protect his balls at all. They're all covered in dirt." (The point is that this "protest" does nothing, and Zizek suggests that we need to "cut them off".)
Here he responds to criticism of the joke, with obvious parallels to our discussion here:
Click.
Thunderhawk wrote:It might be about mocking the symbols of death, but the camps are now monuments to the dead, so mocking one effectively mocks the other from the outside perspective.
It should be remembered that a prime motivating force for Jews to survive the Holocaust was not for their own personal joy or happiness, but rather to
tell the world about what happened. Those who organized the revolt at Treblinka, for example, had no illusions about how many would survive an uprising. But they did it (and most sacrificed themselves) so that the story would be told.
Thus, when I see this man dancing with his child and grandchildren, I not only consider it most appropriate, but indeed a celebration of precisely what those who died would hope to see in the aftermath. I would suggest that it is
your projection of this video clip that makes it seem like they are mocking the dead.
Thunderhawk wrote:Wouldn't dancing in front of the Reichstag and in the Nuremberg fields be more appropriate symbolically?
Yeah, dude.. You should totally send him a Twitter and be like "d00D! Ur doin it WRONG.. Go dance in front of the Reichstag, n00BB!! lolz" You're obviously much more qualified to judge which location would be best for the dance than he is.
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"Whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism." Chinua Achebe
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