Is the shoe on the other foot?

Rating: 10/10 (27 May 2007)

Watching the film for the fifth or sixth time this Memorial Day, I had a whole different set of emotions (on top of all the others from previous viewings). Shame and fear, for two. Will someone in the Hague read the same indictments to us for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? I shuddered when Widmark read out the new 'Nuremberg' laws - secret arrests without notifying friends or family, holding without trial, torture...How uncomfortably close to the patriot act. The first reviewer mentioned that the essential message had been lost - it wasn't the Holocaust, it was what led up to it: the betrayal of law and the concept of justice for survival. "Survival as What?"
Germany drifted into the betrayal of its civilization. Fifty years later, they told us not to invade Iraq. Germany recovered. But are we caught in the same drift?