Cold war comedy that shows what satire begs to be written about the New World Order

Rating: 9/10 (27 December 2019)

This brand of comedy isn't for everybody - my wife who grew up after the Cold War and the heyday of ZAZ movies thinks it's stupid - but watching it again after 25 years, I was still laughing the whole way through.
Now imagine if that same over-the-top silliness directed then at East Germany in this film was directed today at China, the Middle East and their hard-and-fast Big Oil and Silicon Valley business partners here in the West; back then leading up to WWII, you had Thomas Watson's IBM furnishing the Fuhrer with the punch card technology used to efficiently process the prisoners through the death camps and Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors furnishing the Fuhrer with the Blitz trucks used in the Blitzkrieg, as Edwin Black has written about. Today, you have Google and other American tech giants helping China perfect its Social Credit Score and facial recognition systems to make its surveillance state all the more oppressive, while meanwhile, American retirement fund money is finding its way into investments in the same Chinese companies manufacturing the ICBM's that China is pointing at American cities. (Go read the October 2019 issue of Hillsdale College's Imprimis entitled "Why and How the U.S. Should Stop Financing China's Bad Actors".) Why not take the same kind of jabs at Silicon Valley tech giants the same way ZAZ did with Ford with the exploding Pinto gag in the film?
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, you have reports coming out about how the government misled the American public about the failed 18-year Afghanistan War campaign on the same scope and level they did with Vietnam while Big Oil grew richer and richer by the day. (Go read "The Afghanistan papers: a secret history of the war" published by the Washington Post.) that commenced, of course, after 9/11 (which 3,000 professionals over at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have staked their professional reputations on asserting that the WTC collapse was a controlled demolition using remotely-activated explosive charges planted inside the buildings) which was ostensibly masterminded in a cave in Afghanistan by fromer CIA director and president George H.W. Bush's old 1970's "Arbusto Energy" business partner, Salem bin Laden's half-brother, Osama bin Laden.... Uh-huh.
Can you imagine if Abrahams and the Zucker brothers weren't hamstrung by political correctness and the fear of offending the Chinese and the Saudis (not to mention Silicon Valley and Wall Street) and felt as free to take the same jabs at those entities as they were with the East Germans?
As author Dorothy Sayers who translated "The Inferno" has pointed out, back in his day, Dante took a lot of heat (pun intended) for populating the various levels of hell with real-life celebrity characters in Italian public life and politics whose foibles and misdeeds were well-known in his day and, in the process, created a piece of satire that has stood the test of time for 7 centuries.
The foibles and misdeeds of the 21st-century New World Order similarly beg to satirized as unforgivingly by the Zucker bros. or somebody - perhaps with the same over-the-top absurdity - in as worthy a work of satire as East Germany was in this film. If you can't change the existing order of things, at least you can take a good jab at it. Humanity needs that - as both Dante and the Zucker bros. enduring satire has proven.