Bush's America and Hitler's Germany?

I recently joined the ANU Film Group - a group that screens about 60 films a semester. For $35 a semester I can go to any shows I want, from recent blockbusters (I saw Blood Diamond last week) to more political films and shorts, and everything in between.

Tonight they screened a movie called 'Sophie Scholl: The Final Days". From the website:

"The true story of Germany's most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to thrilling life in the multi-award winning drama SOPHIE SCHOLL-THE FINAL DAYS. Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film of 2005, SOPHIE SCHOLL stars Julia Jentsch in a luminous performance as the young coed-turned-fearless activist. Armed with long-buried historical records of her incarceration, director Marc Rothemund expertly re-creates the last six days of Sophie Scholl's life: a heart-stopping journey from arrest to interrogation, trial and sentence."



It's an impressive movie about a woman I'd never heard of before last night. Definitley worth seeing.

As I was leaving the theater, I overheard 2 women talking in front of me. "The arbitrary-ness [of the Nazi High Court] is exactly what America is doing... like Guantanamo..."

That comment really struck me like a thunderbolt. My first reaction was to become totally offended (not enough to say anything, but enough to dismiss the comment out of hand in my head). Then, on my bike ride home I realized that I have no knowledge with which to judge that statement. Just my faith that America is good and therefore could not be doing anything as reprehensible as what was portrayed in the movie tonight.

The more I thought about it though - there's a lot of similar language n the movie to what I've heard. "aiding the enemy", "abetting terrorism". Terrorism is a word I've never really thought about before. The first thing that springs to mind is people in the desert, holding machine guns over their head, covered in masks and turbans and robes. (thanks to the American media for perpetrating that image).

"An end in terror is peferable to terror without end". This is a quote from the last leaflet The White Rose (the resistance group that Sophie and her brother started) wrote before they were executed for high treason.

Is Bush's America terror? I don't think so. But nothing else I've run across in the last 6 years has made me actually ask that question like this movie has. And that's not to say the information isn't out there - I've been avoiding it all. I claim to be apolitical, however I vote Democratic without really thinking, assuming they are the 'better' party. Really it's just laziness on my part to actually educate myself. I'm afraid it'll be like the omnipresent bumper sticker in Berkeley - "If you aren't mad, you aren't paying attention" I don't want to be mad though. I like being happy.

But what do I really know about what's going on in the name of America? Is Guantanamo like a Nazi High Court, with no justice, no presumption of innocence, with no conscience?

I do know one difference between Bush's America and Hitler's Germany. I'm not in danger of losing my head to the guillotine for asking questions like this. But I also know that that freedom is not due to Bush - it's what America is founded on and generations of men and women have ensured its tenacity. But what am I complicitly party to in the name of 'fighting terror'?

Looks like I have a lot to learn for myself.