Tea at Trianon: Zone of Interest (2023)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Zone of Interest (2023)

From The Easton Gazette:

Zone of Interest (2023) film poster, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Rudolf Höss: I wasn't really paying attention... I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room. ~Zone of Interest (2023)
Winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Zone of Interest (2023) is perhaps one of the most placid films ever made yet it leaves the viewer with the feeling best expressed by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!” At the center of the apocalyptic upheavals of World War II is Hitler’s “Final Solution” in which he and his henchman methodically planned the extermination of European Jewry, leading to the deaths of 2/3 of the Jews of Europe. While there have been other holocausts in history, such as the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840’s; the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks from 1915 to 1923; the mass starvation of the Ukrainians in the 1930’s; the ethnic cleansing of the Poles by the Soviets in the 1940’s; Stalin’s purges of his own people at various times throughout his thirty-five year reign of terror; Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the mid-20th century and the mass murders of the Pol Pot regime in the 1980’s, as well as others, none compares to the vast extent of the systematic murders of the Jews by the Nazis. While the aforementioned genocides numbered in the tens of thousands to the millions, none surpasses the Shoah and its six million victims, with the possible exception of the deaths due to Chinese Communism, for which there are no reliable statistics. While Holocaust deniers try to claim that six million deaths is an exaggeration, anyone who has studied the topic, such as Father Patrick Desbois in his book Holocaust by Bullets (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009) knows that even into the 21st century mass graves of Jews have continued to be discovered throughout Eastern Europe. After so much death, the world could never be the same again.
However, we Americans often wonder at the compliance of the Germans and other nationalities with the Nazi policies at rounding up and handing over their friends and neighbors who happened to be Jewish. We know there were active underground movements of brave citizens, usually persons of faith, who risked their lives to save Jews from the gas chambers, such as the Ten Boom family in Holland, as told in Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. Yet when we see films on the Holocaust or even documentaries on The History Channel we are stunned that a crime of such magnitude was allowed to happen in the sight of all the world. (Read more.)