Abiola adds the following comments to his post about German film The Downfall which portrays the "human side" of Hitler:
And it also opens the way for people to say, "since he was human, he must have arrived at his ideas through reasoned reflection ..." in just the same manner that certain people like to go on and on about the "root causes of terrorism" being Western actions. In other words, it opens the way for those who'd like to argue that there was something to the man's ideas
I think people often underestimate the dangers of (to misappropriate a mathematical term) homomorphism - I intend this to mean assuming that someone else shares a similar method of thinking to oneself. For instance, the classic response of many western liberals [sic] - such as Jenny Tonge - to suicide bombers is to try and put themselves in the mind of the suicide bomber and assume that suicide bombers employ similar reasoning to oneself. What follows from this is the assumption, because one couldn't imagine becoming a suicide bomber unless there was some compellingly inevitable reason for doing so, that such a compelling justification must exist. This tendency may be similar to Pareidolia, the inbuilt tendency we have to recognise patterns where none exist. Thus, anyone making such a film must be aware of the possibility that viewers may over-identify with Hitler and should take care to avoid unintentionally lending his internal rationale a veneer of external rationality.
It seems as if Ronan Bennett's film about Al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell will suffer the same pitfalls. Although in the latter case, given Bennett's avowed support for the Provisional Republican movement and condemnation for those who would inform, even on the Omagh bombers, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that identification with the 9/11 terrorists is intentional, particularly given the numerous strained connections, evasions and obfuscations in Bennett's Observer piece on Ziad Jarrah.
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