Philip K. Dick´s nazi diaries influence

@Gehirn: BINGO! Indeed it was for that very reason! @Arkadine: Interesting insight you shared there. But talking emotions, if the replicants didn't have any, how's Pris able to 'enjoy' pulling a spider's legs out? If they know what fun is, they should know sadness as well, unless they've been programmed that way, no?

@HAL 9000 Well, the replicants are a great allegory, a great mirror for us people. You could ask the same about a psychopath or a serial killer... how can they be nice to a pet dog, or be moved by a Symphony and, on the other hand, be able to perform the most horrifying acts without feeling any remorse? Well, empathy, or the lack of it is the answer.

@Arkadine: You got a point there. But I'd assume human's would always be a lot more complex and 'random', if you want. An attribute I'd never expect to find in replicants, no matter how cleverly programmed they'd be. Therefore, behave much more predictable in a way.

Here is a truly horrifying fact: a chief Nazi argument against Jewish people was that they presumably "stabbed Germany in the back" in WW1. Many decades later, someone actually calculated the statistics on Jewish German soldiers in WW1. The results were terribly, horrifyingly, brutally ironic. Turns out that they had the highest percentage of soldiers killed in action of all religious denominations in the imperial German army. Not only did they fight for their homeland of Germany, they also fought more bravely than anyone else. Now how f---ed up is that? Never again! is a statement whose importance cannot be over-emphasized; it is therefore important to know more about the Nazis in a critical fashion. I set up a viewing/reading list below, if anyone's interested: SF NOVEL: His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem (has a scene where a Holocaust survivor scientist shares some of his experiences with a colleague...very creepy and thought-provoking. And even without it, it is one of the finest SF novels ever. MOVIES: "Conspiracy" with Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, about the Wannsee conference, where the details of the Holocaust were agreed and organized. The deadpan, bureaucratized manner in which they discuss it is truly frightening. "The Pianist" - the very worst and the very best of humanity, in one great masterpiece (wipes the floor with Schindler's List, a good movie but not even close to this (POlanski was there as a kid, so , unlike Spielberg, he did not have a major chip on his shoulder making it. NON SF BOOKS: "The Imprisoned Mind" by Czeslaw Milosz - best primer on how to resist any form of totalitarianism, with focus on the Nazis and the Soviets "Deutsches Requiem" by Jorge Luis Borges - EXTREMELY disturbing and creepy short story, written as a confession by a concentration camp director. Dark, scary, and yuckily unrepentant. "Mother Night" by Kurt Vonnegut - classic! NONFICTION: "Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth" by Gitta Serenyi.

Hey Wirrn, I agree with most items on your list, maybe not so much with the movie "Conspiracy", I found it pretty lenghty and weak (not referring to the story here but how it's been made into a film). Then I couldn't agree more on how much 'better' "The Pianist" is compared to "Schindlers List". Have you ever heard of the novel (1992) and TV film (1994) "Fatherland"? Might be worth adding to your list. Oh, and how about the film "Downfall" (2004)? Or do you maybe feel like it is looking at the Holocaust from the wrong perspective? As I'm not sure about your background, I'd understand that only too well. [i]"Fatherland is a bestselling 1992 thriller by the English writer and journalist Robert Harris. It takes the form of a high concept alternative history set in a world in which Nazi Germany won World War II. The novel was an immediate bestseller in the UK. It has sold over three million copies and has been translated into 25 languages."[/i]

@ HAL9000 Read Fatherland as soon as it came out; it is a fine novel, I'm a fan of Robert Harris. Did not watch the movie. Harris was very correct in identifying Reinhard Heydrich as the most sinister Nazi figure, worse even than Herr Schickelgruber himself. I liked Conspiracy because of its focus on Heydrich, as played by Kenneth Branagh. "Der Untergang" - Did not like it too much. Bruno Ganz did a great job playing the mustachioed shitface, but otherwise I thought the movie was way too stereotypical and formulaic. For a great description of the last days, you may want to look at Gitta Serenyi's book; it also has a lot of stuff that is both counter-intuitive and cannot be found almost anywhere else. It also shows how the nowadays-sanitized Wernher von Braun was actually one of the worst Nazis ever - the Dora installation, where the V1 and V2 rockets were built, was probably the most inhumane of all Nazi labor camps (death camps were a different matter - Auschwitz is remembered today because it was a mixed labor/death camp, so there was a number of survivng witnesses. With a pure death camp, like say Chelmno, we now know almost nothing, as there were exactly 2 survivors.) And I was told by a guy who read the memoir of von Braun's USA handler that, whenever von Braun and his mates went out for a drink, von Braun would start behaving almost exactly like dr. Strangelove, with his arm flying upward into a Nazi salute etc. Truth is often more f---d up than fiction.

PS I don't think there is a "right" or a "wrong" way of looking at the Holocaust (except for denying that it took place on the one hand, or insisting that every German is a born Nazi on the other); what I think is that, the more one finds out about it, the better equipped one should be for the "never again" thing. My country -Croatia - was under great repression between two world wars (basically given to the Serbian king as a gift by the Entente powers), and when Hitler attacked royalist Yugoslavia (a state the Croats hated), they were co-opted as allies, and a puppet "Independent state of Croatia" was created. When this was announced on the radio, my grandfather opened a bottle of champagne. He was then invited to the capital, where the new regime offered him a high-ranking post. It took grandfather only a couple of days to see just what kind of state they were setting up; in the end, he told them to their faces that they were traitors and left in disgust. Luckily he had somewhere to go. The said regime then proceeded to do some of the worst Nazi stuff anywhere. My dad lost a Jewish childhood sweetheart to the Holocaust. He described to me how the awful things were done gradually. First they demanded that all Jews in his school wear a yellow star; the next day, the whole class showed up wearing yellow stars out of solidarity. But, very gradually, step by step, they identified and took the Jewish kids away anyway. This, I think, is the important thing usually missed about the Holocaust: many people did try to do something about it as it was happening, at many different levels, and yet it did not work (heck, Heydrich was THE architect of the Holocaust, and yet his own BROTHER later lost his life saving people - most of them Jewish - from the nightmare his brother cooked up). The big question is how to stop such a stepwise process of dehumanization, if it is to truly be NEVER AGAIN. That's my opinion.

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”----- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

THis morning the Science Channel run a documentry about the writer Philip K. Dick's life. It was very interesting as he, a writer, kept coming up with stories about parallel earth and stories that have been made into movies i am aware of . There was mention of a book 'The Man In The High Castle'. dealing with a different outcome of WWII. The storyline caused me to remember the scene where Fifield and millburn discove a pile of Engineer bodies. THere was a mention of holocaust. I could help but wonder(especially since Ridley Scott was part of the program.).that the scene was a nod toward Dick's writing in the SciFi field.