I'm so tired of the French taking advantage of the best the NOMF has to offer, from Jerry Lewis to recycled British game and reality shows. Now they have embraced the entire soul and inspiration of American culture with The Game of Death, inspired by Ivy League experiments at Yale in the sixties that were designed to determine whether the Nazi contagion had jumped to the offspring of the Greatest Generation.
For those of you who missed the results, yes, Americans in the Yale experiments proved perfectly willing to commit torture and mass murder when convinced by authority figures that it's the right thing to do. I remember after getting drafted being told to look at my service as a wonderful way to travel the world, see new places, meet interesting people, and kill them.
On The Game of Death, the snail-eaters go one step better and make the torture and extermination of other contestants something to be wildly applauded by a studio audience in exchange for prizes, such as super-sized Happy Meals for a year or cases of Huggies and free trips to a theme park.
Of course, there are a few who question whether such clear indications of human depravity can really be trusted to teach anything, unlike history, which is always written by the winners in ways that obscure any lessons to be learned.
Jacques Semelin, "a psychologist and historian who studies genocide and totalitarianism," according to the AFP story I read, distributed by our modern Yahoos, questions the elements of manipulation in The Game of Death, that is totally different from mass rallies where political morons incites ordinary little Eichmanns to bring it to the enemy before the enemy brings it to us.
As if.