The scenario: a Lufthansa plane loaded with approximately 150 passengers is taken by hijackers and in a period of twenty minutes....a decision has to be made by German authorities and the Bundeswehr. They've got a fighter jet aloft and simply are following the passenger plane. In a few minutes, it's obvious that it's heading toward a filled soccer arena (Allianz Arena) which has 70,000 fans inside. There's virtually no way that you can get the message to the stadium in time for the 70,000 to escape. So you (the command authorty) pass a message to the pilot of the fighter to down the passenger jet with the Germans onboard. The decision? Do you kill 150 passengers and a terrorist or two.....or allow the 70,000 in the stadium to die?
To add to the scenario now.....weeks have passed and the German bureaucracy has decided that murder charges should be applied against the fighter pilot, in an open court room.
A sampling of what German bureaucracy can become? Maybe, but it's now attached itself to a state-run movie production called "Terrorist" and will be shown on 17 October. At the end of the movie, you will vote (as the public) for the pilot to be cleared or the pilot to be declared guilty. The following night, Hart Aber Fair will run an entire hour of live public forum debate over the consequences.
It's hard to say what was going through the mind of the public-run TV media folks when they approved this movie and the script involved. They obviously want the public to think over the implications and make a decision of who to save....the 150-odd passengers or the 70,000 soccer fans. Perhaps they are preparing the public for an eventual event like this, or bringing the public to some rational understanding of the threat around Germany.
The odds that the word "Jihad" will be uttered in the movie? I really doubt that they'd go and make this into such a movie. My humble guess is that the terrorist involved will barely be shown (maybe two minutes of his threat and the hijacking of the plane itself). The vast majority of this movie is about a court case fantasy to be played out and the fighter-pilot involved who simply took orders and did the best he could to bring down the passenger plane.
Logic? If you are a Green Party guy.....your thinking may lead that it was best to just let it all occur, and let the 150-odd passengers die with the 70,000 soccer fans. If you are a CSU guy from Bavaria....you'd shoot the passenger plane down with three seconds of thinking.
How many will watch this? That's a curious thing. It's on a Monday night at 8:15PM, on a state-run network. They've tried some really creative advertisements for the movie over the past month, and might get some people who are curious. The under-25 crowd? Forget about. For most who get about 30 minutes into this and realize it's just a court debate over accusing some fighter-pilot of carrying out orders, they might just turn flip the channel to some reality TV show or some soccer game. My humble guess is that a quarter of start-up viewers of the movie will be gone by the last minute of the fantasy movie.
So, on the morning of the 18th (Tuesday), if you are an American in Germany.....you might hear three or four of your associates being all chatty about guilt or innocence, and you will know what the topic is all about.
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