“At no time during the start, the middle or ever, did I have the intention of rewriting history. It was only when I was smack dab up against it, that I decided to go my own way. It just came to me as I was doing what I do, which is follow my characters as opposed to lead.”

(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090817/PEOPLE/908179997)

The whole point/theme of the movie is, as you note, that violence does not occur in a vacuum. It’s unpredictable, sometimes seemingly random, sometimes genuinely random, and that wherever people bring a capacity for violence into a given place or time, violence will happen, it will get chaotic, and it’ll be destructive.

The two narrative plots of the movie illustrate this brilliantly. The two Basterds in the theatre are killed by Landa’s bomb. Shoshonna didn’t need to sacrifice herself to kill the top Nazis, as Landa and the Basterds would have done that anyway. And the Basterds didn’t necessarily have to get involved at all; as Shoshonna’s plan to burn the theater might well have worked.

Like war and history, the movie itself is messy, with its anachronisms, imperfect subtitles, etc., right up to the twice-mispelled title. But as Ebert says, a movie’s worth lies not in what it is about but *how* it is about it. IB is about a nonsense, groundlings-pleasing daydream of a past its author had no connection to. But in the how, it earns artistic praise. If, as everyone agrees, asinine movies can be made from great subjects, can’t a great movie be made about an asinine subject?

Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to write this, Jeffrey.