Winner 2013 Webby Awards for Best Political Website
June 19, 2013

 Choose a size
Text Size

Trending:     chris hedges     economy     nsa     politics     robert scheer
Most Read

Reporter Who Brought Down the 'Runaway General' Dead at 33

The Terror Con

Greenland's Great Melt Is Pinned on Climate Change

The U.S. Military and the Unraveling of Africa

Nate Silver vs. Politico: It's on Again

Most Comments
Most Emailed

 * NEW! * Greenland’s Great Melt Is Pinned on Climate Change
The Making of a Global Security State



The Unwinding


Truthdig Bazaar
‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’

‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’

By Ogi Ogas (Author), Sai Gaddam (Author)

The Case for God

The Case for God

By Karen Armstrong
$18.45

more items

 
Arts and Culture

The Hack: Reflections on a Nazi-Era Filmmaker

Email this item Email    Print this item Print    Share this item... Share

Posted on Jun 18, 2010
Zeitgeist Films

By Richard Schickel

(Page 2)

A small dose of reality enters the film with the appearances of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan. They are the niece and nephew of Harlan and, respectively, the widow and the long-time production associate of the great American director. She met Kubrick while working for him as an actress in “Paths of Glory” and, in due course, she introduced Kubrick, a Jew, to her uncle. She recalls her husband fortifying himself with a tall glass of vodka before the meeting. More important, she remembers him pondering the older man’s career in highly personal terms, wondering what he might have done had he been in Harlan’s position in Nazi Germany. Kubrick had served time in Hollywood, he had seen plenty of directors compromise their best impulses in order to sustain their careers. Above all, he could understand what a short, careless step it might have been for Harlan to do a distasteful job for Goebbels. He seems to have thought it was a little like doing something unworthy, but easily forgotten, for Louis B. Mayer. He was also thinking “there but for the grace of God. ...” According to Mrs. Kubrick, he made extensive notes for a film he considered making about Harlan, though nothing concrete came of this interest.

Putting the point simply, Stanley Kubrick knew—from observation, never from practice—what it was to be a hack. Central to that identity, I think, is the sense that no large consequences ever flow from any particular artistic enterprise. The idea was just to keep moving from one forgettable project to the next, earning a nice living, making a comfortable life. Whatever pretenses about his work that a hack may offer the public, in the deepest part of his soul he thinks no one is paying much attention to him, that he can pretty much get away with anything. 

Up to a point, this proved to be the case with Veit Harlan. He continued to direct throughout the Nazi years, most notably with “Kolberg,” a historical military spectacle, that diverted resources the Nazis could well have deployed elsewhere in the waning years of the war (Goebbels found his rough cut “defeatist”). At his de-Nazification hearings Harlan presented himself as an innocent victim of Nazism, even claiming to have written and shot an exculpatory ending for “Jud Süss,” which, naturally, Goebbels rejected.

We don’t know that for certain. What common sense tells us is that a man as well connected as Harlan was had to know in 1940 something like the full meaning of Nazism. What we do know is that by 1950 Harlan was directing again; he made no less than nine movies in the following 12 years, perhaps not knowing that “Jud Süss” was then—and later—circulating widely in the Middle East, continuing to do its evil work among Muslim audiences at least as receptive to its message as the Nazis had been. 

It’s well and good, if useless, for Harlan family members to decry their patriarch’s sins, for which, obviously, they bear no responsibility and thus no guilt. But in narrowly focusing on them, Moeller has blown off two opportunities—to fully tell a fascinating story and, more important, to reflect on the consequences of the hack mentality. It is more than possible that amorality—“just doing my job”—is just as loathsome as immorality—“I really like doing my job.” In any case, it remains the central conundrum of Nazism, entirely unexplored in this documentary.

Richard Schickel, whose celebrated and prolific career spans 50 years, has been the film critic for Time and Life magazines, has written more than 20 books and has produced, written and directed numerous documentaries.

1   2

More Below the Ad

Advertisement

Get truth delivered to
your inbox every week.

Previous item: Deconstructing Marley

Next item: André Naffis-Sahely on Mahmoud Darwish



New and Improved Comments

If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.

Night-Gaunt's avatar

By Night-Gaunt, June 24, 2010 at 3:22 pm Link to this comment

By christian96, June 22 at 3:14 pm #

“To those of you who are concerned about Israel-Arab relations may I suggest you read “God’s War On Terror” by Walid Shoebat.  Mr. Shoebat is an ex-Palestinian terrorist who converted to Christianity after reading the Bible.”

I have heard of him and he is an alleged fake. A false creation in order to be used for propaganda purposes by both Jews and Christians to defame the Palestinians, Islam in general and to make money. So I would be very wary of invoking him as a good source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walid_Shoebat

Aren’t anti-Christian Jews the ones who turned their back on their religion and converted to this bastardized version? A hybrid of Judaism with Christianity called Messianic Judaism? You won’t find any Christians doing it, that I have seen. Aren’t they anti-Jew for their machinations to destroy Judaism and replace it with this? Yes.

Hate can be shown in love of conversion of one groups beliefs into something else. So instead of killing the believer you kill their original, offending religion by converting them to your own! Even to them retaining some semblance of their now dead religion because it conforms with your own. NO murder, no death camps, no hateful speeches but the religion is killed none-the-less. So even the love they show is backed by a hatred of that which they do not promote. Slickly done but still evil. That is the wrong kind of love.

So for Veit Harlan, he didn’t hate Jews but he was a disinterested collaborator who made Jewish characters into more evil ones without being hateful of them for his movies to please his masters. Well that makes all the difference doesn’t it? Not to me but to the Allies yes. He got off, not even any prison time! Are they more gullible than I was or did they have other considerations I am unaware of?

Report this

By christian96, June 23, 2010 at 7:18 pm Link to this comment

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOVE?

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, June 23, 2010 at 12:59 pm Link to this comment

truedigger3, June 23 at 11:39 am #

Re:By Inherit The Wind, June 23 at 7:43 am #

ITW,

You, ITW, are talking about facts??!! Are you kidding.?
The facts are right in front of you and staring you in the eyes but you cann’t see them because of your Zionist blinders and your emotional attachment to Israel.
You are brain-washed but unfortunately I am not trained in de-programming cultists!.

**************************************

You know, you can spout that bullshit all day and it doesn’t bother me…that’s just you and your warped vision.

But when you say to someone else “Get Lost!” you are saying “You don’t have a right to speak!”


And that says more about you than I wanted to know.

Report this

By firefly, June 23, 2010 at 7:57 am Link to this comment

By Ed Harges, June 22 at 2:22 pm #

Sorry, handmaidens of Israel. You can’t distract us
by complaining about a forgotten piece of lousy
propaganda
produced 70 years ago by a regime that no longer
exists.
That was so very then.
And this is so very now:
Israel to Demolish Palestinian Homes for ‘Tourist
Center’
—————————————————-
And a lot more as well. Thank you for saying this.

One of the most annoying aspects of Israel at present
is how it justifies EVERYTHING it does, by using
history. By pointing out the mistakes and injustices
of ancient history, it is saying that ANYTHING they
do now is therefore acceptable. Because of WWII,
Israel seems to believe that persecuting others today
is somehow acceptable. The problem is that certain
ideologues believe that they should be exempt from
the same standards of human justice as the rest of
humanity.  i.e. there are human beings and there are
Jews who are on a pedestal.

We can go on and on about how awful anti-Semitism was
during WWII and how much suffering it caused.
Meanwhile Israel can cause suffering to others today
with absolute impunity. I’m not an Israel-hater, but
I do believe in equality and justice for ALL people.

Report this

By truedigger3, June 23, 2010 at 7:39 am Link to this comment

Re:By Inherit The Wind, June 23 at 7:43 am #

ITW,

You, ITW, are talking about facts??!! Are you kidding.?
The facts are right in front of you and staring you in the eyes but you cann’t see them because of your Zionist blinders and your emotional attachment to Israel.
You are brain-washed but unfortunately I am not trained in de-programming cultists!.

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, June 23, 2010 at 3:43 am Link to this comment

TD3:

Far more indicative of your dogmatic zeal and inability to recognize contradicting facts is contained in your last two words to Jacob:
“Get Lost!”

Nothing says more about you than that.

Report this

By Jacob, June 23, 2010 at 2:27 am Link to this comment

Truedigger3

  As expected facts are irrelevant to the hate-Israel crowd. No surprise here.

Report this

By truedigger3, June 22, 2010 at 10:53 pm Link to this comment

ITW,

It is amazing, how Denial/Self-bullshitting can blind someone from seeing the facts and common sense, even if they are right in front of his face, and staring him in the eyes.
It is a human affliction, and I admit, I fell victim to it in certain episodes in my life but not this one.
You are in Denial/Self-bull-shitting mode regarding anything relating to Israel.
Yes, you said you hate Natanyahoo, but Natanyahoo is no different from all the Israeli prime ministers before him. He is just has a big mouth and cannot hide his feelings and mince his words.
Natanyahoo was not the prime minister who destroyed Gaza and killed 1500 mostly civilians including hundreds of women and children.
Peace.

Report this

By Belinda Gomez, June 22, 2010 at 9:56 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Considering how many rather dull documentaries Mr.S. has pumped out himself (The Men that Made the Movies series, for example) I think he’s a bit unfair to Moeller.

Report this

By firefly, June 22, 2010 at 8:42 pm Link to this comment

All this endless mastication about anti-Semitism
during WWII is so tedious. Will it ever stop? Why is
there a constant obsession over this? More blacks and
non-whites have been persecuted throughout the ages
than Jews. Americans virtually committed genocide,
all but wiping out the original inhabitants of this
continent, but how much do we hear about that? 27
million Russians, 20 million Chinese and 18 million
non-Jewish Europeans died during WWII, but we don’t
hear endless machinations about the dead, we don’t
have incessant musings about the dead, we don’t go on
and on and on and on about it. More recently, 5
million Congolese have died and there’s nothing, nada
about it, no holocaust museums, no endless analysis,
scrutiny and examination. In Rwanda 900,000 people
were killed in 3 months! That’s 10,000 a day! Do you
think we will be talking about that 70 years from
now? Or maybe, we’ll be talking about how the
Israeli’s persecuted the Palestinians for 60 years
non-stop!

Don’t get me wrong, I think what happened to the Jews
during WWII is abominable, but Jews aren’t the only
people to have suffered throughout history. Its time
to give it a rest!

Report this

By christian96, June 22, 2010 at 8:21 pm Link to this comment

Ed Harges—-It’s obvious you are ingesting some
mind altering substance and/or ignorant.  While in
Jerusalem I had two Palestinian Christian young
ladies working for World Vision in Jerusalim drive
me through two Israeli check points and a Palestinian
check point on our way to the town of Rafah in the
Gaza Strip so I could meet a 10 years deaf mentally
retarded girl I support with World Vision.  The ladies didn’t discuss problems with Israeli’s but did discuss problems with radical Mulim terrorists.
I attended services with the Tabernacle of David
and Shepherd of Israel congresgations in Jerusalem.
Both congregations are Christian Jews.  They related
antichristian Jews attacking their congregations.
The antichristian Jews would throw stones at the
windows of the meeting places of the Christian Jews.
If you had above average intelligence I wouldn’t
even have to explain those conditions to you.
I have no idea what you mean by me spreading Israel’s hateful propaganda.  I recommended a book
written by an ex-Muslim terrorist.  If you are
interested in understanding what Muslims terrorist
are taught about the Koran I would suggest you read
the book.  If not, then remain ignorant so you can
maintain your ignorant bisases.

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, June 22, 2010 at 5:09 pm Link to this comment

truedigger3, June 22 at 8:11 pm #

By Jacob, June 22 at 1:59 pm #


Jacob,

You are lying, bullshitting, fabricating and obfuscatin history.
So, I will not waste time and energy with you anymore. Get Lost.!

***************************************

Yeah, you’re a real believer in freedom of speech—as long as the speaker says something you like.  This is a typical reaction from you when someone posts something you don’t like—like evidence any Arab anywhere ever killed any Jew anywhere except in self-defense. You tell them to “shut up”, or “get lost”. This isn’t the first time, either.

I can just imagine you defending the 1972 Munich terrorists.  Maybe you should try living in Saudi Arabia, or Yemen or, Syria.  You’d be back on the first plane outta there.

Report this

By heimweh, June 22, 2010 at 5:03 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Tony Gerard:

Veit Harlan’s “Jud Suss” was not based on the Feuchtwanger novel.  The 1934 British film “Jew Suss,” starring Conrad Veidt, was.  I agree, however, that Schickel carelessly misconstrues Feuchtwanger’s motives in making the character of Oppenheimer part Gentile.  It’s another case of his just not knowing enough about this topic.

Report this

By truedigger3, June 22, 2010 at 4:11 pm Link to this comment

By Jacob, June 22 at 1:59 pm #


Jacob,

You are lying, bullshitting, fabricating and obfuscatin history.
So, I will not waste time and energy with you anymore. Get Lost.!

Report this
Ed Harges's avatar

By Ed Harges, June 22, 2010 at 12:07 pm Link to this comment

re:By christian96, June 22 at 3:14 pm:

As a Christian, does it ever occur to you that plenty
of Palestinians are Christians, and that Israel treats
Christian Palestinians with the same utter contempt
and cruelty, the same denial of the right to live in one’s
birthplace, the same disregard for a supposedly
inferior race and religion, which it dishes out to Muslim
Palestinians? You should be ashamed of yourself, helping to
spread Israel’s hateful propaganda as it brutally mistreats
your co-religionists, while it bamboozles the (mostly Christian)
American taxpayers to pay for the whole enterprise.
If Jesus returned and saw what you are doing,
I wouldn’t be surprised if he lost his blessed
cool and gave you a whack upside the head.

Report this

By christian96, June 22, 2010 at 11:14 am Link to this comment

To those of you who are concerned about Israel-Arab
relations may I suggest you read “God’s War On Terror” by Walid Shoebat.  Mr. Shoebat is an ex-palestinian terrorist who coneverted to Christianity
after reading the Bible.  He discusses very well the teaching of the Koran and how those concepts are
influencing the minds of Muslims.  For example,
Mr. Shoebat relates on page 73, “If you think terrorists are all insane, then the Chairman of the
Arab Psychiatric Association, Adef Sadeq must also
be insane.  Why else would he state to the media,
‘When the martyr dies a martyr’s death, he attains
the height of bliss….As a psychiatrist, I say that
the height of bliss comes with the end of the countdown: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one, and the BOOM, he explodes, and senses himself flying because he knows for certain
that he is not dead…It is a transition to another,
more beautiful world, because he knows very well that within seconds he will see the light of the creator.  He will be at the closest possible point
to Allah…’ (Hadith Al Madina, Egypt, April 23, 2002.
Mr. Shoebat went on to say on the same page, “Discussions of Western gullibility during my
college days, we would confirm their feelings by
using half statements, ‘sure we hated Hitler,’ we
said in front of Americans.  But when we were alone,
we would say ‘we hate Hitler, he never got the job
done.’

Report this
Ed Harges's avatar

By Ed Harges, June 22, 2010 at 10:22 am Link to this comment

Sorry, handmaidens of Israel. You can’t distract us
by complaining about a forgotten piece of lousy propaganda
produced 70 years ago by a regime that no longer exists.

That was so very then.

And this is so very now:

Israel to Demolish Palestinian Homes for ‘Tourist Center’

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/06/21/israel-to-demolish-palestinian-homes-
for-tourist-center/

Report this

By Jacob, June 22, 2010 at 9:59 am Link to this comment

Truedigger3

  Yes, there were periods when Jews were treated well by the Muslim countries, like in Arab Spain. But, they (and the Christians) were always considered to be “dhimmi”. Tolerated unbelievers were called dhimmi, or ahl al-dhimma, “the people of the pact.” This was a legal term for the tolerated and protected non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state. The dhimmis recognized the supremacy of Islam and the dominance of the Muslim state, and their acceptance of a position of subordination, symbolized by certain social restrictions and by the payment of a poll tax (jizya) to which Muslims were not subject.
  And violence by Muslims against Jews did not start in 1948 as you write. Massacres of Jews by Muslims were recorded in Aleppo (1850, 1875), Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890), Beirut (1862, 1874), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Jerusalem (1847), Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901-02), Mansura (1877), Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901-07), Port Said (1903, 1908) - these are just key cases.
  By 1947 the 650,000 Palestinian Jews had the right to political self-determination. They did not live on anybody’s land. They owned legally the land they were living on. While you are a citizen of the US,  the Palestinian Arabs and Jews were not citizens of a Palestinian-Arab state. All of them were citizens of Mandatory Palestine and before 1918, citizens of the Ottoman Empire. During the twenties and thirties the Palestinian Arabs never spoke of a Palestinian Arab state. They considered themselves to be part of Greater Syria. One of their historians, while appearing before the Peel Commission, said the the term Palestine is a Zionist term. Indeed, the English language paper of the Zionist movement was called The Palestine Post (today - The Jerusalem Post), the financial institution of the movement was called The Anglo Palestine Bank.
  The Palestinian Jews fought for their political self-determination and independence against the imperialist power. That caused the UN to intervene and in the end Israel came into being. The Arabs
not only rejected the UN partition plan. They started
a bloody civil war the Arabs in Palestine started immediately after the UN vote, which culminated with the invasion of the regular armies of five Arab states, on the day Israel was proclaimed. They hoped to prevent the implementation of the UN decision by military means. They lost that war and Israel survived. It won, but paid a very heavy price for the victory - 6,000 dead. A whole one percent of the total Jewish population in Palestine at that time.
If the Arabs had accepted the partition and had not started the war, there would have been no refugees and the independent Arab state would have been 62 y old today. 
  I hope you are familiar with the Hamas founding charter. Its prologue states that Hamas’ aim is a war - not against Israel or Zionism but against the Jewish people at large, since the Jews, and not merely Israel and Zionism, are the enemies of Islam.
  The entire chapter 22 is devoted to detailing the iniquities of the Jews:
  According to Hamas, the Jews are responsible for all the ills of modern society - the French Revolution, the Communist revolution, the establishment of secret associations (Freemasons, Rotary and Lions clubs, B’nai B’rith), designed to help them gain control of the world by secret means. They control the economy, press and television; they are responsible for the outbreak of World War I, which they initiated in order to destroy the Muslim caliphates (the Ottoman empire), to get the Balfour Declaration and set up the League of Nations with the aim of establishing their state. They also initiated World War II in order to make a fortune from selling war materials; they use both capitalism and communism as their agents.
  If this is not anti-Semitism what is it?

Report this

By old Germany Catholic, June 21, 2010 at 10:54 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Schickel forgot to mention the nuclear nightmare Israel proudly prods at the world. His complaints are meaningless by comparison.

Report this

By Louis Proyect, June 21, 2010 at 12:41 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

There’s something of an irony here. Schickel wrote a biography whitewashing Elia Kazan, whose ratting out of CP’ers was justifiable because they were anti-American. I don’t think there’s much different here from Veit Harlan. Perhaps our own intellectuals and artists who went along with McCarthyism deserve to be in a lower circle of hell. Here’s my own review:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/harlan-in-the-shadow-of-jew-suss/

Report this
Night-Gaunt's avatar

By Night-Gaunt, June 21, 2010 at 11:13 am Link to this comment

truedigger3, I was speaking in past times not now like during the Black death in the 14th century.

One of the many problems with the the leadership in Israel is the over playing of the Holocaust card (leaving out all the other millions murdered when they do it; it was 11-12 million in total,) to such an extent coupled with their own atrocities against their minorities is leaving bad tastes in many mouths including those who don’t want the Holocaust reduced to a tool for cynical geo-politics. Cheapened by those hard of hearts who use force and torture and murder to get their way. A bad lesson they had learned from their past oppressors.  The liberation of the person by discarding all moral principles to get what they want. Land.

The freedom of the psychopath in human society is the wrong kind of liberation.

Report this

By truedigger3, June 21, 2010 at 10:07 am Link to this comment

Re:By Jacob, June 21 at 11:54 am #

Jacob,

You are flat out wrong.
The Jews lived in peace and prosperity amongst the Arabs for ages.
The best time the Jews had was in Arab Spain where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in a golden age of complete harmony, mutual acceptance and prosperity.
Compare that with the Jewish history in Europe where they suffered atrocity after atrocity, especially during the Crusades, plagues and the inquisitions and not to mention the Tzarist pogroms and the Holocaust!.
Why the Arabs have to pay for the sins of Europe.
Anti-semitism up till very recently was exclusive European phenomenon.
The trouble started between the Arabs and Jews during and after the creation of Israel where the Palestinian found themselves victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing and the accompanied atrocities and brutalities and losing their homes and land and escaping with only the clothes on their back to a life of squalid and humiliation in very crowded ghettos without any hope for themselvess and their children.
Due to this injustic, of course , there are some hateful utterances from some Arab Sheikhs and politicians, but also there are many vile, cruel and vicious utterances against Arabs from many Israeli Rabbis and politician.

Report this

By dihey, June 21, 2010 at 9:06 am Link to this comment

Before criticizing Palestinians and neighboring Arabs for supporting Hitler Germany one must study how the inhabitants of Palestine were screwed and Zionism was coddled at the Paris so-called Peace Conference after W1 by England, France, and, yes, in the end by our country. That study will explain the choice Arabs made in the Middle East during WW2. How can anyone expect that they would chose the side of their tormentors, the Western Allies?
These people were powerless but not masochistic.

Report this

By Jacob, June 21, 2010 at 7:54 am Link to this comment

truedigger3,
  Arab anti-Semitism:
  “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” have long been been bestsellers in Arab world. In 2002 the Protocols was dramatized for Egyptian television in a multimillion-dollar blockbuster series,“Horseman without a Horse” that was screened during Ramadan.   
  A year later came the hideously anti-Semitic Syro-Lebanese TV series Al-Shattat (“The Diaspora”), which included revolting scenes reconstructing the “blood libel” calumny as if it were a normal Jewish ritual practice. 
  Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, in welcoming the late Pope John Paul II to Damascus nine years ago, publicly vilified Israelis and Jews for killing “all the principles of divine faiths [inspired by] the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing Him, just as they had tried to commit treachery against the Prophet Muhammad.”
  Such anti-Jewish prejudice is not merely a by-product of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It derives from traditional Islamic sources. For example, the following words of the prominent Saudi Sheikh Abd Rahman Al-Sudayyis, Imam at the Ka’aba mosque in Mecca, are representative of thousands of such sermons regularly broadcast across the Arab world: “The Jews of today [are] evil offspring, infidels, distorters, of [God’s] words, calfworshippers, prophet-murderers…the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs…”
  And remember the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who fled to Germany in 1941 and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders.  He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler’s special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the infamous SS “mountain divisions”.
  In March 1991, a Syrian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, read a statement recommending that commission members read “a valuable book” called “The Matzoh of Zion”, written by Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass. The book intends to prove the ancient “blood libel” myth, i.e. accusations that Jews use the blood of murdered non-Jews in religious rituals such as baking Matza bread. Tlass has re-printed the book several times, and stands by its conclusions.
  Take a look at the cartoons in the Arab media. You will find plenty of typical anti-Semitic themes, very similar to “Der Sturmer”.
  “The Arab world is the last bastion of unbridled, unashamed, unhidden and unbelievable anti-Semitism. Hitlerian myths get published in the popular press as incontrovertible truths. The Holocaust either gets minimized or denied….How the Arab world will ever come to terms with Israel when Israelis are portrayed as the devil incarnate is hard to figure out.” (Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, October 30, 2001).

Report this

By christian96, June 21, 2010 at 7:53 am Link to this comment

Omop—-Where did you get your info. about Truman’s
beliefs about THE Jews.  I find it hard to believe
that one of our presidents would make such an absurb
comment.  I could believe it if he had said “all
Jews eat, use the bathroom, and sleep.” However,
to say, “All Jews are selfish” is blatantly false
and deceptive.  At what age was he referring to?
As infants it may be that all Jews are selfish at
some time but the same could be said for Germans,
Americans, Italians, etc. The selfishness of infants
sometimes carries into adulthood.  That’s why Jesus
put so much emphasis on “denying” one’s self and
loving and serving others.  The selfishness of infants is what is meant by an “evil” nature.

Report this

By dihey, June 21, 2010 at 5:23 am Link to this comment

“Der Jud Suess” was a blatantly racist movie but the really dangerous movie maker of Hitler Germany was Leni Riefenstahl whose infamous name should never have been mentioned after WW2.

Report this
Ed Harges's avatar

By Ed Harges, June 21, 2010 at 5:12 am Link to this comment

From a new essay by Israeli writer Uri Avnery:

... a fact that nobody seems to have noticed until now: the death of the
Holocaust.

In all the tumult this affair has caused throughout the world, the Holocaust was
not even mentioned. True, in Israel there were some who called Recep Tayyip
Erdogan “a new Hitler,” and some Israel-haters talked about the “Nazi attack,”
but the Holocaust has practically disappeared.

For two generations, our foreign policy used the Holocaust as its main
instrument. The bad conscience of the world determined its attitude towards
Israel. The (justified) guilty feelings – either for atrocities committed or for
looking the other way – caused Europe and America to treat Israel differently
than any other nation – from nuclear armaments to the settlements. All criticism
of our governments’ actions was branded automatically as anti-Semitism and
silenced.

But time does its work. New tragedies have blunted the world’s senses. For a
new generation, the Holocaust is a thing of the remote past, a chapter of
history.

http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2010/06/20/a-flash-of-lightning/

Report this

By eso, June 20, 2010 at 11:50 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

When all is said, it will be discovered that the Holocaust has its roots in the Inquisition, and that Hitler was a canibal against Europe’s own. The Jews are Europe’s own, as were many others.

Report this

By Tony Gerard, June 20, 2010 at 11:05 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Richard Schickel, and this might be the fault of the documentary makers, ignores a salient fact about Lion Feuctwanger, the author of the book upon which the film “Jud Suss” is based. Feuchtwanger was Jewish. He fled the Nazis twice, once from Germany itself, where he was a leading literary figure, and then again from France during the Occupation. Like Thomas Mann, he settled in the Pacific Palisades, and continued to write novels, as well as screenplays. These easily obtained, but apparently ignored facts make nonsense of Schickel’s comment that the book is more sympathetic to the central character because Feuchtwanger, who was infinitely far from being either an anti-semite or Nazi, gives him Christian blood. Feuchtwanger, it should be noted, received no money from the production of the film because the Nazis had seized his copyrights. Furthermore, the book was written during the Weimar Republic,  a time when Germany remained the European country with the best attitudes and policies toward Jews, as it had been throughout most of the previous century. Whatever Feuchtwanger’s motivations might have been for making his central character part Christian, they could not have been of the crude sort Schickel implies.

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, June 20, 2010 at 9:07 pm Link to this comment

omop, June 20 at 6:21 pm #

To all those poor saps who are defending the Muslims its time to read what
Harry S. Truman who is not a Muslim thought of:

  “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.

  “They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or
Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews
get special treatment.”

  ” Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler
nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog..”

    Comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. He ust have turned anti semitic a few
minutes after the US supported the creation of Israel by the UN.

*******************************************

Naturally, with all your hatred for all things Jewish you deliberately left out the next two sentences that changes the WHOLE tone of paragraph:

“Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he goes haywire.”

“I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.”

Why did you leave that tid-bit out? 

Don’t bother to answer—the answer is blatantly clear.

It’s like taking a movie critic’s line “I couldn’t love this movie!” and quoting it as “I…love this movie!”

Report this

By truedigger3, June 20, 2010 at 5:01 pm Link to this comment

Night-Gaunt wrote:
“They failed in the latter but managed to help cultivate a deep seated hatred of all Jews even though in the past Islamic countries were a haven for Jews from the pogroms of Christian nations of the time. Ahh how things can change over the years.
_____________________________________________________

No, Night-Gaunt, NO. The harted started when the European Jews started to move to Palestine with the help and collusion of the British, almost fifty years before the holocaust, with the intent of permanently settling there and displacing the Arabs.
Then came the ugly period of creating the state of Israel with its accompanied vicious ethnic cleansing by the zionists of a large section of Palestine using killings and unspeakable brutalities to let it be known to the Palestinians that “if you stay you die”.
What “Pogroms and what Christians nations”, . There were never a pogrom in the Middle East that was started by the French or the British.
And hey, the Germans are Christian too!! They had crosses painted all over their tanks and aircraft. They had too, the Iron Cross “Eisen Kreutz” medal.!!
Nazism is not a religion????!!!!!!

Report this
Ed Harges's avatar

By Ed Harges, June 20, 2010 at 3:45 pm Link to this comment

re: By Inherit The Wind, June 20 at 6:08 pm:

Natürlich.

Report this

By omop, June 20, 2010 at 2:21 pm Link to this comment

To all those poor saps who are defending the Muslims its time to read what
Harry S. Truman who is not a Muslim thought of:

    “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.

    “They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or
Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews
get special treatment.”

    ” Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler
nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog..”

      Comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. He ust have turned anti semitic a few
minutes after the US supported the creation of Israel by the UN.

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, June 20, 2010 at 2:08 pm Link to this comment

Yeah, naturally EH and TD3 defend the Muslim world against any chance of hating Jews…They should try reading the article.

Report this

By Older Reader, June 20, 2010 at 12:28 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

What evidence is there that “Muslim audiences [are] at least as receptive to its
message as the Nazis had been”?  Shickel should backup such a claim with
something.  If true, what would underlie such receptivity ... something
inherent in Islam or some recent-historical experience?

Report this
Ed Harges's avatar

By Ed Harges, June 20, 2010 at 12:20 pm Link to this comment

The claim is made that Arabs “eat this up.”

I don’t know about that, maybe they do. But really,
after the past century’s history of Zionism in the Middle East,
Arabs must find Jewish complaints about this lousy old piece
of propaganda rather amusing—like a man saying, “The charge
that I murdered ten people is a vicious slander; I definitely didn’t
murder five of those people!”

Report this
Night-Gaunt's avatar

By Night-Gaunt, June 20, 2010 at 12:19 pm Link to this comment

Like the Germanies & Switzerland though one exception during the Black Death was Poland who took in Jews to protect them from being blamed for the spread of the plague. Do some reading on it.

Report this

By christian96, June 20, 2010 at 11:59 am Link to this comment

NightGaunt—-What Christians nations?

Report this
Night-Gaunt's avatar

By Night-Gaunt, June 20, 2010 at 10:29 am Link to this comment

However the Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts in the local languages were played for years without stop in all those countries. Many of them thought the Germans would liberate them from the French and British. That was how the Germans played it anyway to get to that vital oil. They failed in the latter but managed to help cultivate a deep seated hatred of all Jews even though in the past Islamic countries were a haven for Jews from the pogroms of Christian nations of the time. Ahh how things can change over the years.

Report this

By truedigger3, June 20, 2010 at 7:04 am Link to this comment

ITW wrote:

“The second thing is that the Muslim world seems to love this piece of shit”
____________________________________________________

ITW,

How did you come to that faulty conclusion?!.
I can say that almost 100% of the population of the Middle East never heard of that film.
When the movie was made, all the M.E was under the full control of the British, except Syria and Lebanon which were under the control of the French, and that movie was never shown in a single M.E movie house.
That movie was a piece of Nazi Propoganda for local consumption in Germany.
The Arabs hates Israel not because of a dumb Nazi film, but because of the suffering, brutality, injustice and blood shed Israel has inflected on the Middle East.

Report this

By christian96, June 20, 2010 at 6:55 am Link to this comment

I watched a minister this morning on TV who claimed
Germany started WW1, WW2, and will start WW111.  He
appears to get a lot of his material from “Stratfor
Global Intelligence.”  I looked the sight up online.
It is based in Austin, Texas, which I found strange.
Anyone have any ideas why it would be based in
Austin, Texas?  I thought that was Bush country.

Report this

By Inherit The Wind, June 20, 2010 at 6:31 am Link to this comment

Two things strike me:

Harlan seems to have deliberately made a really, REALLY shitty movie, kind of like the 1919 White Sox playing shitty baseball to throw the World Series.  I mean, this sounds almost like The Producers’ “Springtime for Hitler”.

The second thing is that the Muslim world seems to love this piece of shit and, without any sense of taste, accepts it as much of that same world accepts “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as genuine, and not the crude, obvious forgery that it is.

Report this

By David Ehrenstein, June 19, 2010 at 8:19 pm Link to this comment

“Jude Suss” is available complete on You Tube.

Report this
Night-Gaunt's avatar

By Night-Gaunt, June 19, 2010 at 3:18 pm Link to this comment

One thing you will find is that amoralists will be the handmaids of the immoral who are running the show. Their greater numbers in collaboration increase the power of the immoral ones in their evil deeds. As for Veit Harlan it sounds as if a prime opportunity to analyze this has been wasted on a monochromatic polemic.

No the Nazis saturated the airwaves of the Middle East with their anti-Jew poison which unfortunately was sucked up by them and now turned against Israel.

Report this

By omop, June 19, 2010 at 1:39 pm Link to this comment

Speaking of tragic and troubled souls.

Both Netanyahu’s and Ehud Barak’s psychiatrists committed suicide(?) within one
week of each other.

  Que passa?

  http://legalienate.blogspot.com/2010/06/second-psychiatrist-suicide-
rocks.html

Report this

By TheHack, June 19, 2010 at 12:41 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

The question is this.  What American propaganda film makers will be featured in a similar documentary 30 years from now?

Report this

By David Ehrenstein, June 19, 2010 at 10:45 am Link to this comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPmVHN251T0

Report this

By omop, June 19, 2010 at 7:24 am Link to this comment

Reflections on Mr. Schickel’s Reflections:-

Rabbi Fischer from Los angeles California,: “If we Jews are anything, we are a
people of history … Our history provides the strength to know that we can be
right and the whole world wrong.”

“We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels
and the Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel
Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettos ... Each
time, Europe stood by silently—or actively participated in murdering us—and
we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

“Today, once again, we (that includes Israel) alone are right and the whole world
is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, even the Vatican….

  Interestingly no reference whatsoever to Americans.

Report this

By steveinalaska, June 18, 2010 at 11:54 pm Link to this comment

He seems to be merely pointing out that Muslim
audiences in the Middle East were “receptive to its
message” - leaving the reader to infer the reasons why
that might be so.

As to the rest of it: Thanks to the author and TD for
the review.  Had never heard the movie or the director
- Kubrick angle particularly interesting.

Report this

By TheHandyman, June 18, 2010 at 10:13 pm Link to this comment

Is Schickel intimating that the reason Muslims hate Jews is because of this movie? Oh, well, that explains everything. It couldn’t possibly be because vast numbers of Jews illegally entered the Palestine Territories and began murdering, blowing up hotels, and terrorizing the legitimate inhabitants, which they are still doing to this day? Talk about the kettle calling the pot black. If this is the best Schickel can come up with then he certainly knows what a hack is.

Report this

By Michael Hickson, June 18, 2010 at 8:15 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

It sure is swell of Truthdig to publicise such a vile piece of racist filth. What are your true motives for providing an outlet for this sick propaganda?

Report this

By heimweh, June 18, 2010 at 7:00 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

I was particularly struck by this passage:

“At his de-Nazification hearings Harlan presented himself as an innocent victim of Nazism, even claiming to have written and shot an exculpatory ending for “Jud Süss,” which, naturally, Goebbels rejected.

“We don’t know that for certain…”

Really?  We “don’t know for certain” whether the man who agreed to make Jud Suss from the antisemitic script provided for him, and who already had made a series of melodramas which scrupulously adhered to Nazi norms, would have written and shot an “exculpatory ending” for the film Goebbels had poured resources into and explicitly heralded as “THE antisemitic movie,” knowing that Goebbels would reject it and in all likelihood put him in prison at the least?  This being the very same Harlan whom Schickel later describes as being motivated principally by the desire to keep his job?

I think we do know “for certain” that Harlan was lying about the “exulpatory ending,” although it helps if one also knows that Veit Harlan, like Leni Riefenstahl, was a proven and prolific liar virtually until the day he died.

I actually found this documentary unsatisfactory as well, but I think Mr. Schickel mischaracterizes it:  for example, it’s by no means true that the relatives all speak with one voice.  (I recommend he look into the fascinating history of Thomas Harlan, the eldest son, to learn the extent to which this family is split.  But then, the documentary itself should have provided more information about him.)

And IMHO his review also suffers from a lack of knowledge of Nazi cinema in general and Harlan in particular.  (I’m guessing that most of what he thinks he knows comes, directly or indirectly, from David Stewart Hull’s unreliable book.)  For example, Harlan may not have been a party member, but he declared himself a committed Nazi in the earliest days of the regime.  He was not “apolitical;” he was a former leftist who became a Nazi supporter without missing a beat—and probably considered himself wholly sincere at both stages.  And to address just Schickel’s concluding argument:  whether or not Harlan seems like a hack to us, he by no means thought of himself as a hack, and the people he knew and worked with didn’t either.  (This, at least, is clear from the documentary’s interviews.)  He had an artist’s romantic self-conception; he didn’t think he was “just doing his job.”  So whether or not the hack mentality is “the central conundrum of Nazism” (in which case it’s probably the central conundrum of just about everything), it’s not the central conundrum of self-described artists like Veit Harlan or Leni Riefenstahl.

Report this
Newsletter

sign up to get updates


 
 
 
 
Join the Liberal Blog Advertising Network
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.