The December issue of Chronicles features several articles on Cinema and Politics from the right-wing perspective. They are well-worth reading. The following critique focuses on the center piece of the issue, Paul Gottfried’s despairing of the transformation of Hollywood from honor-bound moralism to sadistic nihilism.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/from–em-high-noon–em–to–em-django-unchained--em-/
Paul Gottfried wrote: Several of those who participated in making these movies and whom we discuss in this issue, such as Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, American director S. Craig Zahler, scriptwriter John Milius, and actors Walter Brennan and Randolph Scott, have identified themselves with the political right. Other filmmakers and actors have taken conservative positions without consciously acknowledging them.
More interesting than left or right, liberal or conservative, is truth, insight, empathy, and honesty in the arts. A true artist hangs his ideological jacket(though maybe not the hat) in the closet for the duration of art-making. Of course, some of his bias and beliefs will carry over despite his best attempts at objectivity, fairness, or truth — that’s just part of human nature — , but an artist approaches the theme and subject as matters to explore and understand. Thus, he cannot rely on a hoary set of cliches or ideological certitudes. Oliver Stone exhibited such qualities with NIXON and HEAVEN AND EARTH. In the biopic of Tricky Dick(made into Trippy Dick, as if acid was slipped into his drink), Stone peered into the mind of someone he personally loathes. In the third part of the ‘Vietnam Trilogy’, Stone didn’t whitewash the atrocities committed by the communists(despite his lifelong sympathy with their cause). A true artist must give the devil his due. Gillo Pontecorvo did so with his portrait of the French commander in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. Of course, a faker can feign the look of art while disingenuously pushing propaganda, like in the recent movie STILLWATER with Matt Damon. It has the look and feel of an independent ‘art film’ but is the usual PC garbage.
Paul Gottfried wrote: What differentiates classical Hollywood films from most present ones is their seriousness as an art form.
This is half-true. Clearly, Old Hollywood made movies for adults whereas most current movies(of whatever genre) are made for the young. Also, Old Hollywood had certain moral/social standards ranging from mature and sober to priggish and ridiculous. Still, Old Hollywood was not about art. If anything, Movie Moguls hated that word. Hollywood mostly churned out third-rate products for the unwashed for a quick buck. For Academy Award season, it rolled out some middlebrow ‘serious’ titles, usually based on classic novels or grave social themes, for the sake of patting itself on the back that the industry wasn’t just about naked commerce but cultural respectability. (Usually, the more disreputable movies were more interesting than the respectable ones tailormade for Oscar season.) But then, Otto Preminger came along to fuse the scandalous with the respectable — he made racy movies with ‘thoughtfulness’ — , which complicated things.
It was actually with the fading of Old Hollywood that cinema really came into its own as an art form and ‘personal vision’: IN COLD BLOOD, THE GRADUATE at least in part, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY(though rated G), MIDNIGHT COWBOY, THE WILD BUNCH, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, and etc. The new freedoms allowed artists to delve deeper and more honestly into reality. Something like MEAN STREETS and TAXI DRIVER(and later GOODFELLAS and CASINO) wouldn’t have been possible in Old Hollywood — even so, the fact that pimps were made white in TAXI DRIVER despite virtually all of them being black in NY was proof that there were limits even in the new system.
The problem was, for every instance of art created by new freedoms, there was an endless stream of raw sewage — at least Old Hollywood trash was treated and filtered. For every TAXI DRIVER, there were many more flicks like FRIDAY THE 13TH and worse. The dynamics of industrial pollution. For every ounce of precious metals mined from the earth, so much of nature is destroyed. It was likewise during the Weimar Era. For every work of artistic significance, there was so much garbage to degrade the culture in general. (And of course, even genuine art can be dangerous either through misinterpretation or triggering of dark spirits — after all, much of art is the result of artists wrestling with their own demons. TAXI DRIVER inspired the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE sparked hooligan violence in U.K., and Stanley Kubrick had it pulled from theaters.)
Quentin Tarantino is an interesting case. He has talent to burn and wide-ranging movie knowledge. He has appreciation for film-as-art and movie-as-entertainment, though often unable to tell one from the other. But for all his mental intelligence and elephant-like memory, he has the emotional development of a child or at best a teenager. If some actors like Tom Cruise are forever stuck in 17-yr-old personality, Tarantino is the same way but behind the camera. (Still, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD suggests he may have matured a bit, easing into pride of mastery from glee of mischief.) While movies like KILL BILL are just mindless trash, what’s especially offensive about PULP FICTION and DJANGO UNCHAINED is the pseudo-moralism or pseudo-philosophizing within trashy genre reformulations. But then, that very element was the appeal to both cultural ‘sophisticates’ and shameless vulgarians. Trash-as-trash is trash but at least has the virtue of honesty in its lack of pretension to culture, meaning, or morality. In contrast, trash-as-treatise is downright offensive. Who is Tarantino, whose sensibility isn’t far off from Charles Manson’s in some of his movies, to be preaching to us about justice? Give me a break. Tarantino’s best film is still his first RESERVOIR DOGS, tangled in ironic twists of masked identities and bared souls. But the rush of attention went to his head and, until ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, he was a hipster junkie high on his own noxious fumes, made worse when he sacrificed the saving grace of irony for hardcore moral pornography of DJANGO UNCHAINED and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS.
Paul Gottfried wrote: High Noon, for example, made in 1952, celebrates the courage of a determined lawman, Marshal Will Kane. Confronted with the news that violent hellraisers are coming after him, Kane (Gary Cooper) adamantly stands his ground. In the face of this threat, he refuses to leave his frontier town with his bride, Amy (Grace Kelly), although he has just hung up his marshal’s badge and is ready to take up a new life. Kane fights and defeats the bandits almost single-handedly, except for the reluctant assistance of his Quaker wife and a teenage admirer.
I’m not sure the courage is celebrated. It is certainly noted and admired, but nothing seems celebrated in that rather dour(and sour) Western. Bitterness runs throughout the movie, even when Will Kane confronts the outlaws.
In a way, one could almost say Will Kane has some villainesque qualities himself. Unlike the standard outlaws in many Westerns who terrorize the entire community, the town in the movie is divided between those who side with Kane and those who side with Frank Miller. Miller is a killer but not killing all the time. He has pals and partners in the business community and among ordinary men who like to have a good time. He’s a popular ‘gangsta’. Miller Time means more fun, more entertainment, more booze, more attraction for out-of-towners. Miller Time means the town gets to ‘rock and roll’. So, it’s not like Will Kane is trying to protect all the townsfolk from big bad wolf Miller; at most, he has maybe the support of half the townsfolk, the dullest, lamest, and squarest kind. He’s almost like Nurse Ratched, party pooper, compared to Frank Miller’s Golden-Calf Randall McMurphist. A good many folks want Will Kane and his priggish family-friendly ways to be gone and done away with. To them, it’s like what the Prohibition was for revelers in the 20th century. Too much about church ladies and school children.
It’s worth noting that many folks aren’t afraid of Frank Miller or actually admire and welcome him because of his proto-cool ‘wild one’ or ‘bad boy’ image. They know he’s a bad guy, but he’s good for loosening up the town a bit. He’s good for enterprise and even investment. With the likes of him, the town could be a ‘happening’ place, more Vegas than Amishville.
True, many fail to stand by Will Kane out of cowardice, but it’s far from the whole story. Many just want a less moralistic community where schoolmarm virtue stands around every street corner. It’s like many people would probably prefer in Pottersville in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE with its booze, blues, and hookers than Bedford Falls with nothing happening but family restaurants and folksy friendliness. (Being a square, I prefer Bedford Falls, but I wouldn’t mind visiting Pottersville now and then.) People don’t want to be shot or bashed over the head, but they like a bit of ‘thrill’ and ‘danger’. In BLUE VELVET, the boy and girl are drawn to the dark side out of fascination as well as pursuit of justice.
Given that half the town roots for Frank Miller’s return and the other half is too cowardly to stand by the man who made the town safe for children & womenfolk(and beta-males), one can’t help wondering why Will Kane bothers risking his life for the community. Part of the reason could be what he says at the beginning. Even if he flees to another town, Frank Miller will be after him. So, he has to fight Miller there and then so he won’t have to fight Miller elsewhere(like Bush II telling us we got to fight the terrorists over there or else we’ll be fighting them over here). But another reason seems to be pride. In a way, this pride is honorable but, in another way, vain, especially because the town isn’t worth the trouble. Indeed, after he finally triumphs over the baddies, what does he do? He tosses the badge into the dirt and rides off, as if to spit in town’s face.
Even though Will Kane is a sympathetic figure, there’s one scene that puts him in a poor light. He pleads with an old retired sheriff with a crippled arm, once a respected authority figure, to lend him moral backing. The old man is broken down and isn’t up to it, but Kane looks askance at him, as if personally betrayed. This is so wrong. Kane is right to blame younger men who won’t stand by him, but the old man earned his right to withdraw from the world.
By the way, the ‘teenage admirer’ volunteered, but Kane rightly rebuffed him for being too young, so the kid was of no use to Kane. (No wonder the Power today relies heavily on young Antifa types to do its bidding. The young are stupid enough to rush into danger.)
Paul Gottfried wrote: Today High Noon, which exalts heroic individuality, has achieved libertarian cult status.
Is that true? I would think libertarians would disdain Will Kane as a ‘communitarian’ and prefer Frank Miller and his gang who stand for free enterprise and hedonism. The business community in the movie seems to be mostly on the side of Miller, and what is libertarianism but the cheering squad for moneymen? They are actually rooting for Miller to kill Kane the proto-prohibitionist.
Paul Gottfried wrote: When Fred Zinnemann directed and Stanley Kramer produced that movie, they did so surprisingly as men of the left. They intended the film as a protest against the zealously anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and against the supposed failure of Americans to push back against his accusations.
True and rather funny. Why didn’t they protest the Hollywood Commies who were okay with Stalinist tyranny and terror? And of course, those very ‘leftists’ were totally silent about FDR’s ‘internment’ of over 100,000 Japanese Americans and 10,000 Germans in America. And they had no problem with blacklisting of America First and Pro-German types in Hollywood prior to the so-called ‘Red Scare’. Hollywood Jews sure had no problem with ‘Nazi Scare’, even using mass media to fool Americans that Nazi submarines were cruising along US coastlines.
By the way, Zinnemann and Kramer weren’t only leftist(or liberal) but Jewish, and there was an ethnic angle to their opposition to Joe McCarthy. While many Jews were sincere leftists, many favored it over rightism then dominated by Christians and even anti-Jewish elements. For them, the real concern wasn’t the violation of civil liberties — just ask the Japanese-Americans of the time how much Hollywood Jews and Leftists cared about their civil liberties during World War II — but the possible ‘persecution’ of Jews who happened to be leftist. It was really about tribal circling of wagons. Indeed, many Jews condemned the Moscow Line during the short period of Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
Paul Gottfried wrote: The fact that High Noon has been interpreted in more than one way underscores a difference between old movies and what is now coming out of Hollywood. One is drama and the other low-level propaganda. Leftist political messages thrown together by cultural revolutionaries have become the cinematic fare to which we are now exposed day and night.
I would argue that current cinema is NOT leftist. Leftism is about universalism + egalitarianism. Communism, like it or not, is leftist in this regard. In contrast, current ‘wokeness’ is about the new hierarchy or the new supremacism. It’s about Blacks Uber Whites and Homos Uber Straights. And which group is behind BLM and globo-homo? Jewish Supremacist Power. Hollywood today is defined by Jewish Supremacism and its proxies. Jews favor homos because homos have special creative talents and passions. Thus, they are useful for Jews who run the arts/culture/entertainment industries. Also, homos are a minority elite, therefore homo supremacism rhymes with and complements Jewish Power that is also minority elitist. By making the majority straight folks accept homo dominance, it encourages the conviction that the majority should be ruled by the better-minority. Also, by making globo-homo or limpwristianity the new cult among US elites, Jews can better push the support for Israel and US neo-imperialism. If past imperialism was morally justified on account of missionary zeal of spreading Gospel and save heathen souls, today’s neo-imperialism is justified on grounds of converting(or conperverting) the world to globo-homo. As today’s ‘educated’ elites worship globo-homo or queertianity, they are more likely to support US military invasions and occupations if such are perceived as vessels of globo-homo. The ‘gay flag’ moment in Afghanistan was meant for US elite audiences, not for Afghanis. Jews often point out that Israel has ‘gay pride parades’ whereas Muslims are ‘homophobic’. This makes US elites and the deep state(that is 10% literally homo and 100% globo-homo) support Israel over Palestinians. Finally, Jews know homo communities the world over tend to be are alienated from their own societies and identify with homos in other nations(or World Fruity), just like Jews identify more with World Jewry than with whatever goy nation in which they happen to be citizens. Thus, by pushing and funding globo-homo worldwide, Jews win over homo collaborators in every part of the globe. So, globo-homo is NOT leftist. It’s part of the Jewish Supremacist design to use homos as proxy of Jewish Power.
BLM is also not about equality. It’s not about equal justice for blacks but justice-favoritism for blacks. Why do Jews support this? One reason is profits. Blacks are big in music and sports. Lots of money to be made by Jews who own many sports franchises and monopolizes the music industry and mass entertainment media. Another reason is the MLK cult and Civil Rights narrative made blacks into the holy race synonymous with social justice. Thus, Jews want to keep the alliance with Noble Negroes. It ‘blackwashes’ Jewish crimes like what they’re doing in West Bank. Jews stole Palestine from the Arabs and continue to make land grabs in West Bank. Jews shoot women and children in Gaza. Jews use apartheid against Arabs. Many around the world see the injustice of this. So, Jews seek an alliance with Noble Negroes by promoting BLM and stoking black ego. This way, blacks become dependent on Jewish Money and Favoritism. The wink-wink understanding between Jews and blacks is Jews will do all they can to promote blacks uber alles while blacks denounce ‘white supremacy’ but remain mum about Zionist tyranny over Palestinians. This way, Jews can say, “Look, the Noble Negroes are on our side”, implying that Jews too are noble because the BLM-folks favor Jews.
Jews also know that their supremacist power depends on white submission. To ensure white obedience, whites must be morally paralyzed and stung with ‘white guilt’. Jews know blacks are the most effective weapons against white pride. Why? Because people feel most guilt for the wrongs they may have committed to the superior people. Blacks have dominated sports and popular music, the two biggest obsessions of Americans. Also, blacks have booming voices that sound godlike to white ears. So, whites hold black prowess in awe. And that sense of awe amplifies white guilt about what was done to blacks. Whites feel less guilt about American Indians who aren’t good at much of anything these days. It’s like Christians feel guilt about Jesus because the myth says He was the Son of God. By golly, mankind, Roman gentiles and Jews alike, killed none other than the Son of God! Get on your knees and atone and seek forgiveness! Likewise, whites can’t believe their ancestors wronged the superior race of Muhammad Alis, Marvin Gayes, Aretha Franklins, and Long Dong Silvers. Jews know this about white psychology and exploit BLM for all it’s worth. This isn’t leftist because it’s not about racial equality for all. It’s about black supremacy bordering on worship and is thus ultra-rightist in ‘leftist’ clothing. After all, black thugs attack white, brown, and yellow victims(and even Jewish ones at times), but the Jewish ‘liberal’ media don’t care. Only black lives matter(along with Jewish and Homo lives) even when blacks are thugs. But victims of blacks don’t matter, just like victims of Zionism don’t matter. Who speaks for BDS or Palestinians in the US? If true leftism ruled the US, we would hear a lot more about the plight of Palestinians, and politicians of both parties would give equal consideration to both AIPAC and BDS.
If Hollywood is really so leftist, how come it hasn’t made a single movie about Nakba or the Palestinian plight? Or how Jewish tribal-capitalists raped Russia in the 90s and made off like bandits, sending millions of Russians to early graves? Leftism is about equality. Are Jews and Palestinians equal in Hollywood? My guess is anyone who dares to propose a pro-Palestinian movie will be blacklisted harder, faster, and more permanently than any commie who was blacklisted under HUAC pressure.
And stuff like interracism isn’t about equality. There’s a general pattern in its promotion. Usually, the man is black, woman is white. This is clearly a racial supremacist message. It means black men are the REAL MEN while white men are a bunch of slow, maggoty, flabby white boys who don’t even deserve to keep their own women. White women should go with SUPERIOR black men with bigger penises and more muscle and thicker voices while white males should accept their beta-male roles and maybe hook up Asian girls or Mexican chicks as compensation.
We must stop pretending that ‘wokeness’ is any kind of leftism. It is ultra-right Jewish Supremacism using black supremacism and homo-supremacism to secure and safeguard Jewish Hegemony over the US and spread its tentacles around the world. ‘Wokeness’ is Jewish supremacy in ‘leftist’ clothing pontificating about ‘equity’. Right, ‘equity’ is what defines the US. That must be why both political parties sing endless hosannas to Israel but hardly notice the problems faced by Palestinians. That must be why New York Times and Washington Post have all these Jewish/Zionist editors and columnists but not a single slot for the Palestinian-American view. So much for ‘equity’.
Paul Gottfried wrote: In this (for most of us) not very palatable form of entertainment, Southern whites, policemen and believing Christians (although never devout Muslims) have become predictable fall guys, while black revolutionaries, feminist women warriors, and what comedian Dave Chapelle mocks as “the alphabet people” are ritualistically exalted as politically correct heroes.
True leftism is about universalist and egalitarian ideology over tribal identity. But if the current ‘wokeness’ favors blacks, feminists(though now on the ropes from irate trannies favored by Jews), and homos, it means it’s more about elevating certain identities over others. It should also be noted, for a long spell, Muslims were nothing but terrorists in Hollywood movies and TV shows. This had a huge influence in making all those white Christian soldiers volunteer to go over to the Middle East and blow up the ‘muzzies’.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/3/3/the-liberal-roots-of-islamophobia/
Hollywood is Jewish-controlled, and its modus operandi is “Is it great for Jewish supremacism?” It’s all about maintaining Jewish domination, so Jews will push ANYTHING(usually painted as ‘progressive’ or ‘leftist’) to secure their power uber alles. Not long ago, there was a Netflix series with Al Pacino as a Jewish patriarch calling for ‘mitzvah’ against the Deplorables as, of course, all Trump voters are ‘neo-nazis’ and ‘white supremacists’. Pacino’s Jewish character assembled a team of blacks, browns, yellows, and cuck whites to hunt down Bad Whites and murder them Khmer Rouge style or Nakba-style. It’s almost as if Jews regard proud whites as the New Palestinians to ethnically cleanse.
If Jewish Hollywood were genuinely leftist, it would call attention to black victimization of non-blacks, many of whom are not white. Jews would call attention to Jewish tyranny over Palestinians. There are genuine leftist Jews like Norman Finkelstein and Max Blumenthal who call out on Zionist supremacism. But Hollywood isn’t like that at all. It larps as ‘leftist’ and ‘progressive’ to win over certain ‘iconic’ identities, especially black and homo, and then plays these cards to shield Jewish Supremacism from any exposure and criticism. “Look, MLK and Oprah are with the Jews!!” It’s like Jews encourage blacks to growl at Whitey but swiftly punish any black guy who goes off-script and notices Jewish Power.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Even attempts to sell insurance policies and fast food have become occasions for endless virtue signaling.
Jews control advertising. One thing for sure, pro-diversity Jews don’t promote Jewish women going with Arab or Muslim men. Interracism isn’t based on colorblind love but color-conscious preference for the Other on the basis of its superiority. Jews are telling white women, “Go with black men because they are better men with more muscle and bigger dongs.” That’s the real message. It’s about ACOWW or Afro-Colonization-of-White-Wombs. It’s about sexual imperialism, and Jews know it. There have been articles in Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine that say Jews dominate interracial porn that tell white women that they should reject dorky white boys and go with black men as the Real Men. It’s designed to instill white women with jungle fever and sexual betrayal as the new ‘anti-racist’ virtue, and it is to make white men accept their inferiority as cuck-losers devoid of any manhood or racial pride. All the better for Jews to gain control over whites. Just like white southern plantation owners robbed black men of their manhood to better control them, Jewish globo-massuhs now do the same to white soul-slaves. Jews wield the black whip to beat white manhood into the dirt. And it has worked as most white guys are wussy cucks and approve of interracism. Even as Jews kick them, they bleat about ‘Muh Israel’. Even as blacks kick their ass and take their women, their top message is “Democrats are the real racists, and we love Kanye West.”
Paul Gottfried wrote: What viewers watch in movies or hear repeatedly on television or in electronic media can subliminally influence their attitudes and behaviors.
George Floyd is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life… and I never even met him before his death and ascension to heaven.
Paul Gottfried wrote: While we’re not claiming that movies of an earlier time had no political or moral lesson, they were rarely as preachy as what has taken their place. They were also less antiwhite, less anti-Judeo-Christian, and less anti-American than what the film industry is now giving us.
Movies back then were plenty preachy. Today’s movies are less preachy and more screechy. LILIES OF THE FIELDS and TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD are preachy. While there are still preachy movies with Magic Negroes and Nice Homo Neighbors, the recent works are more strident, brazen, contemptuous, and even murderous in their attitude. After all, DJANGO UNCHAINED isn’t about justice or righteous rage, like Gillo Pontecorvo’s BURN! It’s about the sadistic thrill, the bloodlust of revenge. It’s not so much about killing to get even but killing for orgasmic delight. Same goes for the GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO series. The underlying sensibility is really closer to Alex’s vicious nihilism in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. But, as nihilism as mere nihilism can only be criminal or insane, the current madness is given an ideological rub with ‘woke’ fantasies of Neo-Nazis and ‘white supremacists’, though never of deranged Neocons who start wars in the Middle East that destroy millions of lives or terrorize Palestinians and steal what little remains of their territory. (If not ‘neo-nazis’ or ‘white supremacists’, the villains are either Russians, Latino drug cartels, or yellow peril, though Hollywood is anxious not to offend the Chinese market too much. The Hollywood Rule is the American ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’ can hate American ‘rightists’, BUT ‘rightist’ fury must always be directed at foreigners, especially those hated or disfavored by World Jewry.)
Radicalism has long been in its post-ideological phase. There were signs of this already in the late 60s and 70s. In the film BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, we see the progress or degeneration of German radical politics from true believing fanatics(with deep guilt-complex about German history) to the rise of revelers in violence for violence’s sake. In time, principles, good or bad, surrender to the cult of empowerment. It’s like US imperialism went from ‘liberate people from Spanish Empire’ and ‘save the world from Nazism or communism’ to just bloody orgy in Vietnam. Colonel Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW loves war for war’s sake, just like ISIS radicals want to smash and blow up stuff for the anarcho-Islamic thrill of it.
The Left went from ideology to the sheer nihilism of power, aka ’empowerment’. No wonder the rotten neo-noir THE LAST SEDUCTION was hailed as ‘feminist’ because its liar-killer is a female. Never mind she is totally evil. She prevails over men, and that’s ’empowering’. THELMA AND LOUISE begins as a moral outcry against rape but then degenerates into a celebration of babes-with-guns tormenting any white guy just for the hell of it. And there are plenty of ‘patriotic right-wing’ types who join the military not to serve any moral purpose but just to hold big guns and drop bombs so feel so tough. Rap Culture dominates black mindset today, and it’s not about justice or right-or-wrong but about black power for power’s sake. It favors idolization of identity and cares little for ideology based on principles. The Left adopted the worst aspects of Nietzsche, fascism, and gangsterism but fail to realize because their hysterical cult of ‘social justice’ blinds them to truth.
If Old Hollywood movies were more balanced, in terms of mental health as well as politics, perhaps it owed to the balance of Jews operating in a Christian-dominated world. Secretly, many Jews and white liberals in Hollywood resented or felt hostility toward conservative Christian values but had to recognize them. So, even as they resisted much of Christian/Conservative pressure, they couldn’t go all in with their own more liberal, radical, or even degenerate ways either. It’s like an atheist working under a theocracy will try to tone down the religious element while withholding hardline secularism. If Hollywood were dominated by Christian Conservatives in a Christian Conservative society, the products might have been more preachy. But the balance of Jewish inspiration and Christian/Conservative pressure may have sustained, at least for several decades, what was deemed a workable compromise.
But, it’s no doubt true that even liberals and leftists back then agreed with many tenets of ‘bourgeois’ morality or middle-class values. If anything, they would even seem ‘far-right’ by today’s standards on some issues. For example, the secular-liberal view of homosexuality deemed it a sickness stemming from childhood trauma, and various ‘scientific’ psych-therapies were devised to squeeze the fruitiness out of the fruits. Leftism also denounced homosexuality as capitalist vice or decadence, a kind of excessive narcissism. On the issue of race, many back then believed(or tried to do so) that the only difference between whites and blacks is skin color, i.e. blacks are just whites with dark skin, or whites are blacks with white skin. Events in the Sixties disabused many of that conceit. Today, no one believes blacks are merely whites with dark skin, but the official line still maintains that ‘race is just a social construct’. One thing for sure, prior to the rise of youth culture — young ones sure are easier to manipulate — , the culture was adult-oriented, with teenagers pressured to grow into adulthood and put away childish things. Youth Culture created a vast new space(akin to Zeno’s Paradox) between childish things and adult things, and most of culture has been situated in this infinite grey zone since the late 1950s.
The Diversity theme in today’s Hollywood and mass-culture is in part a reflection of changing America, but it’s not an accurate portrait. According to mass entertainment, you’d think most judges and half the top scientists & doctors are black. Every warm-hearted counselor or psychologist tends to be either black or homo. A poll showed that Americans think 25% of Americans are ‘gay’ because homos are all over TV-land in shows and commercials. And even though there has indeed been sharp rise of black-male-white-female unions, they are way over-represented in entertainment as new propagandistic ideal. Indeed, many white actresses feel obligated to star in roles as lovers of black men. It’s the Jewish Way of crushing white identity, and what better way than by driving a wedge between white men and white women? The very reproductive process by which white people are created has been disrupted with the ‘anti-racist’ or interracist ideal of white women using white wombs to create black babies.
Though entertainment is currently ‘anti-Judeo-Christian’ — does the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ hold any meaning? — , it may turn pro-neo-christian, what with so much of the new liturgy being all about adulation of homos and adoration of Negroes. Many cuck-christians put globo-homo and magic-negro above God and Jesus. Once the core of Christianity is hollowed out and goes full cuck into cucktianity, it may be promoted far and wide by the Jewish-run media. Under Bolshevism, Jewish communists physically destroyed churches but failed to destroy them spiritually. Today, Jewish Power keeps the churches standing but poisons their spiritual core, not least because many entering the clergy are really homo infiltrators and ‘woke’ idolators. Look at all the praised showered on the Devil Pope Francis for destroying whatever is left of the Catholic Church and Western Europe.
Paul Gottfried wrote: It is impossible for me to think about the Civil War without recalling the film adaptation of Gone With the Wind, which I have watched from beginning to end about a half dozen times. I also read Margaret Mitchell’s novel on which the movie was based, and which won numerous literary prizes after it was published in 1936.
I’ve never been able to sit through the whole movie and only caught snippets because my sister loves the movie and the novel. (The wind in THE WIZARD OF OZ had more entertainment value.) Impressive yes but a postcard epic. A far more prophetic work about the South and its reverberations on the American Future is surely D.W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION. People say it’s ‘racist’, but what does ‘racism’ mean? It really boils down to the notion that any critical view of blacks or blackness is bad. It functions much like ‘antisemitism’ and ‘homophobia’. Not only insane hatred but even rational criticism of Jewish Power is deemed ‘antisemitic’. And ‘homophobia’ doesn’t means not only deranged hysterical fear/hatred of homos but even the perfectly rational observation that it’s disgusting to stick male genitals into poop-chutes.
A little over a century after THE BIRTH OF THE NATION, which movie can be said to have been more accurate about the Black Issue? Griffith’s or Selznick/Fleming’s? Though Griffith’s movie has stretches of silliness and laughable caricature, it addresses the race issue head on. It warns, IF YOU PRETEND WHITES AND BLACKS ARE EQUAL, AND TOUGHER BLACKS WILL KICK WHITE BUTT. That’s the reality today. In 2020, opportunistic Jewish overlords and proggy idiots pushed the BLM line that blacks are saints being persecuted by ‘racist cops’, and the result has been steep rises in crime and thuggery all across the country. Let blacks run free, and they will run wild because race differences are real. Blacks are more aggressive due to genetic factors. And blacks, being more muscular and tougher, have no fear of non-black races UNLESS cops and judges take up the slack to lock up the worst of blacks. GONE WITH THE WIND may be great entertainment, but it’s really a women’s movie that fixates on female vanity.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Contrary to media misinformation, neither the novel nor the movie glorifies slavery or racism. It reveals a stratified society run by a landed class.
That may be, but from what I’ve seen of parts of the movie(and a long documentary on the making of it), it doesn’t condemn slavery either. Also, even if not an outright glorification of the slave-south, it is nothing without a certain romanticized nostalgia for the bygone days when massuhs were massuhs and blacks were singing “Ole Black Joe”, at least in white fantasy. After all, its sweeping tidal-like title is ‘gone with the wind’. And even though it’s not overtly ‘racist’ like THE BIRTH OF A NATION, which I admire for its honest and candid race-ism(i.e. -ism means race and race + ism should mean belief in the reality of race and racial differences and the need for racial consciousness), it has a rather condescending view of Negroes as ideally suited for picking cotton, smiling at massuh, and cooking fried chicken. Also, there is one skinny Negress who be lazy and is slapped to get back to work.
The movie goes out of its way to be Negro-Nice. When Scarlett is about to be raped by white lowlifes, a Negro comes to her rescue, the reverse of what happens in THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Now, which is closer to the truth in our world? Negroes intervening to save white women from white rapists? ROTFL. Still, I suppose the scene in the movie is plausible because Negroes on plantations were raised to be loyal to their massuhs and their women. Dey’s wasn’t gangstas. It’s like, after WWII, Japanese were trained to be boot-lickers of Uncle Sam, and they’ve been very good at that.
Still, GONE WITH THE WIND wasn’t just a historical epic but a cultural standard-bearer of respectability on the Southern issue, much like Steven Spielberg’s COLOR PURPLE in the 1980s. Thus, it wasn’t so much depicting black slaves as they might have been but negotiating for compromise between White Southern sensibilities(that still hankered for the Old South) and black sensibilities(that were growing tired of Hollywood’s tendency to feature blacks as either clowns, toms, or savages, usually alongside Tarzan). Today, the racial politics of GONE WITH THE WIND seems hopelessly naive whereas that of THE BIRTH OF A NATION seems especially prescient(though few dare to admit it). Just take a tour of Baltimore. Look what blacks have done to Oakland. Look how naive and/or craven white cucks are.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Although it may surprise our self-appointed moralists, such an arrangement was not a Southern anomoly but once prevailed in large parts of the Western world. Note that most of Europe once had a peasant class that owed labor services to aristocratic landowners.
True, but people know the useful distinction between serfdom or tenant-farmer system and SLAVERY. Obviously, a slave had less freedom and dignity than even a serf, though in material terms, black slaves in South probably ate better than most peasant folks around the world, even many whites in Europe.
Furthermore, there’s always bound to be a special problem with one people ruling over another. Blacks enslaving blacks or whites enslaving whites seems a family affair. Unjust perhaps but a matter for the race to resolve. But when one race threatens or rules over another, it becomes a tribal issue, like when Persians invaded Greece and when Romans ruled over Judea. Jews always lived under Jewish tyranny but Roman tyranny was foreign, therefore more an affront to Jewish pride. Vietnam under communist rule was plenty repressive, but it was a Vietnamese affair. In contrast, many Vietnamese resisted the French and the Americans.
To be sure, there have been examples of foreign minority rule being accepted and/or absorbed as the defining factor of civilization. Aryans who invaded India enforced a spiritualized caste system and became the permanent ruling power. Thus, even though the inequality may have seemed socially unjust, it was made cosmologically just on the basis of karma and dharma. The Spanish who conquered ‘Latin America’ mixed blood with the natives to the point where a large mestizo race came to accept the New Normal.
Furthermore, US prided itself on being founded on democratic principles where ‘all men are created equal’. Therefore, slavery was bound to be less justifiable in the American context. Also, America Slavery seems especially unjust today because whites idolize blacks as the superior race of athletes, studs & divas, rappers, and booming orators. Perhaps, America should have enslaved Eskimos or brown peons from Bolivia or some such. Such victim-folks wouldn’t have risen to the top of the totem pole in sports, pop music, and sexual fantasies. Whites today can’t believe that their ancestors or past whites enslaved such a ‘cool’ and ‘badass’ race, and that is the real source of ‘white guilt’. “My white ancestor once made George Foreman and Rhianna pick cotton” or “Evil racist whites once whipped Muhammad Ali for refusing to say his name is Cassius ‘Toby’ Clay.” If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is this. If you’re gonna practice slavery, “Do NOT enslave a people with superior skills and idolatrous potential.” Get Guillermo to pick cotton instead. If American Slavery had exploited brown peons, whites wouldn’t be groveling on their knees to wash the feet of Felipe Gomez. Another solution is the Islamic Way. If you’re going to enslave blacks, make sure your society doesn’t celebrate out-of-control hedonism. (Cuban blacks aren’t so crazy because the puritanical moralism of communism suppresses their wildest instincts.) Islam is also advantaged for its lack of sanctimonious guilt-complex.
Paul Gottfried wrote: The most admirable figure in the movie is, incidentally, a black house servant, played by Hattie McDaniel, who became the first black to win an Oscar (for Best Supporting Actress) in 1940.
But what is her ‘admirable’ quality? She’s loyal to the massuh’s family. She’s a good slave. Sure, she hollers up a storm and retains a crude kind of pride, but all said and done, when push comes to shove, she be a good slave. Muslims enslaved many whites long ago. Suppose one of these slaves was a fat white woman who loyally served her Muslim masters. She hollered a lot like Shirley Stoler in SEVEN BEAUTIES and threw her weight around, BUT it was all in undying service to her Muslim masters who continue to enslave other whites. Would whites look upon her with favoritism? I think not.
Now, I’m not putting down the character. She was raised to be a slave, and she does her job well. She’s a good person within the limits of her knowledge and freedom. Still, she’s someone who unquestioningly internalized the idea that her kind exists to serve another people as the master race. Today, there are many such white mammies who are soul-enslaved to the new master race, the Jews. So many GOP politicians are little more than white mammies who shuck and ho-de-do before their Jewish Masters. To the Jewish Overlords, John McCain was a most perfect white mammy. He learned to cuck to Jews early on. And even after Jews smeared and dragged him through the mud in the 2008 election, he remained their boy, like the old guy Blue in OLD SCHOOL. He was like a dog still servile to its master after being kicked.
The video above is almost like John McCain’s funeral. No matter how much Jewish Power abused him, he was their boy. He was their white mammy, their white tom. Lindsey Graham should wear that rag on Hattie McDaniel’s head as the new top white mammy for Zion. From the Jewish perspective, white mammies like McCain and Graham are wonderful goy dogs. But should WE feel that way? Of course not. Then, we can understand why blacks don’t take kindly to Hattie McDaniel’s role. Besides, being so fat, she looks comical(like the fat black woman in TOM & JERRY cartoons who be yelling ‘THOMAS’ and chasing him with a broomstick), though it is a good performance. To black women who see the movie, all the glamour is with white women, whereas black women are fat or funny-looking or funny-talking. This hurts Negress pride. Even though Muslims enslaved many whites, they prized white women as attractive and obtained them for sexual reasons. But black women have been mostly presented as comical, fat, or ugly in the American popular imagination. It may be why black women are so into butt-shaking. Being not so hot in the face, they have to attract attention with asses as their lassos.
Paul Gottfried wrote: It is hard to see how this lady’s portrayal of a dedicated, self-sacrificing servant was more insulting to her race than today’s depiction of black gang members on our TV screens committing acts of violence and selling drugs.
But isn’t that a false dichotomy? True, today’s black thugs in entertainment are disgusting and grotesque, but surely there are many gradations between the loyal self-sacrificing black mammy and the street hoodlum. As if to make amends for Hollywood’s past presentation of Negroes, there was Sidney Poitier in a whole bunch of idealized roles in the 50s and 60s.
Also, even if gangsta rappers are insane, they at least have a kind of pride, whereas a slave, no matter how decent, lives for the pride of others. This is why that German film THE LIVES OF OTHERS is pretty useless. It’s not about an East German who gains self-pride but risks his own well-being for the vanity of some proto-EU-crat. It’s not about the nobility of seeking freedom but changing one’s loyalty from one master to another. No wonder globalists promote it as the acceptable kind of ‘conservative’ movie.
More importantly, far more damaging to the white race isn’t the presentation of blacks as rapper-thugs. While some whites take encouragement from such and become ‘whiggers’, others at least see blacks as they really are, i.e. not the kind of people one wants to integrate with. More subversive to white well-being is the idealization of blacks as harmless, noble, wise, and soulful. In a sense, stuff like THE COSBY SHOW, DIFF’RENT STROKES, and depiction of blacks as top scientists, doctors, and professionals have done far more damage by sustaining the false illusion that blacks are just like whites or better, smarter and more sensible than whites, i.e. whites are f***-ups while blacks are full of kindly advice.
In a way, something of Hattie McDaniel’s character in GONE WITH THE WIND is still with us: The portrayal of blacks as white-friendly and soul-kindly.
Oprah Winfrey ran with an updated version of the mammy stereotype and became the first billionaire mammy. Like Obama, she understood the discrepancy between white desire to behold & admire the Negro AND white observation of horrible Negro behavior as thugs and criminals. What whites want from the Negro, they often don’t get as too many real Negroes be ‘crazy and shit’. So, Oprah(and later Obama) and her Jewish handlers figured her neo-mammy act could be the biggest fulfillment of P.T. Barnum’s dictum that there’s a sucker born every minute. By becoming one of the few black billionaires, Oprah could bestride the stage as a liberated and empowered black woman, a message to the world that “We’ve come a long way”, but her success owed to exploiting the hoariest cliches of fat mammy-dom. She was the mammy-empress with big fat chocolate-milk mammaries who assuaged whites of the ‘racist’ anxiety that blacks were all crazy jivers. No matter how badly blacks acted and made whites privately gripe, “Yep, blacks are a bunch of ni**ers”, there was the image of Oprah installed somewhere in their brain as a soothing reminder, and the white soul would weep and remind itself, “I’m so ashamed to have dredged up the n-word as part of my mental vocabulary.” Then, the moron listens to rap music where blacks do little else but call each other that word.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Gone With the Wind as both a novel and movie unfolds like a Greek tragedy. The Southern protagonists are heroic and honor-driven, but they are also boastful and initially welcome the war with the Yankees. Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) warns his fellow Southerners that their boastfulness is not matched by their resources for war, and that the struggle they rejoiced over would end disastrously. Quite predictably this happens. Having yielded to hubris and atê (delusion), the Southern warriors witnessed the destruction of their land, the devastation of their population, and, for those who lived long enough, an enemy occupation.
On the other hand, what is history without risk? No one gave the Greeks a chance when faced with the mighty Persians, but they fended off the enemy against great odds. Who would have thought the American Revolutionaries had a chance against the British Empire, especially as only one-third of the population supported independence while another third was passionately loyal to Britain. It was French intervention that made the American Revolution possible. The South might have prevailed with better diplomacy with other great powers.
Or, was it their fighting style? Maybe they would have done better to swallow their pride and fight more guerrilla-style in a protracted war. It could be the problem was less in the honor of choosing to fight than in choosing to fight honorably: Armies going head to head in the conventional methodology of the times. Maybe the South should have been more adaptive and fought down-and-dirty. (Sherman’s March later proved the North was willing to do anything to seal victory.) But then, the big difference between the American South and Vietnam was the Viet Cong had the support of the Vietnamese whereas Southern Whites not only had to contend with Northern forces but keep their eyes on the Negroes who were great in number. In the end, Abraham Lincoln had it right. The correct formula was geographical unity and racial separation. As a side note, even though the American South is now usually compared with Nazi Germany by Jewish scholars and pundits, the French Resistance identified with the American South as a ‘foreign occupation’ narrative.
Paul Gottfried wrote: The Godfather films, particularly the first and second parts of the trilogy, also deal with a culture of honor. In a brilliant essay (and one of the best pieces ever published in Chronicles) Sam Francis explored the relationship between the Corleone crime family as depicted in the movies and the teaching of political realism in Machiavelli’s The Prince. Sam demonstrated to what extent the emphasis on cunning, dissembling, and the exercise of power as taught by the 16th-century Florentine is reflected in the conduct of the 20th-century Corleones.
That’s only half-true. Corleones are capable of being ruthlessness, but they are not true Machiavellians. They are too sentimental and ‘personal’. They “make an offer you can’t refuse” as the last resort. In a way, Tom Hagen is the most ‘business’-oriented person in the Family. In contrast, despite his cunning and ruthlessness, Michael takes everything personally(though he hides it). And Vito’s elevation of the non-Italian Tom Hagen to the role of ‘consiglieri’ wasn’t Machiavellian as it only garnered disapproval from the other Families; furthermore, Vito overlooked Hagen’s lack of killer instinct necessary for a wartime counselor. Sergio Leone’s THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is the true Machiavellian plot.
Paul Gottfried wrote: …the social situation in which the Corleone family found themselves, as upstarts one generation removed from the Sicilian peasantry, was comparable to the challenge of self-legitimation of the newly established princes in Renaissance Italian cities…. In both cases there is obvious need for a mailed fist beneath the silk glove, since those who were exercising power lacked the benefit of legitimate hereditary authority.
But didn’t Michael have legitimacy as the rightful heir to the Corleone throne? The only person who deemed it illegitimate was Fredo, the older brother who felt ‘passed over’. The problem wasn’t a matter of inheritance but the nature of the business, vice industry and organized crime. As the US wasn’t ruled by monarchy-aristocracy, the Corleones needn’t worry about legitimacy by lineage. Even among Anglos, many were self-made men who went from rags to riches. The real problem stems from the nature of the business the Corleones are in. Vito made his money during the Prohibition, and he moved into gambling and control of unions. Gambling was illegal in most places then, and even Las Vegas was disreputable. So, the real issue of legitimacy concerns the move from one industry to another(one more legitimate), or gaining a foothold in the institution of politics, not least by union machinations.
Paul Gottfried wrote: That said, one does encounter the aforesaid characteristics in antebellum Southern society, which was predominantly Protestant and mostly of Northern European extraction.
Rural cultures tend to be more clannish and honor-bound. Also, the large presence of blacks in the South made whites think more in terms of unity and loyalty than free-wheeling individuality. When blacks moved up North in great numbers, Irish and other ethnics became more old-school to keep the blacks out. Jews seem intensely tribal but contemptuous of honor culture, which they find to be childish and stupid as it tends to favor death-over-vanity over survival-for-power.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Montesquieu and Tocqueville, both of whom sprang from French nobility, defined honor as the distinctive characteristic of aristocratic societies. It was a cultural and moral trait that according to these observers distinguished an aristocratic from a bourgeois mentality.
When one says aristocratic societies are honor-driven, does it mean only aristocrats have honor or that the aristocratic code of honor informs the culture at large, even among majority non-aristocrats? Aristocrats or noblemen were the warrior caste, and much of honor culture was about the pride of manhood. Then, does this imply that the Jets and the Sharks in WEST SIDE STORY are animated by a crude form of honor culture as they’re willing to risk their lives for pride of manhood and turf?
Paul Gottfried wrote: Evidence of an honor ethic is present in both Gone With Wind and The Godfather, but they take different as well as overlapping forms. For the Corleone family an honor ethic provides limits as to how far they may slake their appetite for revenge or indulge their greed.
It seems honor in GONE WITH THE WIND is about warrior pride under the sun. This honor culture despises stealth, deviousness, and dirty tricks. A man must state his position, stand his ground, and live or die for pride in open contest, like many of Andrew Jackson’s violent duels. This kind of honor will even risk sure death against a fearsome opponent. A vulgar version of this is the Western showdown(though historians say it derived from fiction). Two men face each other out in the open on equal terms. No dirty tricks here. The man with the quicker draw and surer aim wins. A democratization of the European Duel between aristocrats.
Gangster honor isn’t like this. It’s not about openness and fairness. No one plays by Queensberry Rules. Anything goes as long as it catches the mice. You assassinate the enemy from the shadows. You use all sorts of trickery and deception, like what Michael did with Carlo who was misled to think he was in good graces with the Family. No one fights fair, which is for the suckers. People are ambushed. You smile and shake hands while holding a knife behind your back or hiding a gun in the toilet. It’s like a game of poker; you never show your cards. Or like what Al Pacino’s character says in GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS: “You never open your mouth unless you know what the shot is.” Thus, there is no aristocratic or cowboy honor to the violence in THE GODFATHER. Rather, the only kind of honor is one of loyalty. You don’t ask questions but do as told, and in return, the boss takes care of you as part of the ‘family’. It’s about secrecy and darkness.
It is, however, alien to young Michael’s honorable decision to serve in the US military in World War II. Michael feels that, as a patriotic American, he should fight for the country, even at the cost of life. It’s the kind of honor that the South(and the North) in the Civil War would have understood and approved of. To step into the sunlight, sign up, and serve the great cause. In contrast, Vito and Sonny see no point in that kind of patriotism or national honor. Vito did the dishonorable thing of pulling strings to get his son a deferment, but for Vito it is a different kind of honor, a secret honor, one that is centered on family and then the tribe. For Vito and Sonny, it is utterly stupid to die for strangers, for the abstract notion of ‘country’. In a way, the supposedly ‘individualistic’ and ‘rules-based’ values of Northern-Europeanism can make people less individualistic and politically more submissive in service to the larger community or higher principles. As the US is ruled by Wasps when Michael signed up, isn’t it really their war as they manipulated world events to provoke the attack on Pearl Harbor? Were German-Americans being patriotic when they served in World War I or just hopelessly naive in being shipped back to the Old Country to kill their blood-relatives in a war cynically manipulated by Jews and Anglos? And even though Jews have admonished American goyim to intervene and fight in wars(mostly for Judeo-centric interests), would Jews be willing to sacrifice their own sons for goy interests or goy lives? If by some crazy chance, a pro-BDS president got elected and called on Americans to sanction and then invade Israel to save Palestinians from ‘genocide’, how many American Jews would be willing to die for the sake of Palestinians, especially by killing other Jews? No Jew would be that stupid, but plenty of German-Americans were that stupid in World War I. So, on the one hand, Michael did the patriotic and honorable thing in volunteering for the Marines, but Vito and Sonny have valid reasons of their own. At least during World War II, men like George H.W. Bush fought in the war. But later, such men got deferments for their sons or pulled strings so that they would only have to serve in the National Guard, which is more despicable than outright draft-dodging, which at least has the element of honesty and defiance. In the current year, does anyone want to die for Ukraine or Taiwan in the name of ‘muh democracy’ or globo-homo? For Victoria Nuland, a more nakedly hostile version of Madeleine Albright?
Paul Gottfried wrote: When Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) kills his brother Alfredo (John Cazale) after his mother’s death for having once betrayed him, he is trampling on a sacred Italian value, unswerving loyalty to one’s kinfolk.
Not quite. True, the family is sacrosanct, but Fredo violated the terms by dealing behind Michael’s back with Hyman Roth and Johnny Ola. Fredo caused his own disownment from Michael. Fredo forfeited his place in the family. And, when Fredo initially explained himself, that he didn’t know it was gonna be a ‘hit’, Michael was willing to half-believe him because Fredo, like Chris Cuomo, is really dumb. But then, Fredo explodes and spills the beans about how he really feels about Mike. It is THEN that Michael believes Fredo DID KNOW it was an assassination attempt and was looking to take over. Fredo can’t keep his secrets for long. Now, WE are not sure if dumb Fredo did or didn’t know it was going to be a hit, but dumb as he is, he surely must have wondered what Roth was really after.
Even so, I don’t think Michael was 100% determined on killing Fredo until later. The way he looked at Al Neri at the funeral while embracing Fredo suggests he was 70% there. But Connie had pleaded with him to forgive Fredo, and he was relieved to have Connie back in the family. But then, Connie went behind his back and let the dreaded Kay into the house, and he felt betrayed. It was then that I believe he finally decided to do away with Fredo.
Michael was put in a tight spot by his father. Vito promised the Five Families that he would not initiate any act of revenge but with the secret understanding that it’d be up to Michael to pull it off. This way, he would keep his promise but also exact revenge through Michael who would then secure the Corleones as the undisputed power in the mafia world. And Vito surely knew what had to be done about Carlo. But again, it fell upon Michael to do it. So, Connie blames Michael but not her father. Vito also feels Tom Hagen proved disappointing as a ‘wartime consiglieri’ — Michael surely discussed with Vito about how Tom, for the sake of ‘business’, advised Sonny to cut a deal with the very men who nearly killed his father — , but he didn’t have the heart to demote Tom himself. Again, he left it to Michael, which creates tensions between Michael and Tom. It becomes Michael’s Burden.
In a way, the saddest is what happens with Sal. The Corleones needed a traitor in the family to bait Barzini into setting a trap so that Corleones plan a counter-move. So, Vito and Michael allowed Barzini to run roughshod over Sal and Clemenza until one would break and go over to the other side. Neither Sal nor Clemenza wanted to betray the family. But finally, Sal was sure Barzini would gain the upper hand and bet on him. With Sal on his side, Barzini felt safe and lowered his guard, which allowed the Corleones to set their own trap and wipe out the enemies. So, it is sad when Sal must be done away with.
Italians do kill members of the family. It was a common thing in the mafia. If someone really got out of hand, there would be a meeting and even the members of the family would consent to the hit. Better to save the family at the expense of one black sheep. Maybe Carlo’s death was inspired by the death of Ciano, a co-conspirator against his father-in-law, Benito Mussolini who, upon returning to power, had no choice but to have him executed. His daughter went crazy over this, much like Connie in the final scene of THE GODFATHER.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Michael is also shown treating his wife Kate (Diane Keaton) vengefully after she underwent an abortion following years of neglect by her husband.
What is Paul Gottfried now? A feminist into ‘my body, my choice’? To Michael, it’s not an issue of ‘abortion’ but the horror of realizing that his wife murdered his son. He was doing everything to protect the family. Day in and day out, he feared for his wife and children. His family almost got wiped out because Fredo, his own brother, turned against him. The oldest brother Sonny brother was gunned down. His first wife was blown up back in Sicily. He heard stories of how his own grandfather, grandmother, and uncle were murdered in Old Sicily. He feels surrounded by killers who want to rub him out and his kids. But who turns out to be the most successful ‘assassin’ against the family? His own wife. She succeeded where all others failed. She’s better than Tataglia-Sollozzo-Barzini-Roth combined. She really killed the kid and fooled Tom Hagen into believing it was a miscarriage, or maybe Hagen knew the truth but pretended otherwise to keep peace between Kay and Michael. All this time, he thought she was feeling down because she lost the kid in miscarriage. He even felt guilty about it. But she tells him, “I murdered your son, haha”, and it’s like the heaviest shit he ever had to face. His mind just can’t process it. Worse, Kay gloats about it and says she killed the kid with conviction. To her, it was like an Omen child, a greaseball Damien in her womb. And yup, she even goes into a ‘racist’ tirade about it being a ‘Sicilian Thing’ that’s been going on for two thousand yrs and how it all must end(though, she’s probably half-right because Southern Italian culture is vicious and crazy with all the corruption and distrust, but then she’s also naive because it’s not just a Sicilian thing but a Jewish thing). Of course, Michael is going to be furious and could never forgive her. This is why THE GODFATHER PART 3 is hardly believable as a mellowed Michael wants to be nice with Kay again. Shouldn’t she feel apologetic as well for having killed the kid and being ‘prejudiced against Italians'(like Tommy laments in GOODFELLAS)? (Jimmy Hoffa also says ‘you people’ in THE IRISHMAN.)
Kay was NOT neglected by Michael. Now, Connie was sometimes neglected by Carlo, the womanizer. Same with Sonny who fools around. His angry wife wants his super Italian dong for herself. It turns out even Tom Hagen has a mistress. In contrast, Michael was faithful to Kay like his Vito Corleone was to his wife. With his power and money, Michael could have been ‘banging cocktail waitresses two at a time’ like Fredo in Vegas. But he remained true to Kay. (One could argue he wasn’t being faithful when he married Apollonia in Sicily, but Michael and Kay weren’t married then.) Michael never neglected Kay. It’s just that he believes there’s the manosphere and the womanosphere. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and woman’s gotta do her own thing. And this was the arrangement between Vito and his wife. She never asked questions. She was content to raise her kids and see them grow. But times are changing and, besides, Kay has some of that New England puritan strain. (To be sure, Kay in the novel is thrilled by mafia tales and upset only because Michael doesn’t treat her as a confidante.)
Paul Gottfried wrote: Family had greater meaning for Michael’s father, who affectionately cared for his wife and children and who forgave the obvious weaknesses of his erring offspring. The older Don was a scrupulous man of his word and avoided violating even those agreements he made with his enemies.
No, family means everything to Michael. It’s just that they grew up in different times. Vito had a traditional Old World wife, whereas Michael has an educated wife with an independent conscience who isn’t content to be a homemaker. There’s something of those women in THE GROUP, the Sidney Lumet movie based on Mary McCarthy’s novel.
Besides, no one in the family tried to have Vito killed. Would Vito have forgiven Sonny if he’d planned a hit on his own pa? No way. One thing for sure, when Paulie was identified as the traitor, he was summarily dealt with in mafia fashion. By the way, if Vito is such a good father, why did he raise Sonny to be a hothead humping everything in sight(and Fredo also turned out to be a hornball). And Connie sure was a bad judge of character in marrying the fool Carlo and for his looks and ‘mickey mouse’ charms.
And, Vito is not so scrupulous, even relative to the gangster world. He used Luca Brasi to free Johnny Fontaine from a contract. He has an innocent horse killed to make Johnny Fontaine get the part in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. Killing other goombas is one thing, but why kill an innocent animal? Of course, Vito is a better gangster than most, but he’s still a killer.
Also, Michael is at least as ‘scrupulous’ as his father. He wanted to do business with Senator Geary but the son-of-a-bitch got ‘racist’ and not only said bad things about Italians but his ‘whole f***ing family’. In a way, what Kay says to Michael has a similar ring. It’s as if Anglos, as partners-in-crime or partners-in-bed, can’t help seeing Italians as not-quite-white. Now, what Michael does to blackmail Geary is the absolute worst thing in the two movies — murder of a whore — , but the fact that Vito used someone like Luca Brasi suggests he too did some dirty things. But apart from that, Michael tries to be fair with everyone in THE GODFATHER PART 2. He really wanted a deal with Hyman Roth, but following the failed hit, things got complicatd, even impossible. He really liked Pentangeli, and it was Roth who engineered the ‘incident to make it seem like Michael carried out the treachery.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Don Corleone also refused to enter the drug trade because he considered it to be morally unworthy as well as unnecessarily perilous for his soldiers.
After taking out the Five Families, Michael didn’t turn to the drug trade. Indeed, the understanding between father and son was the Five Families would have to be taken out in part to prevent the drug trade. Michael’s big move is to Reno and Vegas. He wants to be involved in LEGAL gambling.
In their exchange, it’s obvious that Michael wants to keep the family name as respectable as possible, which is why, as long as Pentangeli is part of the ‘family’, he must keep his word with the Rosato Brothers. Pentangeli says he welched, and this disappoints Michael. Now, Pentangeli has his reasons. Rosatos deal in narcotics and prostitution(and even hires Hispanics and Negroes), stuff the ‘family’ steers clear of. If anything, Michael is desperately doing all that’s possible to make the family ‘legitimate’, but new issues keep cropping up in whack-a-mole fashion.
Paul Gottfried wrote: When Michael confesses his sins to Cardinal Lamberto in the third part of the trilogy, some of his transgressions run counter to his father’s honor code as well as Christian moral precepts.
He confessed to having been a killer. His father was a killer too. Vito killed Fanucci, the extortionist of the neighborhood. He later went back to Sicily and killed the old man who killed parents and brother. There was no Christian forgiveness in him. And how Christian is it to murder a horse just so some broken-down singer can get a role in a Hollywood movie?
The only thing that Michael agonizes over in his confession is the murder of his brother. But there were reasons because Fredo nearly got him killed. Michael says he betrayed his wife, but this is bogus. He was true to her. True, he failed to make the Corleones totally ‘legitimate’ in five yrs like he promised, but he was really trying and doing everything he can. It was she who betrayed him by killing the kid and being ‘prejudiced against Italians’.
Paul Gottfried wrote: The main reason for these different outcomes is that unlike the Southern landowners in Gone With the Wind, who counted their victories prematurely, Will Kane acts thoughtfully, with a sense of moral responsibility.
It could be Will Kane did better than Southern ‘aristocracy’ because he fought ‘thoughtfully’. He used ‘guerrilla’-like tactics of hide-and-seek. Why should he have fought fair when it was four guys against one? He’s not like the Man with No Name in Spaghetti Westerns who can mow down four or five guys all alone. So, he fights Viet-Cong style. Or like how the Minutemen in the American Revolutionary War employed proto-guerrilla tactics. The South should have swallowed its pride and fought ‘dirty’ as the odds were against them.
Even in the final showdown with Frank Miller, Will Kane gained an edge because his wife decided to go crazy-cat and claw at Miller’s face, giving Kane the upper-hand in the draw. Howard Hawks and John Wayne hated HIGH NOON for violating all the honor-code conventions of the Western.
Paul Gottfried wrote: He acts not only for himself but also on behalf of a town that he had been charged with protecting.
I think Kane really did it for himself. After all, half the town wanted Frank Miller back for one reason or another. And the other half was too craven to stand by Kane. They feared the Miller gang would kill him but didn’t lift a finger to come to his aid. So, Kane would have been stupid to risk his life for such a community. Then, why did he? It was about pride. In contrast, the South had rational interests for seceding and preserving the status quo, at least for the near future.
Paul Gottfried wrote: One among other reasons for focusing on films that deal with honor is that they accentuate the sharp contrast between classic movies and their more propagandistic successors. Today’s filmmakers generally eschew movies about traditional honor cultures because they may be emotionally and ideologically incapable of making or even comprehending them.
There are superhero movies, and they are about Good vs Bad. To be sure, you don’t need much honor when you’re a superhero with the power to knock out entire cities with few hand gestures.
Some of the more intelligent movies don’t get the love and box office they deserve. Some examples: Slow West, Ride with the Devil, The Kings of Summer, Carlito’s Way, 13th Warrior, Wild Bill, Last Man Standing, Geronimo, Waterworld, Metropolitan, Mountains of the Moon, Miller’s Crossing, Gettysburg, K-19 Widow Maker, Count of Monte Cristo(2002), Clear and Present Danger.
But these movies did fairly well at the box office:
The Last of the Mohicans, True Grit(Coens), In the Line of Fire, Rob Roy(though homos were furious), Braveheart(not good), True Romance(trashy but has one great scene with rough honor), Tombstone, Hurt Locker, Michael Clayton, Flags of Our Fathers – Letters from Iwo Jima, Tron Legacy, Lone Survivor, United 93, Twilight series(which, silly as it is, is about honor and loyalty), American Sniper(though its critics find little that’s honorable about sniping), Dunkirk. Bourne movies and the far trashier Resident Evil series are about search for truth and have no time for honor in what is a totally dishonorable world of corrupt elites. As for movies like Heist(David Mamet), it’s just a game of who can outwit whom. Only smarts, ruthlessness, and will count, nothing else.
Then, there is the odd genuine work of art like The Assassination of Jesse James that can’t be winnowed down to familiar themes. Generally, Europeans are better at this, with works like Katyn(Andrej Wajda) and Unknown Soldier, a truly remarkable film about the Finnish experience against Soviet Union in the World War II era.
Though sex, violence, and foul language proliferated with the rise of New Hollywood in the late 60s, the real dividing line, at least politically speaking, isn’t between ‘classic Hollywood’ and what came afterwards. The kind of insane and murderous anti-whiteness, one that dehumanizes whites like Muslims were in the 80s and 90s(mostly as terrorists or lunatics), is a rather recent phenomenon, along with non-stop globo-homo and rampant interracist propaganda(to the point where every white actress feels obligated to be sexually paired with a Negro). And in UK, it’s relatively recently that British/European historical roles got handed to blacks. The disease even spread to Finland, with a black guy cast as Mannerheim.
It’s like Big Tech censorship was hardly a thing before 2016 when Donald Trump won and Alt Right made a splash. It was only then that the hammer came down. It happened suddenly. At one time, there was hardly any Evil Arabs in movies, but they were suddenly everywhere as American politics steered toward the Neocon direction. Trumpism appears to have alarmed Jewish Supremacist power that had written off white politics as over and finished, as illustrated by the Newsweek cover of their toy mulatto-napoleon or nappy-leon Obama. At one time, Jewish Elites were so sure that white pride/identity was crushed for good, but the Deplorables coming out of the woodworks convinced Jews in media, academia, and entertainment to go whole hog on anti-whiteness, in part to rally non-whites against whites but also to embolden white cuck maggots to attack white patriots, which is why most Jews were cheering for Kyle Rittenhouse to end up behind bars for life to be ass-raped by big Negroes. The rising war hysteria against Russia and China is also a sign of Jewish Elite Anxiety. Jewish Power figures on making nonwhite goyim and cuck-white goyim hate on white patriot goyim while, at the same time, directing all white goy suckers to vent their spleen against Russia and China(and of course Iran) as diversion from the fact of Jewish domination of the US.
The real difference happened with the rise of ‘wokeness’, even though movies like PAN’S LABYRINTH and GIRL WITH DRAGON TATTOO anticipated what was to come. To be sure, further back, there were movies like FRIED GREEN TOMATOES, THELMA AND LOUISE, and MISSISSIPPI BURNING. The tone of these movies was different because it went beyond moral angst and expressed a kind of cold sadism and torture-porn glee at what was done to the bad guys. It was as if one’s side, cause, or agenda was so righteous and justified that it could go to any lengths to torment and destroy the other side with zero remorse and reflection. John Wayne’s character in THE SEARCHERS becomes a bit unhinged, and Tom Courtney’s character in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO becomes cold as steel, but both works warn of the dangers of unfettered rage or radicalism as dehumanizing, not only of the Other but of the self. They note and even understand the vengeful sadism or cruelty but minus the approval. Clint Eastwood also ruminated about the culture of violence and revenge in UNFORGIVEN. As for Sergio Leone’s Dollars Westerns, they are plenty cruel and sadistic but without the sermonizing. In contrast, some of these newer works enjoin moralism toward sadism. They are like ‘woke’ versions of John Wayne in THE SEARCHERS but with full approval and celebration of the bloodshed.
PAN’S LABYRINTH not only features the bad guy as irredeemably evil but makes the good guys into guilt-free saints; former can do no right, the latter can do no wrong. Paradoxically, if one side is totally good, it means they are justified no matter what they do. It’s a kind of moral idolatry. (According to current American Morality, Jews as the holy holocaust people can do no wrong. If Jews were to go full nazi and wipe out the Palestinians, it’ll just be branded as one more chapter in Anne Frank’s righteous revenge upon the world, one that goes back to the Scarlett Johansson character’s burning Nazis alive in INGLORIOUS BASTERDS. This may explain the Jewish support for people like George Soros who has done so much obvious harm to the world. Even when he does bad, it’s good because he is somehow avenging the memory of past Jews.) This is the mindset of THE DRAGON TATTOO series. The naziesque baddies are so bad that one can indulge in any kind of torture porn fantasy. This goes beyond Cowboys and Indians. Though the anti-Indian narratives of Westerns were simplistic, they didn’t dwell on the agony of defeated Indians with hideous glee. But that kind of bloodlust is what these torture porns encourage. In the Jewish-made FRIED GREEN TOMATOES, southern white males are Neanderthal scum who beat up their wives and torture hapless Negroes. They are so bad that they deserve to be murdered, butchered, bbq-grilled, and fed to other rednecks(like human flesh in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE). It was obviously meant to instill white self-loathing and white guilt. You’re a good white if you side with closet-lesbians and Nice Negroes against the Evil White Male. All unite against his subhuman being. Such hatred is useful to Jewish Supremacist power, and it’s no wonder so many white Southerners turned against themselves and can’t even muster the courage to defend Southern Heritage. They’ve been poisoned by garbage like FRIED GREEN TOMATOES.
And, as Pat Buchanan noted at the time of its release, MISSISSIPPI BURNING went beyond the usual ‘anti-racist’ movies. Blacks weren’t merely sympathetic but flawless and saintly while white rednecks weren’t only bigoted but worthless as human beings in every possible way. It was as if Southern Whites had only recently evolved from ape to man. And again, white ‘racism’ was associated with white male brutality to white women. (Right, white women should look to Nice Negroes for defense from white male abuse. And, never mind all the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world and Jewish porn-merchants who use poor white girls as sex meat. Or the sex slavery of Slavic women in Israel.)
The TV series ROOTS was profoundly sympathetic of the black experience and critical of white prejudice, but it didn’t dehumanize whites as a race. Same could be said of CENTENNIAL, the mini-series on the transformation of the Wild West that wreaked havoc on the American Indians. But movies like MISSISSIPPI BURNING and FRIED GREEN TOMATOES set a new tone, one that was black-and-white in morality and in which many whites had no redeeming or discernible human quality at all. They weren’t about good people vs bad people but angels and demons. Something similar could be glimpsed in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK as well. While Germans were often the baddies of post-WWII movies and TV shows, they were nevertheless bad human beings, whereas RAIDERS revels in the creative ways by which the Nazis are turned into mincemeat. It didn’t merely make the audience cheer for the good guys but for mayhem as instant moral high.
But such dementedness was also on display in movies favored by right-wing audiences. As Pauline Kael noted, RAMBO isn’t merely about hero vs baddies but baddies without an ounce of discernible humanity. While it’s true that wartime brings out the most brutal and ugly side of human nature, peacetime is supposed to be about reflection and moderation, even a bit of remorse, as even the good guys or the better side had plenty of unwarranted blood on its hands. (Eastwood’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA were made in this vein.) But Spielberg in RAIDERS turned Nazi-killing into a blood sport. And RAMBO gleefully reveled in war as orgy-porgy. (And what is Zach Synder’s 300 but demented Neocon War Porn?) Worse was the moral posturing, as if its demented sadistic fantasies had anything to say about the painful memories(or forgotten POWs).
Perhaps, it could be traced back to DIRTY DOZEN and DIRTY HARRY. In DIRTY DOZEN, the Germans are so vile that they deserve to be trapped in a room and burned alive, along with their wives. DIRTY HARRY is a bit more thoughtful and complicated(and some have drawn parallels between Harry and Scorpio as two sides of the same coin), but what troubled many critics at the time was the element of sadism. It wasn’t just about sticking in the knife but twisting it and then again. Since then, so many movies have served ever more gruesome doses of righteous masochism and righteous sadism, which sort of go together. In RAMBO, the christ-like hero is terribly tortured(righteous masochism) by vicious Russians, and that gives him moral license to tear them to bits in the most outlandish ways(righteous sadism). And in PAN’S LABYRINTH, the bad guy tortures a stuttering victim so horribly(righteous masochism) that it only justifies the cruelest revenge at the end(righteous sadism). The righteous masochism of 12 YRS A SLAVE compliments the righteous sadism of DJANGO UNCHAINED. “We suffered so much that we earned the right to dish out the same or even greater pain on our enemies.”
A Serving of BBQ’ed Redneck Ribs�
There’s been a cultural sea-change from whitewashing ‘our side’ as too-good-to-be-true to red-soaking it as too-justified-to-be-judged. After WWII, the heroic narrative held that American soldiers fought honorably. Soviet history had Russians liberating Eastern Europe and treating the defeated Germans humanely. In truth, lots of atrocities were committed by Americans and especially Russians. Still, there had to have been a sense of shame in what really happened to warrant the suppression in preference of the Noble Hero narrative and iconography. Next came the phase when more of the truth could be addressed and admitted, and this could be used as the basis of more complex narratives, even art.
In contrast, movies like INGLORIOUS BASTERDS nonchalantly admit to the atrocities only to exult in them. It’d be like Russia finally admitting to the full horror of the rape of German(and other) women and, instead of reflecting on the dark side of war, celebrating it as awesome bacchanalia justified as righteous revenge. Recently, there was a movie that admitted to a Jewish Plan to poison water in Germany and kill six million goyim. Instead of featuring this as the dark side of revenge mentality, the movie presented the Jewish plotters as heroes. With such mentality, is it any wonder that Dancing Israelis could celebrate the destruction of 9/11? Jews feel so self-righteous as the holy Holocaust People that ANYTHING is justified if seen as furthering sacred Jewish interests. So, it went from “Our side is better because we don’t do what the other side does” to “our side is so very good that we can do whatever and with sadistic glee and zero reflection, and the hell with remorse.” It went from showing the true brutality of war or violence(often whitewashed in earlier ‘heroic’ narratives) to wallowing in it in orgiastic abandon like Ozzie Osbourne chewing off heads of bats. Instead of “We are angels, they are devils”, we have “Because we are angels, we have license to act like devils.” This is why many Jews were nervous about Mel Gibson’s torture-porn treatment of the Crucifixion Story. Never mind 12-years-a-slave. The message of PASSION OF THE CHRIST was 2000-years-a-crucifixion…and Jews done it(with Romans of course). Jews fear, if Christians feel their Lord was so horribly wronged, might they not feel justified in meting out any amount of brutal justice upon their perceived enemies? Indeed, what set the history of Christian brutality apart from the pagan kind was its sense of moral-spiritual entitlement: No matter what they did, they had God on their side and the Son of God whose myth of righteous masochism could justify any amount of righteous sadism. No wonder then that, following Gibson’s movie, Jews have been making quasi-passion movies but with victims of whites and Christians instead to suppress the return of white/Christian moral pride.
In this climate, something like TROPIC THUNDER is rather refreshing for puncturing the convoluted moralism of Hollywood. Though Jews and the ‘left’ dominate the industry, the bloodbaths of Mel Gibson aren’t all that different in kind. The violence in HACKSAW RIDGE is so orgiastic and over the top that it turns almost into self-parody. It deserves double-billing with TROPIC THUNDER.
Passion of the Christ – Torture Porn of Righteous Masochism�
Paul Gottfried wrote: Instead, they belabor us with scenes showing victim groups taking revenge on their onetime masters or rulers, as in Django Unchained (2012), a film vacuously applauded by our selfstyled cognoscenti. Thus, we get a steady diet of blacks killing whites in slave revolts, feminized women humiliating sexist men, and gays exposing the bigotry of homophobic Christian fundamentalists.
The problem isn’t so much the victim narrative or the slave rebellion story. It’s the infantile and gleeful torture porn treatment, made worse by the obnoxious moral posturing. Better to push trash as trash than as treasure. SPARTACUS is a slave rebellion story, a very good one at that. EL CID is also a story of rebellion or resistance, against the Moorish conquerors. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is about a British agent leading an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The American Republic was founded on the rebellion-against-tyranny narrative(even though the British Monarch hardly treated colonials as slaves). Biblical movies like SAMSON AND DELILAH and TEN COMMANDMENTS run on slave rebellion fantasies. Samson the strong hairy Jew beats up Philistine overlords and even brings down an entire pagan temple to kill everyone in it. Charlton Heston as Moses goes from Egyptian prince to Jewish shepherd who is called by God to free his Tribe from Egyptian bondage. God aids Moses by killing bushels of Egyptians left and right… though, in the end, maybe Egyptians came out ahead with a Jew-free kingdom. The South also had their own variation of the slave rebellion narrative. James and Younger Gang’s robberies of Northern Banks were romanticized as Robin-Hood-like exploits against the North. Enraged Southerners were blind to the victimization of Yankees at the hand of Jesse James. And according to THE BIRTH OF A NATION, white southerners are the new slaves under Yankee carpetbaggers and uppity Negroes who’ve taken over government. So, whites must don KKK hoods and take on the Yanks, Negroes, and Southern traitors.
Are there many examples of ‘feminized women humiliating sexist men’? First, doesn’t Gottfried really mean ‘masculinized women’ humiliating ‘sexist men’? This has become problematic for feminists because rap music gained predominance, and it’s about pimps and ho’s. Feminists used to accuse men of seeing women as ‘sex objects’, but ‘twerking’ is now the proud expression of womanhood. Also, Camille Paglia heralded slut-feminism that paved the way for stuff like GIRLS and SEX AND THE CITY. In such shows, women insist on being seen and used as sex objects. Also, the pornification of culture has meant the fading of feminist objection to women as sex-obsessed creatures. In this climate, the stud is highly valued, though ‘woke’ culture can be schizophrenic, as with Emma Sulkowicz who indulged in porny-slut behavior all the while screaming ‘rape’. And women will howl about #MeToo injustice while also mocking loser-men as ‘incels’. And Rolling Stone magazine featured ultra-‘sexist’ images of ho’s and skanks while also running the crazy UVA rape hoax perpetuated by Sabrina Rubin Erderly. (What’s with all these Jewish hoaxers?) Of course, feminists have now split into opposing camps of pro-tranny pets of Jewish Power and (lesbian-heavy)TERFS who are denounced by Jewish powers-that-be as ‘transphobic’. It’s all very confusing, but who said there’s any logic to the idolatry of ‘wokeness’?
Paul Gottfried wrote: During World War II, pro-Communist filmmakers and scriptwriters filled their products with pro-Soviet messages and used the war to cast Stalin’s brutal regime in a favorable light.
Right, Stalin was very brutal. But what regime or government was not brutal? The American Right whitewashed the brutality of the Shah of Iran and the militarist regime of Guatemala. US media censored all the horrors committed by the Mujahedeen and portrayed them as ‘freedom fighters’. US certainly overlooks all the brutal things done by Israel, even the attack on USS Liberty. Most of cinema-as-history has been one pile of baloney or another.
Paul Gottfried wrote: Despite this regrettable chapter in the history of American cinematic art, certain differences between this earlier descent into leftist indoctrination and what is now happening should be noted. Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet films of the 1940s did not attack gender roles, the white race, or the nuclear family. They were aimed at whitewashing and glorifying Soviet totalitarianism at the expense of Western constitutional governments.
Stalin was certainly a monster, and the system was totalitarian. But from the leftist perspective, the West was more than about ‘constitutional governments’. Through most of the 20th century, it was the Soviets who lent aid to national liberation struggles around the world while Great Britain and France were the premier imperialist powers who brutally crushed the natives(who, of course, were also brutal in their own ways). Granted, Soviet Union was an empire in its own right, and Stalin’s treatment of various ethnic groups was often inhuman. But around much of the world, the Soviet Union was the only counter-balance against the capitalist-imperialist West. And even though capitalist West later tolerated industrial development in the Third World(as the US brand of neo-hegemony replaced the European kind), most non-white natives remembered capitalism as synonymous with imperialism that concentrated industry in the metropoles while exploiting non-white colonies as sources of raw material and coolie labor. So, given the context of the times, we can understand why many idealists looked to the Soviet Union as the force of progress, especially as it had stood against the might of Nazi Germany.
Also, Jews back then weren’t as powerful as they are today. So, whatever anti-white or anti-Christian hostility Jews may have felt went largely repressed. Even as late as the 1970s, Saul Alinsky was advising his followers to dress smart and look respectable to win over Middle America. Rules for Radicals. It would have been stupid for Jews to rock the boat too much back then.
Of course, it’s also likely that Jews, leftists, and liberals back then, having grown up in a more sober and respectable culture, had less tolerance for deviancy than they have today, a time when the elites think the rap musical HAMILTON is the greatest thing since sliced bread and when even librarians have green hair, tattoos, and piercings. What happened with Weimar Germany perhaps taught American Jews that things can go very badly for them if they go ‘full degenerate’.
Today, Jews have total power over most industries and institutions, so they see no need to hold anything back. So, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman make a nasty Christmas special and gleefully rub White America’s nose in it. Jews pull strings to remove the Robert E. Lee statue, and there is no white resistance in the cucked South. Jews push all this jungle fever stuff, but most white males only nod that race-mixing is the greatest thing. With all that power, Jews no longer fear going ‘full degenerate’ on goyim.
Paul Gottfried wrote: The movies that Professor McMeekin examines were politically subversive and grossly dishonest, but not as viciously nihilistic as today’s cinema.
Today’s nihilism owes much to capitalist hype and promotion of rollercoaster thrills. So, everything is made more ‘extreme’. Look how fight culture went from boxing to MMA with tattooed freakos. Even women are into the blood-sport of bashing each other’s face in.
And in a way, Hollywood promotes both pop-fascism(with its superhero franchises of ubermensch heroes in Wagnerian struggles that turn the world upside down many times over) and neo-imperialist militarism. While the BLM narrative has US police being ‘racist cops’ brutalizing innocent blacks, both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ are agreed that US is the sole rightful hegemon and that US military men are ‘heroes’ who deserve to invade and blow up other nations. Many are afraid to defend police officers(who kill a handful of criminal blacks every year), but everyone on both sides of the political aisle praises US militarism as heroic and honorable. ‘Liberals’ were upset that Trump didn’t start another war. ‘Conservatives’ have a knee-jerk tendency to praise anything military. ‘Liberals’ used to be somewhat more reluctant, but they are the main cheering section for US force around the world because the military has been promoted as ‘woke’ and aligned with BLM and globo-homo agenda. Drop bombs painted ‘BLM’ on ‘homophobic’ Muslims and hopefully on Russia and China too. So, in a way, ‘honor culture’ is very much alive because both political parties and Hollywood sing paeans to US military ‘heroes’ who nobly ‘sacrifice’ their lives(and kill many foreigners) in the name of homos and Negroes. Why should we have remained in Afghanistan according to MSM? Because the Taliban returned to power and painted over George Floyd murals and took down LGBT symbols. What horror!
And if Jewish Leftists were mostly anti-war and anti-imperialist in the 50s and 60s because they associated such with Anglo-American Christian right-wing jingoism, they are now fully supportive of neo-hegemony and new cold wars with Russia and China because Jews are in control of the West and steer stupid white goyim to serve the Zion King.
