In case readers think I have been idle, I have opened a YouTube account and created two playlists named ‘Songs of Struggle’, parts 1 and 2. These are songs with which the workers’ movement can identify.
Visit my channel and take a look.
Or go direct:
Playlist one is here.
Playlist two is here.
Obviously there are countless other singers and songs which could have been included – Victor Jara, Billy Bragg, etc – so perhaps I’ll create further playlists in the future. I’m open to suggestions.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Saturday, 30 July 2011
Good Nazis, bad news, part 3
3
From Dr Kassell in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) to Major Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), fascists have been a staple of cinema for many decades. Some of these portrayals, like the character Max Aldorfer in The Night Porter (1974) or even Rolf the messenger in The Sound of Music (1965), have been less straightforward than the stereotypical ‘evil Nazi’. The trends outlined above, however, represent a qualitative change in the representation of fascists onscreen. Hitler has never before been so humanised, and sympathetic fascists, coyness towards the true history of fascist personalities and atrocities, and outright heroes who are also unrepentant Nazis have never been presented in such quantity or quality before.
The rehabilitation of fascism
To fully understand these sympathetic depictions of fascists and blatant abuses of history, we must place the films in context. Western capitalism is struggling to reverse a relative economic decline. This is part of the foundation upon which the complex superstructure of history, politics and culture is built.
My argument is that these films represent one part of a broad rehabilitation of fascism. These films represent only one section of film-makers, and one section of the ruling class.[18] The Western bourgeoisie is not trying to introduce fascist governments. But it has a powerful interest in encouraging the influence of far right parties to assist its attacks on the working class. If fascism is to channel enough mass support to put pressure on mainstream politics, it must to an extent be legitimised. It must be made less monstrous through the application of ‘shades of grey’.
The films falsify or distort history through a highly selective use of characters and themes. Selected facts, when torn from their interconnectedness with other facts, can become the building blocks of all kinds of unpleasantness. One does not even have to lie – but the resulting narrative is dishonest because it uses partial empirical evidence to misrepresent the totality of a situation.
By emphasising certain things and downplaying or ignoring others, it is easy to create a credible case for what these films are trying to do. The world really is more morally complex than an uncompromising condemnation of fascism seems to allow. Not every person in a fascist uniform was a genocidal villain: no doubt many thousands made pleasant conversation, loved their pets, and sent money to their mothers. Thousands more were deluded or ignorant about the movement they were participating in, and still more thousands were repelled by it but did not dare confront it. Fascism does pose moral complexities and contradictions, and in the past directors have tended to leave these unexplored. John Rabe really did help protect thousands of Chinese refugees, and Hitler and other fascist leaders really were human beings – so why not say so?
Such objections seem reasonable. But for a proper perspective, we must not misleadingly emphasise individual facts, but consider the sum total of facts.
If the only piece of information we had about Hitler was that he was a vegetarian, most people would have either a neutral or in some cases a very positive response. But if we were then also told that Hitler was a genocidal tyrant, then his vegetarianism would become an irrelevance. Likewise, cinema today is providing us with an abundance of humanitarian fascists who sing songs, protect refugees, donate their life savings to Jewish survivors and bravely try to kill Hitler, but the main fact about the Nazis is not whether selected figures performed admirable acts. Nazism was cruelly prejudiced against homosexuals, women, Black people and other minorities. It sterilised 400,000 disabled people and practised euthanasia against thousands more. It instituted a police state, imprisoned and tortured thousands of political opponents, initiated the most brutal war the world has ever seen, and set up death camps for the systematic extermination of millions of Jews and other victims. It was one of the most horrific episodes in history in which tens of millions of people were killed.
In Downfall, the Holocaust is relegated to one sentence in the credits. Indeed, in the Italian comedy Life is Beautiful (1997), a concentration camp becomes the setting for slapstick comedy – in its single explicit image of mass murder, a heap of bodies is only dimly seen, in case its intrusion upsets the film.
One might object that the horrors of the period have been exhaustively explored and that there is no need to repeat them. But context is essential. If the full horror of fascist regimes is relegated to the background, it can become a regrettable excess offset by the good works done by its kindest members, or by the cheerful antics of its victims. No doubt there were people, like the character Guido Orefice in Life is Beautiful or Jakob in Jakob the Liar, who managed to raise people’s spirits with a joke in the ghettos or the camps, but they are so untypical of the experience that to highlight them without the full context of what those places represented is at best in poor taste. (Fortunately the ‘death camp comedy’ is one trend that even the bourgeoisie has not seen fit to pursue.) Without turning a blind eye to the total reality of history, some of these films would be morally unthinkable.
Trends like the ‘good Nazi’ normalise fascism, suggesting that it is possible to be both a sympathetic person and a fascist – people like Hitler become relatively isolated and extreme cases. This approach makes fascism more acceptable as a political choice. Those who take a firm stand and dismiss fascism on principle may then be accused of being simplistic or even, absurdly, as intolerant as the fascists themselves.
In addition, the traditional bourgeois parties refuse to take any action against fascist organisations, the media legitimise the BNP, and far right violence – such as the threat of white fascist terrorism or the street riots of the EDL – goes barely acknowledged by the authorities.
Justifications can be made for any of these films’ individual choices. It is when they are taken together, in their full political context, that they constitute a disquieting trend in contemporary cinema.
Determinism
One might think our argument guilty of ‘economic determinism’ for trying to explain aspects of cinema by reference to the means of production.
In fact, the correspondence between base and superstructure is never mechanical. The decline of Western capitalism has led to highly contradictory developments. These range from the entry of fascists into European governments to the socialist revolution in Venezuela. Between these poles stretches a complex and variegated landscape. Within social democracy alone, we see such diverging trends as the Thatcherism of New Labour and the ‘pink tide’ of the administrations in Ecuador, Brazil and other countries in Latin America. Every such development is a response to a general world situation through the prism of particular conditions, not least the balance of power between the classes.
The rise of neo-fascism is not the only development from the crisis of capital. But it is by far the most dangerous. Similiarly, a relative indulgence of fascism is not the only trend in cinema, as explicitly anti-fascist films are also being made. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a striking example of a film that pulls no punches in its depiction of Francoist brutality, and openly identifies with the progressive forces opposing it; the 2005 adaptation of V for Vendetta sided with a vigilante trying to subvert a racist, homophobic regime. The existence of such films does not mean that the ‘sympathetic’ trend does not exist and does not represent real political and cultural forces, nor does it mean that it is not a matter of concern.
The historical precedent is obvious – the last time the world suffered a financial crisis of this magnitude, Hitler was occupying the Chancellery within four years. No crude analogy should be made with 1929, in which mass fascist parties were bidding for state power and in Italy had already succeeded. Fascism’s victory in Spain, Italy and Germany followed years of radicalisation, during which the proletariat had the opportunity to take power but, held back by Stalin and social democracy, failed to seize it. In 2010*, the situation is far less radicalised and fascist forces have made relatively less progress: their fortunes are still variable, their support unstable.
Fascist violence and electoral support is nonetheless firmly on the rise, and the present crisis, which has exposed the mainstream parties as unwilling to protect the interests of the working class, has the potential to create conditions even more favourable to fascism.
Just as the rise of fascism is not mechanically determined, nor is its victory. Fascism could have been stopped in the 1920s and 1930s, and it can be stopped today. But it requires a determined campaign capable of exerting hegemonic leadership over the anti-fascist majority. Nothing is inevitable – human praxis helps to direct history.
Artists and fascism
Are these artists – film-makers, scriptwriters, television producers, etc – consciously trying to rehabilitate fascism?
The rehabilitation of fascism is a deliberate bourgeois project. Quite how far artists are conscious of the role they are playing is debatable and will vary from artist to artist. It is difficult to believe, faced with the oversights and distortions in these films, that some are not at least partly conscious of what they are doing. However, most of these films have above all an anti-fascist message: the ‘shades of grey’ exist alongside that message.
There are millions of people living and dead about whom films may be made, and an infinite number of real or imaginary situations. Films, like all works of art, flow from a series of choices. What the critic must unravel is why film-makers choose particular situations and characters and tell their stories from particular points of view.
The important question however is not, are these artists consciously trying to rehabilitate fascism? I doubt very much if they are. To suggest that Schindler’s List, which I have discussed in this context, is an attempt to ‘encourage sympathy for fascism’ would be preposterous. However, it is not the intentions behind people’s actions that are most important, but their effect upon the real world. The cinema helps to form people’s opinions and condition their attitudes to political movements. The significance of Schindler’s List is that it introduced the ‘good Nazi’ to cinema screens across the world in the mid-1990s and, no doubt unwittingly, set a precedent that allowed later films like John Rabe to go much further.
Cultural trends exist in a complex and mediated relationship with the economic foundations of society. It is possible that cabals of bosses are conspiring in smoky rooms about how to encourage support for the BNP through tendentious film-making, but it is hardly likely, nor is it necessary. Historical processes and their accompanying shifts of ideology can influence people’s behaviour whether or not they are conscious of it, and artists are attuned to such changes on the cultural level. When a space is opened up for the extreme right by the bourgeoisie, some artists respond to the questions this raises and express them in works like the films we have discussed.
The main question we must ask is: how does cinema, whatever the intentions behind it, influence popular perceptions? I would argue that some film-makers’ highly selective readings are providing ammunition for fascism. They are making it possible for Party members like Oskar Schindler, John Halder, John Rabe et al to be held up as evidence that fascists too may be respectable.
We also need to consider how films get made. Some artists, influenced by trends in politics or expected by financial backers to approach a subject in a ‘contemporary’ manner – a manner perhaps influenced by the postmodern view that all discourses are relative – are more likely than in the past to think sympathetic portrayals of Nazis are acceptable, original or ‘thought-provoking’. Given that it takes several years to get a film from concept to release, often directors will attempt to anticipate future trends. What this means in effect is that some of the most ‘avant garde’ directors in Hollywood – Von Trier for example – swerve between the centre and ultra-reactionary end of the political spectrum in search of celebrity and reward.
An example of a film which deals with fascism without making concessions to it is Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007). Told through the eyes of the 12 year-old Shaun, Meadows’ film explores how far-right politics drove the skinhead movement of the 1970s away from its roots in black culture towards racism. This includes Combo, a member of the National Front, who is not demonised but portrayed with some sympathy as he tries to recruit Shaun’s gang to his politics. Meadows looks honestly at some of the motivations that made young white people get involved in fascism:
But the film does not slip into the trends we have been discussing. Combo is not a ‘good Nazi’ but a confused and dangerous man. The progressive and anti-racist character of the original gang is asserted as an alternative to the National Front’s vile ideology, and the climactic act of violence not only drives Shaun away from fascism but exposes the contradictions within Combo’s own character and leaves him empty. Using images of the Falklands War, Meadows even makes an explicit connection between racism and imperialism. This Is England shows that it is possible to allow complex characterisation of, and even a measure of sympathy for, members of the National Front or other organisations without whitewashing history, introducing inappropriate moral ambiguities or turning fascists into heroes.
Conclusion
It should be unthinkable, after the horrific experience of the 1920s-1940s, that anybody would consider turning to fascism ever again, but the potential for fascism within imperialism never goes away. Europe’s neo-fascists do not wear black shirts and jackboots and publicly demand the liquidation of the Jews – they wear suits, participate in elections, and deny they are fascists at all. The sentiments that contemporary fascism feeds on – Islamophobia, prejudice against immigrants, attacks on multi-culturalism, concern about a ‘white working class’ with separate needs to the black working class, and so on – are firmly established in mainstream politics.
We should have no illusions in the media, which are almost entirely owned by the bourgeoisie and ultimately serve its class interests. But the general silence on how some films are representing fascists is nonetheless reprehensible. Few film critics point out that some contemporary films are inviting us to sympathise with racists and fascists, and that this is inappropriate and dangerous. Downfall in particular created controversy upon its release, but the subsequent debate has been completely inadequate. Even with John Rabe, the debate centred not on its having an unabashed Nazi hero who protects refugees under a giant swastika but on the effect upon Sino-Japanese relations of depicting the Nanjing Massacre. Is the depiction of fascists as heroes really not worthy of comment?
None of the trends outlined here is entirely new – even concentration camp comedy has been attempted before, in Jerry Lewis’s unreleased 1972 movie The Day the Clown Cried. But their prominence in contemporary films warns us that a sea change may be underway. If film-makers are broadly keeping to an anti-fascist position today, what of tomorrow? How will the sympathy be extended further over the next couple of decades?
We are experiencing a radicalisation to both the right and the left. It is inevitable that if the rise of fascism is allowed to continue, cultural expressions will appear which are more and more sympathetic to it; at the same time, others will explicitly oppose it. No development is inevitable. The victory of fascism in Europe could have been avoided: it was the outcome of a political struggle in which the rotten politics of Stalin and of social democracy betrayed the working class. As Trotsky wrote: “fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[20] No concession should be made to fascism or the racism it feeds on, and it should be permitted no platform upon which to build.
Art is one of the arenas in which this ideological struggle will find expression. Despite the problems we’ve discussed, these films are not pro-fascist, and the appropriate anti-fascist response is not to call for their censorship, or the witch-hunting of directors. Instead we need to create a genuine debate which clarifies anti-fascist arguments both for film-makers and for cinema-goers. Film-makers would be less likely to indulge the trends we’ve discussed if they knew they would be held to account and were more conscious of their broader political significance.
With Jodie Foster’s biopic about Leni Riefenstahl and other works currently in development, anti-fascists should be aware of this trend in cinema, and draw behind them the broadest possible forces of anti-fascist opinion to expose and question it. There is no shame in depicting fascism as a tremendous evil, but plenty in helping to rehabilitate it.
*I wrote this article last year. Happily, Jodie Foster appears to have abandoned her Riefenstahl project and the tide of films of this sort seems to have abated. But the general political context is much the same and further concessions to the far-right in culture are likely. On the positive side we may add the protests in the Middle East to the slowly increasing level of class struggle outside of the imperialist countries. Tragically we may also add the atrocities of Anders Breivik to the growing problem of fascist violence. The difference between how the attacks in Norway were treated when Muslims were suspected, and the relative media silence once a white racist was found to be responsible, illustrates the ruling class’s double standards regarding terrorism and its failure to confront fascism. – Eugene Hirschfeld
[18] The readiness of the Canary Wharf consortium to sponsor multicultural events in London exemplifies a contradiction within the bourgeoisie. Depending as it does on easy movement of international personnel, the City tends to be hostile towards racist controls on immigration.
[19] Shane Meadows quoted on www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk.
[20] Trotsky, op. cit..
From Dr Kassell in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) to Major Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), fascists have been a staple of cinema for many decades. Some of these portrayals, like the character Max Aldorfer in The Night Porter (1974) or even Rolf the messenger in The Sound of Music (1965), have been less straightforward than the stereotypical ‘evil Nazi’. The trends outlined above, however, represent a qualitative change in the representation of fascists onscreen. Hitler has never before been so humanised, and sympathetic fascists, coyness towards the true history of fascist personalities and atrocities, and outright heroes who are also unrepentant Nazis have never been presented in such quantity or quality before.
The rehabilitation of fascism
To fully understand these sympathetic depictions of fascists and blatant abuses of history, we must place the films in context. Western capitalism is struggling to reverse a relative economic decline. This is part of the foundation upon which the complex superstructure of history, politics and culture is built.
My argument is that these films represent one part of a broad rehabilitation of fascism. These films represent only one section of film-makers, and one section of the ruling class.[18] The Western bourgeoisie is not trying to introduce fascist governments. But it has a powerful interest in encouraging the influence of far right parties to assist its attacks on the working class. If fascism is to channel enough mass support to put pressure on mainstream politics, it must to an extent be legitimised. It must be made less monstrous through the application of ‘shades of grey’.
The films falsify or distort history through a highly selective use of characters and themes. Selected facts, when torn from their interconnectedness with other facts, can become the building blocks of all kinds of unpleasantness. One does not even have to lie – but the resulting narrative is dishonest because it uses partial empirical evidence to misrepresent the totality of a situation.
By emphasising certain things and downplaying or ignoring others, it is easy to create a credible case for what these films are trying to do. The world really is more morally complex than an uncompromising condemnation of fascism seems to allow. Not every person in a fascist uniform was a genocidal villain: no doubt many thousands made pleasant conversation, loved their pets, and sent money to their mothers. Thousands more were deluded or ignorant about the movement they were participating in, and still more thousands were repelled by it but did not dare confront it. Fascism does pose moral complexities and contradictions, and in the past directors have tended to leave these unexplored. John Rabe really did help protect thousands of Chinese refugees, and Hitler and other fascist leaders really were human beings – so why not say so?
Such objections seem reasonable. But for a proper perspective, we must not misleadingly emphasise individual facts, but consider the sum total of facts.
If the only piece of information we had about Hitler was that he was a vegetarian, most people would have either a neutral or in some cases a very positive response. But if we were then also told that Hitler was a genocidal tyrant, then his vegetarianism would become an irrelevance. Likewise, cinema today is providing us with an abundance of humanitarian fascists who sing songs, protect refugees, donate their life savings to Jewish survivors and bravely try to kill Hitler, but the main fact about the Nazis is not whether selected figures performed admirable acts. Nazism was cruelly prejudiced against homosexuals, women, Black people and other minorities. It sterilised 400,000 disabled people and practised euthanasia against thousands more. It instituted a police state, imprisoned and tortured thousands of political opponents, initiated the most brutal war the world has ever seen, and set up death camps for the systematic extermination of millions of Jews and other victims. It was one of the most horrific episodes in history in which tens of millions of people were killed.
In Downfall, the Holocaust is relegated to one sentence in the credits. Indeed, in the Italian comedy Life is Beautiful (1997), a concentration camp becomes the setting for slapstick comedy – in its single explicit image of mass murder, a heap of bodies is only dimly seen, in case its intrusion upsets the film.
One might object that the horrors of the period have been exhaustively explored and that there is no need to repeat them. But context is essential. If the full horror of fascist regimes is relegated to the background, it can become a regrettable excess offset by the good works done by its kindest members, or by the cheerful antics of its victims. No doubt there were people, like the character Guido Orefice in Life is Beautiful or Jakob in Jakob the Liar, who managed to raise people’s spirits with a joke in the ghettos or the camps, but they are so untypical of the experience that to highlight them without the full context of what those places represented is at best in poor taste. (Fortunately the ‘death camp comedy’ is one trend that even the bourgeoisie has not seen fit to pursue.) Without turning a blind eye to the total reality of history, some of these films would be morally unthinkable.
Trends like the ‘good Nazi’ normalise fascism, suggesting that it is possible to be both a sympathetic person and a fascist – people like Hitler become relatively isolated and extreme cases. This approach makes fascism more acceptable as a political choice. Those who take a firm stand and dismiss fascism on principle may then be accused of being simplistic or even, absurdly, as intolerant as the fascists themselves.
In addition, the traditional bourgeois parties refuse to take any action against fascist organisations, the media legitimise the BNP, and far right violence – such as the threat of white fascist terrorism or the street riots of the EDL – goes barely acknowledged by the authorities.
Justifications can be made for any of these films’ individual choices. It is when they are taken together, in their full political context, that they constitute a disquieting trend in contemporary cinema.
Determinism
One might think our argument guilty of ‘economic determinism’ for trying to explain aspects of cinema by reference to the means of production.
In fact, the correspondence between base and superstructure is never mechanical. The decline of Western capitalism has led to highly contradictory developments. These range from the entry of fascists into European governments to the socialist revolution in Venezuela. Between these poles stretches a complex and variegated landscape. Within social democracy alone, we see such diverging trends as the Thatcherism of New Labour and the ‘pink tide’ of the administrations in Ecuador, Brazil and other countries in Latin America. Every such development is a response to a general world situation through the prism of particular conditions, not least the balance of power between the classes.
The rise of neo-fascism is not the only development from the crisis of capital. But it is by far the most dangerous. Similiarly, a relative indulgence of fascism is not the only trend in cinema, as explicitly anti-fascist films are also being made. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a striking example of a film that pulls no punches in its depiction of Francoist brutality, and openly identifies with the progressive forces opposing it; the 2005 adaptation of V for Vendetta sided with a vigilante trying to subvert a racist, homophobic regime. The existence of such films does not mean that the ‘sympathetic’ trend does not exist and does not represent real political and cultural forces, nor does it mean that it is not a matter of concern.
The historical precedent is obvious – the last time the world suffered a financial crisis of this magnitude, Hitler was occupying the Chancellery within four years. No crude analogy should be made with 1929, in which mass fascist parties were bidding for state power and in Italy had already succeeded. Fascism’s victory in Spain, Italy and Germany followed years of radicalisation, during which the proletariat had the opportunity to take power but, held back by Stalin and social democracy, failed to seize it. In 2010*, the situation is far less radicalised and fascist forces have made relatively less progress: their fortunes are still variable, their support unstable.
Fascist violence and electoral support is nonetheless firmly on the rise, and the present crisis, which has exposed the mainstream parties as unwilling to protect the interests of the working class, has the potential to create conditions even more favourable to fascism.
Just as the rise of fascism is not mechanically determined, nor is its victory. Fascism could have been stopped in the 1920s and 1930s, and it can be stopped today. But it requires a determined campaign capable of exerting hegemonic leadership over the anti-fascist majority. Nothing is inevitable – human praxis helps to direct history.
Artists and fascism
Are these artists – film-makers, scriptwriters, television producers, etc – consciously trying to rehabilitate fascism?
The rehabilitation of fascism is a deliberate bourgeois project. Quite how far artists are conscious of the role they are playing is debatable and will vary from artist to artist. It is difficult to believe, faced with the oversights and distortions in these films, that some are not at least partly conscious of what they are doing. However, most of these films have above all an anti-fascist message: the ‘shades of grey’ exist alongside that message.
There are millions of people living and dead about whom films may be made, and an infinite number of real or imaginary situations. Films, like all works of art, flow from a series of choices. What the critic must unravel is why film-makers choose particular situations and characters and tell their stories from particular points of view.
The important question however is not, are these artists consciously trying to rehabilitate fascism? I doubt very much if they are. To suggest that Schindler’s List, which I have discussed in this context, is an attempt to ‘encourage sympathy for fascism’ would be preposterous. However, it is not the intentions behind people’s actions that are most important, but their effect upon the real world. The cinema helps to form people’s opinions and condition their attitudes to political movements. The significance of Schindler’s List is that it introduced the ‘good Nazi’ to cinema screens across the world in the mid-1990s and, no doubt unwittingly, set a precedent that allowed later films like John Rabe to go much further.
Cultural trends exist in a complex and mediated relationship with the economic foundations of society. It is possible that cabals of bosses are conspiring in smoky rooms about how to encourage support for the BNP through tendentious film-making, but it is hardly likely, nor is it necessary. Historical processes and their accompanying shifts of ideology can influence people’s behaviour whether or not they are conscious of it, and artists are attuned to such changes on the cultural level. When a space is opened up for the extreme right by the bourgeoisie, some artists respond to the questions this raises and express them in works like the films we have discussed.
The main question we must ask is: how does cinema, whatever the intentions behind it, influence popular perceptions? I would argue that some film-makers’ highly selective readings are providing ammunition for fascism. They are making it possible for Party members like Oskar Schindler, John Halder, John Rabe et al to be held up as evidence that fascists too may be respectable.
We also need to consider how films get made. Some artists, influenced by trends in politics or expected by financial backers to approach a subject in a ‘contemporary’ manner – a manner perhaps influenced by the postmodern view that all discourses are relative – are more likely than in the past to think sympathetic portrayals of Nazis are acceptable, original or ‘thought-provoking’. Given that it takes several years to get a film from concept to release, often directors will attempt to anticipate future trends. What this means in effect is that some of the most ‘avant garde’ directors in Hollywood – Von Trier for example – swerve between the centre and ultra-reactionary end of the political spectrum in search of celebrity and reward.
An example of a film which deals with fascism without making concessions to it is Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007). Told through the eyes of the 12 year-old Shaun, Meadows’ film explores how far-right politics drove the skinhead movement of the 1970s away from its roots in black culture towards racism. This includes Combo, a member of the National Front, who is not demonised but portrayed with some sympathy as he tries to recruit Shaun’s gang to his politics. Meadows looks honestly at some of the motivations that made young white people get involved in fascism:
These were teens who came from areas of high unemployment looking for solidarity beyond Thatcher’s ‘me’ culture. They were abandoned by society and that, of course, made them vulnerable to the advances of the National Front...
When you’re twelve and no one in your town can get a job, and someone comes up to you and says ‘these people are to blame’ it’s easy to believe. I did for about three weeks, some people still believe that as adults and that’s frightening.[19]
But the film does not slip into the trends we have been discussing. Combo is not a ‘good Nazi’ but a confused and dangerous man. The progressive and anti-racist character of the original gang is asserted as an alternative to the National Front’s vile ideology, and the climactic act of violence not only drives Shaun away from fascism but exposes the contradictions within Combo’s own character and leaves him empty. Using images of the Falklands War, Meadows even makes an explicit connection between racism and imperialism. This Is England shows that it is possible to allow complex characterisation of, and even a measure of sympathy for, members of the National Front or other organisations without whitewashing history, introducing inappropriate moral ambiguities or turning fascists into heroes.
Conclusion
It should be unthinkable, after the horrific experience of the 1920s-1940s, that anybody would consider turning to fascism ever again, but the potential for fascism within imperialism never goes away. Europe’s neo-fascists do not wear black shirts and jackboots and publicly demand the liquidation of the Jews – they wear suits, participate in elections, and deny they are fascists at all. The sentiments that contemporary fascism feeds on – Islamophobia, prejudice against immigrants, attacks on multi-culturalism, concern about a ‘white working class’ with separate needs to the black working class, and so on – are firmly established in mainstream politics.
We should have no illusions in the media, which are almost entirely owned by the bourgeoisie and ultimately serve its class interests. But the general silence on how some films are representing fascists is nonetheless reprehensible. Few film critics point out that some contemporary films are inviting us to sympathise with racists and fascists, and that this is inappropriate and dangerous. Downfall in particular created controversy upon its release, but the subsequent debate has been completely inadequate. Even with John Rabe, the debate centred not on its having an unabashed Nazi hero who protects refugees under a giant swastika but on the effect upon Sino-Japanese relations of depicting the Nanjing Massacre. Is the depiction of fascists as heroes really not worthy of comment?
None of the trends outlined here is entirely new – even concentration camp comedy has been attempted before, in Jerry Lewis’s unreleased 1972 movie The Day the Clown Cried. But their prominence in contemporary films warns us that a sea change may be underway. If film-makers are broadly keeping to an anti-fascist position today, what of tomorrow? How will the sympathy be extended further over the next couple of decades?
We are experiencing a radicalisation to both the right and the left. It is inevitable that if the rise of fascism is allowed to continue, cultural expressions will appear which are more and more sympathetic to it; at the same time, others will explicitly oppose it. No development is inevitable. The victory of fascism in Europe could have been avoided: it was the outcome of a political struggle in which the rotten politics of Stalin and of social democracy betrayed the working class. As Trotsky wrote: “fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[20] No concession should be made to fascism or the racism it feeds on, and it should be permitted no platform upon which to build.
Art is one of the arenas in which this ideological struggle will find expression. Despite the problems we’ve discussed, these films are not pro-fascist, and the appropriate anti-fascist response is not to call for their censorship, or the witch-hunting of directors. Instead we need to create a genuine debate which clarifies anti-fascist arguments both for film-makers and for cinema-goers. Film-makers would be less likely to indulge the trends we’ve discussed if they knew they would be held to account and were more conscious of their broader political significance.
With Jodie Foster’s biopic about Leni Riefenstahl and other works currently in development, anti-fascists should be aware of this trend in cinema, and draw behind them the broadest possible forces of anti-fascist opinion to expose and question it. There is no shame in depicting fascism as a tremendous evil, but plenty in helping to rehabilitate it.
*I wrote this article last year. Happily, Jodie Foster appears to have abandoned her Riefenstahl project and the tide of films of this sort seems to have abated. But the general political context is much the same and further concessions to the far-right in culture are likely. On the positive side we may add the protests in the Middle East to the slowly increasing level of class struggle outside of the imperialist countries. Tragically we may also add the atrocities of Anders Breivik to the growing problem of fascist violence. The difference between how the attacks in Norway were treated when Muslims were suspected, and the relative media silence once a white racist was found to be responsible, illustrates the ruling class’s double standards regarding terrorism and its failure to confront fascism. – Eugene Hirschfeld
[18] The readiness of the Canary Wharf consortium to sponsor multicultural events in London exemplifies a contradiction within the bourgeoisie. Depending as it does on easy movement of international personnel, the City tends to be hostile towards racist controls on immigration.
[19] Shane Meadows quoted on www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk.
[20] Trotsky, op. cit..
Good Nazis, bad news, part 2
2
The films mentioned at the beginning of this article are not completely unprecedented, as fascists and fascism have been portrayed onscreen for decades. What is striking today is a number of key trends that are appearing in so many new films.
Enter the good Nazi
The first of these trends is the ‘good Nazi’. This term was originally coined for Albert Speer, the architect and prominent Party member who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Hitler’s regime. Claiming ignorance of the Holocaust to escape execution at the Nuremburg trials, Speer argued that he drew close to the Führer not out of political conviction but in order to realise his dreams as an architect. He would not be the last Nazi to protest innocence of his regime’s horrors.
The ‘good Nazi’ – the more general ‘good fascist’ would be better, but the label is already current as a cinematic type – has become a favourite theme in contemporary film. In Schindler’s List he is Oskar Schindler, the industrialist and Party member who uses his factories to spare Jews from the concentration camps. In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin he is the eponymous Captain Corelli, a soldier in the Italian fascist army who sings songs and falls in love with one of the women whose island his army occupies. In The Pianist he is Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, the music-loving officer who brings food to the haggard Szpilman in the ruins of Warsaw. In The Counterfeiters he is Bernhard Kruger, the chief of a Sachsenhausen counterfeiting operation, who provides his Jewish workers with privileges, never hits his children, and whose Party membership is mere opportunism. In Black Book he is the SS officer Ludwig Müntze, who baulks at the atrocities of his superiors and ends up as the lover and protector of the heroine. In Valkyrie he is Von Stauffenberg, the principled officer who tries to bring the war to an end by assassinating Hitler. In John Rabe he is the loyal Party member who is shocked by Japanese atrocities in China.
In Good, directed by Vicente Amorim, the protagonist John Halder is a professor and decent family man whose novel on euthanasia brings him to the attention of the Nazi Party. Initially hesitant, Halder agrees to be recruited to the Party in the interests of keeping it in touch with ‘humanity’. Despite warnings from his Jewish friend Maurice, Halder somehow manages to remain ignorant of the regime’s racism and finds himself being mobilised for Kristallnacht. It is only when Halder goes in search of the now missing Maurice and is confronted with a concentration camp that the penny finally drops.
The film explores how a series of choices (in combination with moral cowardice) takes a civilised man to the point where he finds himself serving the SS and helping to perpetrate the Holocaust. On one level, Good is a serious attempt to understand how the population of an advanced state might be seduced into collaborating with a vicious regime. On another, it offers us yet another character who is a good person despite their fascist uniform.
The message delivered by the ‘good Nazi’ is that it is possible to be both a decent person and a fascist. He or she often has a connection to traditional (i.e. pre-fascist) culture, and demonstrates sympathetic traits such as loving music, reviling Hitler, rescuing Jews, and so on. Indeed, the sympathy the character encourages is such that he or she must usually share the film with another fascist who is an unmitigated psychopath – for every Oskar Schindler, an Amon Göth – lest its moral compass be lost completely.
John Rabe is often compared to Oskar Schindler [5]. Whereas Schindler clearly acted against the racist policies of the Party, Rabe’s relationship to it is played down onscreen, for example when he is shown, after initial reluctance, joining the American doctor Robert Wilson in the singing of an anti-Nazi song. But not only did this humanitarian join the NSDAP in 1933, he was head of the local branch in Nanjing. During the Japanese invasion he sent a telegram to Hitler in sincere expectation of assistance, and reportedly said in a lecture in 1938: “Although I feel tremendous sympathy for the suffering of China, I am still, above all, pro-German and I believe not only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organiser of the party, I am behind the system 100 percent” [6] – additional evidence suggests that he meant it. When in the film Rabe is confronted by the Jewish diplomat Rosen about the persecution of Jews, he has nothing to say in response. It is true that Rabe, like Schindler, is partly non-racist in practice, by saving the lives of thousands of Chinese, an ethnic group that most fascists would consider racially inferior. He nonetheless patronises them as being “like children”, a view that is never challenged. Just 16 years after Schindler’s List rewrote the rules on whom we may sympathise with in films, John Rabe is perhaps the most egregious of them all, because neither its eponymous hero nor the film itself expresses any significant discomfort with his membership of the Nazi Party. This character is perhaps the first of his kind, and certainly he will not be the last.
“Ten years ago,” commented Ulrich Tukur, the actor who plays the title role in John Rabe, “it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi.” [7] Today, it is hard to find a film about fascism that does not include this character type.
Humanising Hitler
The second trend requires breaking an even stronger taboo. This is the humanisation of Hitler himself. The most powerful example of this was the performance by Bruno Ganz in Downfall. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film – undoubtedly anti-fascist in its overall impact – depicts the final days of Nazi Germany, mostly through the experiences of the coterie around Hitler in the Führerbunker. Ganz reimagines with great power Hitler’s frustrated tirades, his marshalling of non-existent armies, and his monstrous indifference to suffering, but he also, inevitably, shows more. The Führer comes across as a wretched and hate-filled human being, but a human being nonetheless.
Downfall was not of course the first film to depict Hitler as a character. In Britain, various respected actors have played the role, such as Alec Guinness in 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days and Anthony Hopkins in the 1981 TV drama The Bunker. In Germany, however, Downfall had to overcome a powerful taboo on the appearance of Hitler as a leading character played by a German-speaking actor [8]. Ganz’s powerful performance helped to justify that step and quickly became a benchmark.
Other recent cinematic portrayals of Hitler include Menno Meyjes’s Max (2002) in which we see Hitler deciding whether to devote his life to art or politics, and the 2005 TV drama Uncle Adolf, starring Ken Stott, which explores Hitler’s relationship with his niece Geli Raubal (‘Hitler’s darkest passion’, as the blurb has it). This film takes the humanisation of Hitler much further than Downfall. Early on, Hitler cuts an often jovial figure, larking around with his friends and charming Raubal with his jokes – he is twice referred to as a “wonderful man” and is even shown with Raubal in sexual scenes. Whatever we know about history, many viewers will find it hard not to be provoked to some measure of sympathy when presented with a story of failed love, however twisted the relationship. Even during the last days in the bunker, the film allows Hitler to make an appeal for sympathy: “Have you any idea,” he complains to Eva Braun, as Soviet bombs fall outside, “what this is like for me?”
Although actors often invest months of research in crafting these performances, the quality of their acting is a secondary issue compared to the political significance of breaking the taboo on humanising Hitler. Downfall opened a door, allowing others to go even further.
The humanisation of Hitler may seem excusable on a facile level because Hitler was, undeniably, a human being. One might argue that the alternative is to restrict ourselves to a black and white caricature of a historical figure. With a distance of over sixty years since the end of the war, surely we can now step beyond this simplistic level? After all, Hitler on screen usually comes across as little more than a repulsive lunatic, which is unlikely to win anyone to his politics.
The problem is that to humanise Hitler onscreen is to normalise him and invite a sympathy from the viewer that is completely inappropriate. The dominant fact about Hitler is not that he allegedly fancied his niece, or was a vegetarian, or loved his dog Blondi, but that he was a vicious racist and the lead instigator of the worst atrocity in European history. Bruno Ganz commented, “He had no pity, no compassion, no understanding of what the victims of war suffered. Ultimately, I could not get to the heart of Hitler because there was none.”[9]
To what end would you invite sympathy with such a figure? One answer would be that it may be profitable to try to ‘understand’ the mentality of Hitler. But little can be learnt about the great forces of history from his personal psychology. Fascism was not the invention of an individual ‘evil genius’ who bewitched millions of innocents into following him, but a national movement that can only be understood by reference to the social forces of the time. Hitler was, so to speak, ‘chosen’ by history to front that movement in Germany. If it had not been him, then some other figure would have been filmed by Hirschbiegel ranting in the bunker. If the individual psychology of Hitler does not offer any real insight, turning him into a cinematic character makes an unacceptable moral compromise for zero gain.
The whitewashing of history
The third trend is the whitewashing of history through the distortion or highly selective use of documented facts. This is unavoidable if film-makers want to make fascist characters palatable to most cinema-goers.
Much of Downfall is presented through the eyes of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary. Junge is played as an innocent, and appears in interview at the beginning and end of the film to claim that she knew nothing about the extermination camps. This ‘massaging of history’ was severely criticised by historians David Cesarani and Peter Longerich [10]. Nothing in the film is more unconvincing, they point out, than Junge’s eyes widening in shock when she hears Hitler ranting against the Jews. In reality, Junge was a committed National Socialist with a role at the centre of power in the Third Reich.
Downfall portrays most of the bunker’s inhabitants as part of a practical officer caste, honour-bound by oath to an extremist Nazi clique and struggling to manage a desperate situation. This division of the ruling elite into honourable soldiers and callous Nazis is also unconvincing, as we are fed the ghastly spectacle of Waffen-SS officers such as General Mohnke raising humanitarian objections to Hitler’s orders. Or there is the doctor Ernst Günther Schenck, who braves the Soviet advance to help the wounded. Cesarani and Longerich point out that not only had Schenk served in the SS, but after the war he “was implicated in the conduct of ‘frivolous’ medical experiments on inmates in Mauthausen concentration camp.” To represent such a character as a sympathetic hero without mention of this past is an extraordinary ‘oversight’ [11].
Another beneficiary of the historical whitewash is Claus Schenk Von Stauffenberg, portrayed not only in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie but in a number of recent German films. Von Stauffenberg was a leading figure in the conspiracy that planned to assassinate Hitler in the bomb plot of 20 July 1944 and then mobilise reserve troops (Operation Valkyrie) to complete a coup. Valkyrie’s tagline promises heroic deeds: “Many saw evil. They dared to stop it.” Yet far from being a ‘good’ Nazi, the real Von Stauffenberg was an aristocratic reactionary who welcomed the creation of a German empire. According to historian Roger Moorehouse,
Although Von Stauffenberg never joined the Nazi party, this was due to elitism rather than principle. He was a racist who, after the 1939 Polish campaign, “described the Poles as ‘an unbelievable rabble’ of ‘Jews and mongrels’ who were ‘only comfortable under the knout’.” Von Stauffenberg’s participation in the conspiracy was motivated more by Hitler’s strategic failures in running the war than the extremely vague humanist ideals attributed to him by the film. This inconvenient context probably helps account for the under-development of Von Stauffenberg’s character. “I have admired him as a hero,” said Tom Cruise, who played him, “and I will play him as a hero.”[13]
The motivations of his fellow conspirators remain equally vague. Several of these characters are played by well-liked actors such as Bill Nighy and the comedian Eddie Izzard, which further encourages us to see them as benign figures.
As for the original ‘good Nazi’, Albert Speer, who insisted that he knew nothing about the Holocaust despite his proximity to Hitler, his myth has been debunked by documents unearthed by Berlin historian Susanne Willems. One report referring to how Auschwitz had been fitted to handle the ‘Final Solution’ was copiously annotated in Speer’s handwriting.[14] Speer’s protests of ignorance, like those of Traudl Junge, are simply not credible in the face of such evidence.
The altering of historical fact is not unusual in art, and is not in itself reprehensible – what matters are the messages that result. What is the effect upon the perceptions of an audience of portraying members of Hitler’s personal staff as innocent of the Holocaust? Of ignoring the atrocities committed by SS officers? Of depicting racist imperialists as heroes?
Moral ambiguity
The last cinematic trend we shall consider is the introduction of a moral ambiguity that questions whether or not fascists are especially repugnant.
For most of the post-war period the verdict on fascism was, rightly, uncompromising: it was an evil that cost millions of people their lives. Today, this verdict is apparently no longer satisfactory, as it is too simplistic and ignores the most interesting moral questions. Thus moral ambiguity is being used to pose ‘uncomfortable’ questions about complicity, and how easily any of us might fall into the same role as the characters onscreen.
An excellent example is the character Hanna Schmitz in The Reader [15], directed by Stephen Daldry. In this film a teenage boy, Michael, befriends a lonely older woman, Hanna, and begins a love affair with her. One day she disappears without warning, and he does not see her again until he is a law student attending a court trial as part of his training. With a shock, he realises that one of the six women in the dock charged with war crimes is his former lover. The key point in the trial comes during a discussion of a death march, when the women on trial locked 300 Jews in a church and let it burn to the ground. When the court produces a contemporary report of the event as evidence, the other defendants try to accuse Hanna of writing it. She admits to doing so, and is consequently sentenced more sternly than the others. But Michael alone knows that she could not have written the report, because she is illiterate.
Hanna admits to participating in the Holocaust, selecting women to be gassed and joining in a death march. The film’s preposterous thesis seems to be that she would rather be imprisoned for mass murder than exposed as illiterate. Perhaps we are meant to think she embraces punishment out of remorse, but if that is so, why are we not shown it? We are offered only the barest whiff of such a motivation. Either way, the film’s main theme is very clear. In the first section of the film we are encouraged to feel a certain sympathy for Hanna. Only then are we told what she has done, and expected to ask ourselves, what led her to behave this way?
It is a question to which the film offers no answer. As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, “you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard”.[16] At the end of the film Hanna donates her money to one of the survivors of the camps. The survivor refuses it, but, in an unconvincing touch, keeps the old tin Hanna kept the money in because it reminds her of a tin she herself once owned. Although it belonged to an SS guard who helped kill her mother, she puts it on her mantelpiece in a trite and inappropriate image of ‘reconciliation’.
In another scene, a student from Michael’s law class becomes a heavy-handed representative of punitive inflexibility. Raging against Hanna Schmitz and her fellow ex-SS guards, he shouts: “You know what I’d do? Put the gun in my hand and shoot her myself. Shoot them all!” The film then cuts to Michael walking towards Auschwitz. The juxtaposition implies that those who take a hard line against fascists are little better than fascists themselves. In his call for violence, does the law student mean only the six women in the dock, or all the thousands of people who worked in the camps or merely knew about them – a comparable call to mass murder? In the same vein, Hanna demands of the judge at her trial, “What would you have done differently?” Flustered, he offers no reply.
Another film steeped in such moral ambiguity is Black Book. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the film follows a Dutch Jewish singer called Rachel Stein and her almost picaresque passage from one tribulation to the next during the war. After her family is killed trying to flee the Nazi occupation, Stein becomes a spy for the Resistance, seducing an SS officer, Ludwig Müntze, with whom she falls in love. Then the situation reverses. The Resistance are tricked into thinking she has betrayed them, and they become her pursuers. Müntze, already alienated from his Nazi peers after refusing to carry out an atrocity, becomes her protector, and the lovers flee together from vengeful (and anti-Semitic) Resistance fighters. Towards the end we are presumably meant to grieve as Müntze is shot by an Allied firing squad.
The obvious message is that there is no moral distinction between the Nazis and the Resistance fighters who tried to stop them. The worst of Stein’s many tribulations comes not at the hands of fascists but after the victory, when a Dutch mob publicly humiliate her for supposedly being a collaborator. As Verhoeven put it: “In this movie, everything has a shade of grey. There are no people who are completely good and no people who are completely bad. It’s like life.”[17]
In reality, wanting to stop racism, dictatorship and mass murder is not in the least comparable to perpetrating them. Yet the implication that anti-fascists are no better than the fascists themselves appears again and again, both in these films and in the general media response to anti-fascist activism.
Certainly many people joined fascist parties out of fear or ignorance rather than because they were committed to those politics. But there is a thin line between forgiving the terrorised and forgiving the perpetrators of terror. The emphasis in certain films upon ambivalent characters and situations invites us not only to understand more, but to condemn less.
(Concluded in Part 3.)
[5] It might have been more interesting to film the achievements of the real ‘Chinese Schindler’, Ho Fengshan, a Chinese diplomat to Austria who helped possibly thousands of Jews escape the Third Reich by issuing them with visas to enter Shanghai.
[6] Quoted in David W. Chen, ‘At the Rape of Nanking: A Nazi Who Saved Lives’, New York Times, 15 December 1996.
[7] From an interview with Ulrich Tukur by the DPA news agency, cited on Deutsche Welle (www.dw-world.de), 9 February 2009.
[8] Hitler had been portrayed in German cinema one or two times before, for example by Albin Skoda in G. W. Pabst’s Der Letzte Akt in 1955. But Downfall broke new ground in seeking the ‘human’ side of the Führer.
[9] From Krysia Diver and Stephen Moss, ‘Desperately Seeking Adolf’, Guardian, 25 March 2005.
[10] David Cesarani and Peter Longerich, ‘The Massaging of History’, Guardian, 7 April 2005.
[11] These shortcomings are less surprising when we consider that Downfall was based largely on a book by Joachim Fest, the right-wing historian who helped Speer write his memoirs.
[12] Roger Moorhouse, ‘A Good German? Von Stauffenberg and the July plot’, History Today, Jan 2009.
[13] Quoted in Allan Hall, ‘Tom Cruise’s transformation into a heroic Nazi’, Daily Mail, 20 July 2007.
[14] See for example Kate Connolly, ‘Wartime reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi’, Daily Telegraph, 11 May 2005.
[15] The Reader, like Schindler’s List, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and others, is based upon a novel, in this case 1995’s Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink – the new approach to fascism is not limited to the cinema.
[16] Manohla Dargis, ‘Innocence is Lost in Postwar Germany’, New York Times, 10 December 2008.
[17] Quoted in Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Homeward Bound’, The Guardian, 25 November 2005.
The films mentioned at the beginning of this article are not completely unprecedented, as fascists and fascism have been portrayed onscreen for decades. What is striking today is a number of key trends that are appearing in so many new films.
Enter the good Nazi
The first of these trends is the ‘good Nazi’. This term was originally coined for Albert Speer, the architect and prominent Party member who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Hitler’s regime. Claiming ignorance of the Holocaust to escape execution at the Nuremburg trials, Speer argued that he drew close to the Führer not out of political conviction but in order to realise his dreams as an architect. He would not be the last Nazi to protest innocence of his regime’s horrors.
The ‘good Nazi’ – the more general ‘good fascist’ would be better, but the label is already current as a cinematic type – has become a favourite theme in contemporary film. In Schindler’s List he is Oskar Schindler, the industrialist and Party member who uses his factories to spare Jews from the concentration camps. In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin he is the eponymous Captain Corelli, a soldier in the Italian fascist army who sings songs and falls in love with one of the women whose island his army occupies. In The Pianist he is Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, the music-loving officer who brings food to the haggard Szpilman in the ruins of Warsaw. In The Counterfeiters he is Bernhard Kruger, the chief of a Sachsenhausen counterfeiting operation, who provides his Jewish workers with privileges, never hits his children, and whose Party membership is mere opportunism. In Black Book he is the SS officer Ludwig Müntze, who baulks at the atrocities of his superiors and ends up as the lover and protector of the heroine. In Valkyrie he is Von Stauffenberg, the principled officer who tries to bring the war to an end by assassinating Hitler. In John Rabe he is the loyal Party member who is shocked by Japanese atrocities in China.
In Good, directed by Vicente Amorim, the protagonist John Halder is a professor and decent family man whose novel on euthanasia brings him to the attention of the Nazi Party. Initially hesitant, Halder agrees to be recruited to the Party in the interests of keeping it in touch with ‘humanity’. Despite warnings from his Jewish friend Maurice, Halder somehow manages to remain ignorant of the regime’s racism and finds himself being mobilised for Kristallnacht. It is only when Halder goes in search of the now missing Maurice and is confronted with a concentration camp that the penny finally drops.
The film explores how a series of choices (in combination with moral cowardice) takes a civilised man to the point where he finds himself serving the SS and helping to perpetrate the Holocaust. On one level, Good is a serious attempt to understand how the population of an advanced state might be seduced into collaborating with a vicious regime. On another, it offers us yet another character who is a good person despite their fascist uniform.
The message delivered by the ‘good Nazi’ is that it is possible to be both a decent person and a fascist. He or she often has a connection to traditional (i.e. pre-fascist) culture, and demonstrates sympathetic traits such as loving music, reviling Hitler, rescuing Jews, and so on. Indeed, the sympathy the character encourages is such that he or she must usually share the film with another fascist who is an unmitigated psychopath – for every Oskar Schindler, an Amon Göth – lest its moral compass be lost completely.
John Rabe is often compared to Oskar Schindler [5]. Whereas Schindler clearly acted against the racist policies of the Party, Rabe’s relationship to it is played down onscreen, for example when he is shown, after initial reluctance, joining the American doctor Robert Wilson in the singing of an anti-Nazi song. But not only did this humanitarian join the NSDAP in 1933, he was head of the local branch in Nanjing. During the Japanese invasion he sent a telegram to Hitler in sincere expectation of assistance, and reportedly said in a lecture in 1938: “Although I feel tremendous sympathy for the suffering of China, I am still, above all, pro-German and I believe not only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organiser of the party, I am behind the system 100 percent” [6] – additional evidence suggests that he meant it. When in the film Rabe is confronted by the Jewish diplomat Rosen about the persecution of Jews, he has nothing to say in response. It is true that Rabe, like Schindler, is partly non-racist in practice, by saving the lives of thousands of Chinese, an ethnic group that most fascists would consider racially inferior. He nonetheless patronises them as being “like children”, a view that is never challenged. Just 16 years after Schindler’s List rewrote the rules on whom we may sympathise with in films, John Rabe is perhaps the most egregious of them all, because neither its eponymous hero nor the film itself expresses any significant discomfort with his membership of the Nazi Party. This character is perhaps the first of his kind, and certainly he will not be the last.
“Ten years ago,” commented Ulrich Tukur, the actor who plays the title role in John Rabe, “it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi.” [7] Today, it is hard to find a film about fascism that does not include this character type.
Humanising Hitler
The second trend requires breaking an even stronger taboo. This is the humanisation of Hitler himself. The most powerful example of this was the performance by Bruno Ganz in Downfall. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film – undoubtedly anti-fascist in its overall impact – depicts the final days of Nazi Germany, mostly through the experiences of the coterie around Hitler in the Führerbunker. Ganz reimagines with great power Hitler’s frustrated tirades, his marshalling of non-existent armies, and his monstrous indifference to suffering, but he also, inevitably, shows more. The Führer comes across as a wretched and hate-filled human being, but a human being nonetheless.
Downfall was not of course the first film to depict Hitler as a character. In Britain, various respected actors have played the role, such as Alec Guinness in 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days and Anthony Hopkins in the 1981 TV drama The Bunker. In Germany, however, Downfall had to overcome a powerful taboo on the appearance of Hitler as a leading character played by a German-speaking actor [8]. Ganz’s powerful performance helped to justify that step and quickly became a benchmark.
Other recent cinematic portrayals of Hitler include Menno Meyjes’s Max (2002) in which we see Hitler deciding whether to devote his life to art or politics, and the 2005 TV drama Uncle Adolf, starring Ken Stott, which explores Hitler’s relationship with his niece Geli Raubal (‘Hitler’s darkest passion’, as the blurb has it). This film takes the humanisation of Hitler much further than Downfall. Early on, Hitler cuts an often jovial figure, larking around with his friends and charming Raubal with his jokes – he is twice referred to as a “wonderful man” and is even shown with Raubal in sexual scenes. Whatever we know about history, many viewers will find it hard not to be provoked to some measure of sympathy when presented with a story of failed love, however twisted the relationship. Even during the last days in the bunker, the film allows Hitler to make an appeal for sympathy: “Have you any idea,” he complains to Eva Braun, as Soviet bombs fall outside, “what this is like for me?”
Although actors often invest months of research in crafting these performances, the quality of their acting is a secondary issue compared to the political significance of breaking the taboo on humanising Hitler. Downfall opened a door, allowing others to go even further.
The humanisation of Hitler may seem excusable on a facile level because Hitler was, undeniably, a human being. One might argue that the alternative is to restrict ourselves to a black and white caricature of a historical figure. With a distance of over sixty years since the end of the war, surely we can now step beyond this simplistic level? After all, Hitler on screen usually comes across as little more than a repulsive lunatic, which is unlikely to win anyone to his politics.
The problem is that to humanise Hitler onscreen is to normalise him and invite a sympathy from the viewer that is completely inappropriate. The dominant fact about Hitler is not that he allegedly fancied his niece, or was a vegetarian, or loved his dog Blondi, but that he was a vicious racist and the lead instigator of the worst atrocity in European history. Bruno Ganz commented, “He had no pity, no compassion, no understanding of what the victims of war suffered. Ultimately, I could not get to the heart of Hitler because there was none.”[9]
To what end would you invite sympathy with such a figure? One answer would be that it may be profitable to try to ‘understand’ the mentality of Hitler. But little can be learnt about the great forces of history from his personal psychology. Fascism was not the invention of an individual ‘evil genius’ who bewitched millions of innocents into following him, but a national movement that can only be understood by reference to the social forces of the time. Hitler was, so to speak, ‘chosen’ by history to front that movement in Germany. If it had not been him, then some other figure would have been filmed by Hirschbiegel ranting in the bunker. If the individual psychology of Hitler does not offer any real insight, turning him into a cinematic character makes an unacceptable moral compromise for zero gain.
The whitewashing of history
The third trend is the whitewashing of history through the distortion or highly selective use of documented facts. This is unavoidable if film-makers want to make fascist characters palatable to most cinema-goers.
Much of Downfall is presented through the eyes of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary. Junge is played as an innocent, and appears in interview at the beginning and end of the film to claim that she knew nothing about the extermination camps. This ‘massaging of history’ was severely criticised by historians David Cesarani and Peter Longerich [10]. Nothing in the film is more unconvincing, they point out, than Junge’s eyes widening in shock when she hears Hitler ranting against the Jews. In reality, Junge was a committed National Socialist with a role at the centre of power in the Third Reich.
Downfall portrays most of the bunker’s inhabitants as part of a practical officer caste, honour-bound by oath to an extremist Nazi clique and struggling to manage a desperate situation. This division of the ruling elite into honourable soldiers and callous Nazis is also unconvincing, as we are fed the ghastly spectacle of Waffen-SS officers such as General Mohnke raising humanitarian objections to Hitler’s orders. Or there is the doctor Ernst Günther Schenck, who braves the Soviet advance to help the wounded. Cesarani and Longerich point out that not only had Schenk served in the SS, but after the war he “was implicated in the conduct of ‘frivolous’ medical experiments on inmates in Mauthausen concentration camp.” To represent such a character as a sympathetic hero without mention of this past is an extraordinary ‘oversight’ [11].
Another beneficiary of the historical whitewash is Claus Schenk Von Stauffenberg, portrayed not only in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie but in a number of recent German films. Von Stauffenberg was a leading figure in the conspiracy that planned to assassinate Hitler in the bomb plot of 20 July 1944 and then mobilise reserve troops (Operation Valkyrie) to complete a coup. Valkyrie’s tagline promises heroic deeds: “Many saw evil. They dared to stop it.” Yet far from being a ‘good’ Nazi, the real Von Stauffenberg was an aristocratic reactionary who welcomed the creation of a German empire. According to historian Roger Moorehouse,
He had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of Nazism, for example, and had welcomed Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. He embraced all of those subsequent measures – the reintroduction of conscription, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland – which were seen as ‘restoring German honour’.[12]
Although Von Stauffenberg never joined the Nazi party, this was due to elitism rather than principle. He was a racist who, after the 1939 Polish campaign, “described the Poles as ‘an unbelievable rabble’ of ‘Jews and mongrels’ who were ‘only comfortable under the knout’.” Von Stauffenberg’s participation in the conspiracy was motivated more by Hitler’s strategic failures in running the war than the extremely vague humanist ideals attributed to him by the film. This inconvenient context probably helps account for the under-development of Von Stauffenberg’s character. “I have admired him as a hero,” said Tom Cruise, who played him, “and I will play him as a hero.”[13]
The motivations of his fellow conspirators remain equally vague. Several of these characters are played by well-liked actors such as Bill Nighy and the comedian Eddie Izzard, which further encourages us to see them as benign figures.
As for the original ‘good Nazi’, Albert Speer, who insisted that he knew nothing about the Holocaust despite his proximity to Hitler, his myth has been debunked by documents unearthed by Berlin historian Susanne Willems. One report referring to how Auschwitz had been fitted to handle the ‘Final Solution’ was copiously annotated in Speer’s handwriting.[14] Speer’s protests of ignorance, like those of Traudl Junge, are simply not credible in the face of such evidence.
The altering of historical fact is not unusual in art, and is not in itself reprehensible – what matters are the messages that result. What is the effect upon the perceptions of an audience of portraying members of Hitler’s personal staff as innocent of the Holocaust? Of ignoring the atrocities committed by SS officers? Of depicting racist imperialists as heroes?
Moral ambiguity
The last cinematic trend we shall consider is the introduction of a moral ambiguity that questions whether or not fascists are especially repugnant.
For most of the post-war period the verdict on fascism was, rightly, uncompromising: it was an evil that cost millions of people their lives. Today, this verdict is apparently no longer satisfactory, as it is too simplistic and ignores the most interesting moral questions. Thus moral ambiguity is being used to pose ‘uncomfortable’ questions about complicity, and how easily any of us might fall into the same role as the characters onscreen.
An excellent example is the character Hanna Schmitz in The Reader [15], directed by Stephen Daldry. In this film a teenage boy, Michael, befriends a lonely older woman, Hanna, and begins a love affair with her. One day she disappears without warning, and he does not see her again until he is a law student attending a court trial as part of his training. With a shock, he realises that one of the six women in the dock charged with war crimes is his former lover. The key point in the trial comes during a discussion of a death march, when the women on trial locked 300 Jews in a church and let it burn to the ground. When the court produces a contemporary report of the event as evidence, the other defendants try to accuse Hanna of writing it. She admits to doing so, and is consequently sentenced more sternly than the others. But Michael alone knows that she could not have written the report, because she is illiterate.
Hanna admits to participating in the Holocaust, selecting women to be gassed and joining in a death march. The film’s preposterous thesis seems to be that she would rather be imprisoned for mass murder than exposed as illiterate. Perhaps we are meant to think she embraces punishment out of remorse, but if that is so, why are we not shown it? We are offered only the barest whiff of such a motivation. Either way, the film’s main theme is very clear. In the first section of the film we are encouraged to feel a certain sympathy for Hanna. Only then are we told what she has done, and expected to ask ourselves, what led her to behave this way?
It is a question to which the film offers no answer. As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, “you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard”.[16] At the end of the film Hanna donates her money to one of the survivors of the camps. The survivor refuses it, but, in an unconvincing touch, keeps the old tin Hanna kept the money in because it reminds her of a tin she herself once owned. Although it belonged to an SS guard who helped kill her mother, she puts it on her mantelpiece in a trite and inappropriate image of ‘reconciliation’.
In another scene, a student from Michael’s law class becomes a heavy-handed representative of punitive inflexibility. Raging against Hanna Schmitz and her fellow ex-SS guards, he shouts: “You know what I’d do? Put the gun in my hand and shoot her myself. Shoot them all!” The film then cuts to Michael walking towards Auschwitz. The juxtaposition implies that those who take a hard line against fascists are little better than fascists themselves. In his call for violence, does the law student mean only the six women in the dock, or all the thousands of people who worked in the camps or merely knew about them – a comparable call to mass murder? In the same vein, Hanna demands of the judge at her trial, “What would you have done differently?” Flustered, he offers no reply.
Another film steeped in such moral ambiguity is Black Book. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the film follows a Dutch Jewish singer called Rachel Stein and her almost picaresque passage from one tribulation to the next during the war. After her family is killed trying to flee the Nazi occupation, Stein becomes a spy for the Resistance, seducing an SS officer, Ludwig Müntze, with whom she falls in love. Then the situation reverses. The Resistance are tricked into thinking she has betrayed them, and they become her pursuers. Müntze, already alienated from his Nazi peers after refusing to carry out an atrocity, becomes her protector, and the lovers flee together from vengeful (and anti-Semitic) Resistance fighters. Towards the end we are presumably meant to grieve as Müntze is shot by an Allied firing squad.
The obvious message is that there is no moral distinction between the Nazis and the Resistance fighters who tried to stop them. The worst of Stein’s many tribulations comes not at the hands of fascists but after the victory, when a Dutch mob publicly humiliate her for supposedly being a collaborator. As Verhoeven put it: “In this movie, everything has a shade of grey. There are no people who are completely good and no people who are completely bad. It’s like life.”[17]
In reality, wanting to stop racism, dictatorship and mass murder is not in the least comparable to perpetrating them. Yet the implication that anti-fascists are no better than the fascists themselves appears again and again, both in these films and in the general media response to anti-fascist activism.
Certainly many people joined fascist parties out of fear or ignorance rather than because they were committed to those politics. But there is a thin line between forgiving the terrorised and forgiving the perpetrators of terror. The emphasis in certain films upon ambivalent characters and situations invites us not only to understand more, but to condemn less.
(Concluded in Part 3.)
[5] It might have been more interesting to film the achievements of the real ‘Chinese Schindler’, Ho Fengshan, a Chinese diplomat to Austria who helped possibly thousands of Jews escape the Third Reich by issuing them with visas to enter Shanghai.
[6] Quoted in David W. Chen, ‘At the Rape of Nanking: A Nazi Who Saved Lives’, New York Times, 15 December 1996.
[7] From an interview with Ulrich Tukur by the DPA news agency, cited on Deutsche Welle (www.dw-world.de), 9 February 2009.
[8] Hitler had been portrayed in German cinema one or two times before, for example by Albin Skoda in G. W. Pabst’s Der Letzte Akt in 1955. But Downfall broke new ground in seeking the ‘human’ side of the Führer.
[9] From Krysia Diver and Stephen Moss, ‘Desperately Seeking Adolf’, Guardian, 25 March 2005.
[10] David Cesarani and Peter Longerich, ‘The Massaging of History’, Guardian, 7 April 2005.
[11] These shortcomings are less surprising when we consider that Downfall was based largely on a book by Joachim Fest, the right-wing historian who helped Speer write his memoirs.
[12] Roger Moorhouse, ‘A Good German? Von Stauffenberg and the July plot’, History Today, Jan 2009.
[13] Quoted in Allan Hall, ‘Tom Cruise’s transformation into a heroic Nazi’, Daily Mail, 20 July 2007.
[14] See for example Kate Connolly, ‘Wartime reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi’, Daily Telegraph, 11 May 2005.
[15] The Reader, like Schindler’s List, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and others, is based upon a novel, in this case 1995’s Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink – the new approach to fascism is not limited to the cinema.
[16] Manohla Dargis, ‘Innocence is Lost in Postwar Germany’, New York Times, 10 December 2008.
[17] Quoted in Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Homeward Bound’, The Guardian, 25 November 2005.
Good Nazis, bad news: fascism in contemporary film
1
December 1937: The soldiers of fascist Japan are attacking Nanjing, the capital city of China, and massacring thousands of its inhabitants. As the warplanes roar overhead, John Rabe, a German businessman working for Siemens, hurries back to his factory, surrounded by fleeing Chinese workers. He allows the gates to be opened and orders the unfurling of an immense swastika flag, urging the refugees beneath it. When the Japanese pilots see the symbol of their Nazi allies, they move on – in a grotesque image, the swastika has become the means to a humanitarian act.
John Rabe (2009), directed by Florian Gallenberger, is a German film about the so-called ‘good Nazi of Nanjing’ [1], who used his membership of Hitler’s NSDAP to help protect a safety zone that saved the lives of over 200,000 Chinese from Japanese aggression. It is just one of a slew of recent films, on both big and small screens, which encourage us to revise our attitudes towards fascism.
In The Pianist (2003), the protagonist Szpilman is rescued from starvation by a music-loving Nazi officer. In Valkyrie (2009), a conspiracy of high-ranking National Socialists led by Von Stauffenberg is appalled by the excesses of Hitler. Further examples include Black Book (2006), The Counterfeiters (2007), Good (2008) and The Reader (2008) – and in Downfall (2004) we see the humanising of Hitler himself. None of these films advocates fascism as a form of government, or disputes that Hitler was a nasty piece of work. But apparently there were nice fascists too – and in contemporary Western cinema we’re cheering them on.
This trend represents a qualitative change in how fascism is treated on film, and demands an obvious question: Why are some film-makers trying to show followers of modernity’s most vile political doctrine in a sympathetic light?
We shall discuss this trend and some of its most important films in more detail [2]. But first we need to look at the broader social, economic and political context in which they are being created. Artistic trends, like political ones, are products of particular historical circumstances. They cannot be ‘explained’ through that context in a simplistic fashion, as their relationship to it is uneven, but nor can they be separated from it without their full significance being missed. As I shall argue, the shift of the political discourse to the right over the last thirty years has permeated all levels of society, including its cultural products.
Context
We are presently living through an economic crisis, the worst since 1929 and still far from over, which is the product of a long, slow capitalist decline.
In the immediate post-war period the United States was by far the most dominant nation on the planet – it was the only nuclear-armed power and was responsible for half the world’s manufacturing output. Wartime industrial expansion helped to provide the resources to pour billions into rebuilding Germany and Japan, and allowed imperialism to reorganise itself around US hegemony.
From the 1970s however the US has been suffering a relative decline, whose principal cause is the immense competitive pressure placed upon the US economy by the higher levels of investment in Germany from the 1950s, in Japan from the 1960s, and in China today. With China in particular investing at historically unprecedented levels (more than 40% of GDP), it is extremely difficult for the Western powers to keep up.
As Karl Marx noted, capitalists must increase their level of investment in the means of production to remain competitive, but this investment grows more rapidly than the surplus value created by the workers – thus in the ratio of profit to investment, the rate of profit tends to fall.
Western capitalism’s response was the agenda pursued by Reagan, Thatcher and their neo-liberal successors since 1979: to transfer resources to capital from the working class by extending working hours, driving down wages, restricting trade unions and rolling back the welfare state. Their offensive has been made easier by the overthrow of the Russian Revolution in 1991, which dealt a huge blow to the prestige and influence of socialism in general. The Western capitalist alliance has also used the unrivalled military power of the United States to achieve goals it can no longer win by economic means. The most significant examples of this were the attacks on Iraq in 1990, Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq again in 2003.
Over the last thirty years, therefore, the bourgeoisie has driven politics in the Western states to the right, with militarism and racism in tow. Yet despite its attacks on the working class and the opening of new markets in the former workers’ states in Eastern Europe, Western imperialism has still not succeeded in reversing its relative decline. It is only in this context that the rise of fascism, and its treatment in the cultural sphere, can be fully understood.
What is fascism?
The precise nature of fascism was dissected by Leon Trotsky, who exposed as nonsense the Stalinist theory that all forms of capitalism were as bad as each other. Trotsky argued that whereas a ‘normal’ dictatorship (an example from recent times would be Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq) uses the standard police and institutional resources of the bourgeois state, fascism has a different character.
Presented with a crisis that threatens its very existence, capital needs greater forces on the ground to defeat the workers’ movement and mobilises a section of the masses, the petty bourgeoisie, which it uses “as a battering ram.”[3] A fascist regime sweeps aside independent organisations of the working class and subordinates the apparatus of the state to monopoly capital, increasing the exploitation of the working class (even as far as the use of slave labour) to produce the superlative profits that can extricate it from crisis.
The bourgeoisie has a contradictory relationship with fascism. It does not trust the petty bourgeois forces it mobilises, and in return the petty bourgeoisie engages in occasional rhetoric against big capital. Hence the distaste with which Hitler’s NSDAP was regarded by the traditional conservative parties in Germany. Nonetheless, fascism creates ideal conditions for big capital and cannot triumph without its full support. In his famous montage ‘Millions Stand Behind Me’, in which a businessman places wads of banknotes into Hitler’s saluting hand, the German artist John Heartfield neatly illustrated whose interests fascism truly serves.
Fascism therefore is not some perplexing psychological enigma: it is a capitalist response, logical in its way, to the kind of crisis that precipitated Europe into the First World War and intensified after the 1929 crash.
If fascism is a form of militant capitalism hostile to working class interests, why does a section of the working class support it? Hitler could not come to power with the votes of the petty bourgeoisie alone. These votes were won over through a combination of pseudo-socialist rhetoric and an appeal to nationalism and racism. This combination is manifested today in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment and the myth of the ‘white working class’ as a distinct community whose needs are being overlooked. Fascism cannot thrive without racism, its repulsive ideological fuel.
Racism
Racism plays an essential part in the bourgeoisie’s response to the crisis, dividing the working class by turning its members against one another and scapegoating vulnerable minorities for the social problems arising from the failings of capitalism. The principle was summarised by Karl Marx in a letter of 1870 where he discussed anti-Irish prejudice:
Marx’s argument is just as true of the contemporary prejudices against Muslims, immigrants and other minorities.
Racism desensitises the West to the humanity of the many millions of people, overwhelmingly black, who suffer most from increasing global inequality. It ‘justifies’ brutal attacks on the Middle East and elsewhere by demonising people who come from the target region. At home, it diverts from government the blame for housing shortages and the other social problems exacerbated by neo-liberalism. Racism is thus imperialism’s ideological accomplice, expressed through anti-immigrant legislation, attacks on multi-culturalism, media scare stories about asylum seekers and Muslims (who are overwhelmingly from ethnic minorities), and other means. Sadly a section of the left also supports Islamophobia from a supposedly progressive direction, claiming that Islam is especially sexist, homophobic and reactionary. In practice, this scramble to abet the hounding of a minority provides a ‘left’ justification for imperialism’s wars and benefits racism.
The rise in racism inevitably boosts support for the fascist parties that feed on it. The public is frustrated by the identikit neo-liberalism of the main political parties. The bourgeoisie’s concern is that this discontent, and pressure upon mainstream politics, should be led by right-wing developments such as, in Britain, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the fascist British National Party (BNP). It is therefore allowing space for fascist arguments and even actively assists their profile. BNP leader Nick Griffin has been invited to speak on the BBC’s Newsnight and Question Time programmes, and the BNP’s bigotry is rarely challenged by mainstream politicians disarmed by their own concessions to racism.
The encouragement of racism has had concrete results. Globally there has been a slight shift in favour of the working class over the last decade, with the rise of China, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and a general left shift in Latin America, and the stymieing of the US military in Iraq. In Europe, however, developments on the far right have equalled or outpaced those on the far left. In Italy and Austria, far right parties have taken part in governing coalitions. In France, National Front leader Le Pen reached the second round of the 2002 presidential elections. In Britain, where the far right has historically been less successful than on the continent, the BNP won two MEPs and nearly a million votes in the 2009 Euro-elections – the biggest vote for a fascist party in British history. In the English Defence League (EDL) we see a street-fighting movement that aims to intimidate Muslim communities.
It is in this context that sympathetic fascists are being introduced onto our screens.
(Continued in Part 2.)
[1] Rabe’s diaries were published under the less offensive title The Good Man of Nanking in 1998.
[2] This article is concerned with the political significance of the films discussed rather than their quality as cinema, which is variable.
[3] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What it is and how to fight it (1944/1969).
[4] Karl Marx, letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870.
December 1937: The soldiers of fascist Japan are attacking Nanjing, the capital city of China, and massacring thousands of its inhabitants. As the warplanes roar overhead, John Rabe, a German businessman working for Siemens, hurries back to his factory, surrounded by fleeing Chinese workers. He allows the gates to be opened and orders the unfurling of an immense swastika flag, urging the refugees beneath it. When the Japanese pilots see the symbol of their Nazi allies, they move on – in a grotesque image, the swastika has become the means to a humanitarian act.
John Rabe (2009), directed by Florian Gallenberger, is a German film about the so-called ‘good Nazi of Nanjing’ [1], who used his membership of Hitler’s NSDAP to help protect a safety zone that saved the lives of over 200,000 Chinese from Japanese aggression. It is just one of a slew of recent films, on both big and small screens, which encourage us to revise our attitudes towards fascism.
In The Pianist (2003), the protagonist Szpilman is rescued from starvation by a music-loving Nazi officer. In Valkyrie (2009), a conspiracy of high-ranking National Socialists led by Von Stauffenberg is appalled by the excesses of Hitler. Further examples include Black Book (2006), The Counterfeiters (2007), Good (2008) and The Reader (2008) – and in Downfall (2004) we see the humanising of Hitler himself. None of these films advocates fascism as a form of government, or disputes that Hitler was a nasty piece of work. But apparently there were nice fascists too – and in contemporary Western cinema we’re cheering them on.
This trend represents a qualitative change in how fascism is treated on film, and demands an obvious question: Why are some film-makers trying to show followers of modernity’s most vile political doctrine in a sympathetic light?
We shall discuss this trend and some of its most important films in more detail [2]. But first we need to look at the broader social, economic and political context in which they are being created. Artistic trends, like political ones, are products of particular historical circumstances. They cannot be ‘explained’ through that context in a simplistic fashion, as their relationship to it is uneven, but nor can they be separated from it without their full significance being missed. As I shall argue, the shift of the political discourse to the right over the last thirty years has permeated all levels of society, including its cultural products.
Context
We are presently living through an economic crisis, the worst since 1929 and still far from over, which is the product of a long, slow capitalist decline.
In the immediate post-war period the United States was by far the most dominant nation on the planet – it was the only nuclear-armed power and was responsible for half the world’s manufacturing output. Wartime industrial expansion helped to provide the resources to pour billions into rebuilding Germany and Japan, and allowed imperialism to reorganise itself around US hegemony.
From the 1970s however the US has been suffering a relative decline, whose principal cause is the immense competitive pressure placed upon the US economy by the higher levels of investment in Germany from the 1950s, in Japan from the 1960s, and in China today. With China in particular investing at historically unprecedented levels (more than 40% of GDP), it is extremely difficult for the Western powers to keep up.
As Karl Marx noted, capitalists must increase their level of investment in the means of production to remain competitive, but this investment grows more rapidly than the surplus value created by the workers – thus in the ratio of profit to investment, the rate of profit tends to fall.
Western capitalism’s response was the agenda pursued by Reagan, Thatcher and their neo-liberal successors since 1979: to transfer resources to capital from the working class by extending working hours, driving down wages, restricting trade unions and rolling back the welfare state. Their offensive has been made easier by the overthrow of the Russian Revolution in 1991, which dealt a huge blow to the prestige and influence of socialism in general. The Western capitalist alliance has also used the unrivalled military power of the United States to achieve goals it can no longer win by economic means. The most significant examples of this were the attacks on Iraq in 1990, Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq again in 2003.
Over the last thirty years, therefore, the bourgeoisie has driven politics in the Western states to the right, with militarism and racism in tow. Yet despite its attacks on the working class and the opening of new markets in the former workers’ states in Eastern Europe, Western imperialism has still not succeeded in reversing its relative decline. It is only in this context that the rise of fascism, and its treatment in the cultural sphere, can be fully understood.
What is fascism?
The precise nature of fascism was dissected by Leon Trotsky, who exposed as nonsense the Stalinist theory that all forms of capitalism were as bad as each other. Trotsky argued that whereas a ‘normal’ dictatorship (an example from recent times would be Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq) uses the standard police and institutional resources of the bourgeois state, fascism has a different character.
Presented with a crisis that threatens its very existence, capital needs greater forces on the ground to defeat the workers’ movement and mobilises a section of the masses, the petty bourgeoisie, which it uses “as a battering ram.”[3] A fascist regime sweeps aside independent organisations of the working class and subordinates the apparatus of the state to monopoly capital, increasing the exploitation of the working class (even as far as the use of slave labour) to produce the superlative profits that can extricate it from crisis.
The bourgeoisie has a contradictory relationship with fascism. It does not trust the petty bourgeois forces it mobilises, and in return the petty bourgeoisie engages in occasional rhetoric against big capital. Hence the distaste with which Hitler’s NSDAP was regarded by the traditional conservative parties in Germany. Nonetheless, fascism creates ideal conditions for big capital and cannot triumph without its full support. In his famous montage ‘Millions Stand Behind Me’, in which a businessman places wads of banknotes into Hitler’s saluting hand, the German artist John Heartfield neatly illustrated whose interests fascism truly serves.
Fascism therefore is not some perplexing psychological enigma: it is a capitalist response, logical in its way, to the kind of crisis that precipitated Europe into the First World War and intensified after the 1929 crash.
If fascism is a form of militant capitalism hostile to working class interests, why does a section of the working class support it? Hitler could not come to power with the votes of the petty bourgeoisie alone. These votes were won over through a combination of pseudo-socialist rhetoric and an appeal to nationalism and racism. This combination is manifested today in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment and the myth of the ‘white working class’ as a distinct community whose needs are being overlooked. Fascism cannot thrive without racism, its repulsive ideological fuel.
Racism
Racism plays an essential part in the bourgeoisie’s response to the crisis, dividing the working class by turning its members against one another and scapegoating vulnerable minorities for the social problems arising from the failings of capitalism. The principle was summarised by Karl Marx in a letter of 1870 where he discussed anti-Irish prejudice:
Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker.[4]
Marx’s argument is just as true of the contemporary prejudices against Muslims, immigrants and other minorities.
Racism desensitises the West to the humanity of the many millions of people, overwhelmingly black, who suffer most from increasing global inequality. It ‘justifies’ brutal attacks on the Middle East and elsewhere by demonising people who come from the target region. At home, it diverts from government the blame for housing shortages and the other social problems exacerbated by neo-liberalism. Racism is thus imperialism’s ideological accomplice, expressed through anti-immigrant legislation, attacks on multi-culturalism, media scare stories about asylum seekers and Muslims (who are overwhelmingly from ethnic minorities), and other means. Sadly a section of the left also supports Islamophobia from a supposedly progressive direction, claiming that Islam is especially sexist, homophobic and reactionary. In practice, this scramble to abet the hounding of a minority provides a ‘left’ justification for imperialism’s wars and benefits racism.
The rise in racism inevitably boosts support for the fascist parties that feed on it. The public is frustrated by the identikit neo-liberalism of the main political parties. The bourgeoisie’s concern is that this discontent, and pressure upon mainstream politics, should be led by right-wing developments such as, in Britain, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the fascist British National Party (BNP). It is therefore allowing space for fascist arguments and even actively assists their profile. BNP leader Nick Griffin has been invited to speak on the BBC’s Newsnight and Question Time programmes, and the BNP’s bigotry is rarely challenged by mainstream politicians disarmed by their own concessions to racism.
The encouragement of racism has had concrete results. Globally there has been a slight shift in favour of the working class over the last decade, with the rise of China, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and a general left shift in Latin America, and the stymieing of the US military in Iraq. In Europe, however, developments on the far right have equalled or outpaced those on the far left. In Italy and Austria, far right parties have taken part in governing coalitions. In France, National Front leader Le Pen reached the second round of the 2002 presidential elections. In Britain, where the far right has historically been less successful than on the continent, the BNP won two MEPs and nearly a million votes in the 2009 Euro-elections – the biggest vote for a fascist party in British history. In the English Defence League (EDL) we see a street-fighting movement that aims to intimidate Muslim communities.
It is in this context that sympathetic fascists are being introduced onto our screens.
(Continued in Part 2.)
[1] Rabe’s diaries were published under the less offensive title The Good Man of Nanking in 1998.
[2] This article is concerned with the political significance of the films discussed rather than their quality as cinema, which is variable.
[3] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What it is and how to fight it (1944/1969).
[4] Karl Marx, letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870.
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Publication notice
My article on the Minoans has been published in the Greek journal Marxist Thought, Volume 2, May–August 2011.http://www.marxistikiskepsi.gr/ (in Greek)
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Totality
One of the key concepts of advanced materialist thought is the ‘totality’, championed by Hegel and embraced by Marx. We have already touched upon this topic, but it deserves a post of its own.
We could discuss the totality at great length, but the principle is simple.
As a dialectical thinker, Hegel sought to break up the static way of seeing inherited from formal logic. For a full understanding of what is happening, he thought, it is not enough to look at momentary, incomplete or isolated parts of a process. Only the whole was true — a whole which includes within it each of the stages that created it.
The classic bourgeois example of causality was introduced by Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1772: one billiard ball striking another. One ball travels across the billiard table and hits the second, causing the second ball to move. But this is a very limited conception of what is actually happening.
Let’s use an example a little closer to our own interests and ask, what happens when a painter sits down to paint a landscape? The straightforward answer might be that she applies paint to the canvas to create an image, which is correct as far as it goes. However, to truly understand the artistic outcome we must consider a multitude of determinants. One example is the materials used — the paint will behave differently if it is oil-based than if it is acrylic or watercolour. The painter may have good or poor judgement in making her artistic decisions, e.g. which colours to apply, how hard to press the brush, etc — judgements influenced by how experienced she is as well as by any natural prowess. If the weather is different today to how it was yesterday, this may influence her mood or choice of colours, as will her general emotional state of mind. Her materials themselves will vary in quality, not only in terms of whether they are well- or poorly-made but even materials of comparable quality may perform differently according to what they are made of and their design; if the materials are new to the painter, she will judge their ‘performance’ better if she’s had a chance to practice with them than if she’s using them for the first time. If she is creating the image for herself she may approach it differently to one which has been commissioned by a patron, whom she may or may not like or resent.
These are only a few of the most immediate factors at work. We might then draw back and consider her education, the particular social conditioning she receives as a woman, the prevailing artistic trends of the day, and so on. In short, the form concretely taken by her landscape is determined by everything acting upon it. (We may recall here Lenin’s call for ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’, with each force assigned the correct relative weight in the situation.) Thus Terry Eagleton’s comment, which we have quoted before:
Marx did not have time to write big treatises describing his philosophical approach, but his embracing of Hegel’s concept is evident throughout his work. The isolation of particular aspects of nature in order to study them is a necessary part of scientific investigation, but to isolate social phenomena without reference to the larger context to which they belong, and ignore powerful factors which reveal a broader truth, is poor science and will distort one’s analysis.
Thus in a revolutionary situation, the working class is not the only class playing a role. There is a range of class forces, each with a greater or lesser say in how events play out. Or, we misrepresent Marxism if we try to reduce it to a critique of economics, or to a ‘discourse’ that has made an interesting contribution to sociology. You cannot pick and choose the bits of Marxism you like and leave out the commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
It follows that causality in art, too, is not a straightforward linear affair and no artist or work of art exists in glorious isolation. Art is part of the ‘superstructure’ of society and is influenced by the prevailing mode of production and class structures as well as many other things, such as individual personality, psychology, philosophy, religion, sex, the physics of the natural environment, and so on — combinations that will be unique in every case. As Marx put it, “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”[2] Tracing every cause that contributes towards the production of a work of art is impossible. But criticism must try to identify at least the most significant processes acting upon an artist or work if they are to make the most insightful conclusions about them.
[1] Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976).
[2] Marx, ‘The Method of Political Economy’ from Grundrisse.
We could discuss the totality at great length, but the principle is simple.
As a dialectical thinker, Hegel sought to break up the static way of seeing inherited from formal logic. For a full understanding of what is happening, he thought, it is not enough to look at momentary, incomplete or isolated parts of a process. Only the whole was true — a whole which includes within it each of the stages that created it.
The classic bourgeois example of causality was introduced by Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1772: one billiard ball striking another. One ball travels across the billiard table and hits the second, causing the second ball to move. But this is a very limited conception of what is actually happening.
Let’s use an example a little closer to our own interests and ask, what happens when a painter sits down to paint a landscape? The straightforward answer might be that she applies paint to the canvas to create an image, which is correct as far as it goes. However, to truly understand the artistic outcome we must consider a multitude of determinants. One example is the materials used — the paint will behave differently if it is oil-based than if it is acrylic or watercolour. The painter may have good or poor judgement in making her artistic decisions, e.g. which colours to apply, how hard to press the brush, etc — judgements influenced by how experienced she is as well as by any natural prowess. If the weather is different today to how it was yesterday, this may influence her mood or choice of colours, as will her general emotional state of mind. Her materials themselves will vary in quality, not only in terms of whether they are well- or poorly-made but even materials of comparable quality may perform differently according to what they are made of and their design; if the materials are new to the painter, she will judge their ‘performance’ better if she’s had a chance to practice with them than if she’s using them for the first time. If she is creating the image for herself she may approach it differently to one which has been commissioned by a patron, whom she may or may not like or resent.
These are only a few of the most immediate factors at work. We might then draw back and consider her education, the particular social conditioning she receives as a woman, the prevailing artistic trends of the day, and so on. In short, the form concretely taken by her landscape is determined by everything acting upon it. (We may recall here Lenin’s call for ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’, with each force assigned the correct relative weight in the situation.) Thus Terry Eagleton’s comment, which we have quoted before:
To understand King Lear, The Dunciad or Ulysses is therefore to do more than interpret their symbolism, study their literary history and add footnotes about sociological facts which enter into them. It is first of all to understand the complex indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit — relations which emerge not just in ‘themes’ and ‘preoccupations’, but in style, rhythm, image, quality and... form. But we do not understand ideology either unless we grasp the part it plays in the society as a whole — how it consists of a definite, historically relative structure of perception which underpins the power of a particular social class. This is not an easy task, since an ideology is never a simple reflection of a ruling class’s ideas; on the contrary, it is always a complex phenomenon, which may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world. To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society; and to do that means grasping where those classes stand in relation to the mode of production. [1]
Marx did not have time to write big treatises describing his philosophical approach, but his embracing of Hegel’s concept is evident throughout his work. The isolation of particular aspects of nature in order to study them is a necessary part of scientific investigation, but to isolate social phenomena without reference to the larger context to which they belong, and ignore powerful factors which reveal a broader truth, is poor science and will distort one’s analysis.
Thus in a revolutionary situation, the working class is not the only class playing a role. There is a range of class forces, each with a greater or lesser say in how events play out. Or, we misrepresent Marxism if we try to reduce it to a critique of economics, or to a ‘discourse’ that has made an interesting contribution to sociology. You cannot pick and choose the bits of Marxism you like and leave out the commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
It follows that causality in art, too, is not a straightforward linear affair and no artist or work of art exists in glorious isolation. Art is part of the ‘superstructure’ of society and is influenced by the prevailing mode of production and class structures as well as many other things, such as individual personality, psychology, philosophy, religion, sex, the physics of the natural environment, and so on — combinations that will be unique in every case. As Marx put it, “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”[2] Tracing every cause that contributes towards the production of a work of art is impossible. But criticism must try to identify at least the most significant processes acting upon an artist or work if they are to make the most insightful conclusions about them.
[1] Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976).
[2] Marx, ‘The Method of Political Economy’ from Grundrisse.
Friday, 11 February 2011
Wordsworth on revolution
‘Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated, and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion, filled the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soil of common life was, at that time,
Too hot to tread upon.
William Wordsworth, Book IX, The Prelude (1805)
Congratulations to the Egyptian Revolution
Latuff: Catapulting Mubarak
Hosni Mubarak resigns as president of Egypt. Now let us hope that Mubarakism goes with him.
Sunday, 6 February 2011
Hip-hop and graffiti revolution: a video manifesto
Reproduced from Venezuelanalysis.com
EPATU Manifesto
EPATU stands for Popular School for the Arts and Urban Traditions, but it is also Spanish for ‘Hey you’. The schools, developed jointly with the Venezuelan Ministry for Communes, are non-formal spaces for youth to learn rap, break dancing, graffiti, and DJ, and are an alternative to the consumerism, violence, and criminal life that young people are often exposed to. Instead, the schools focus on developing cultural, social, and collective awareness.
Translation:
Group: We are a School
Male 1: We take on militancy and we learn to be rebels
Male 2: Always inventing
Male 3: From the grassroots
Male 4: Because we base our knowledge on experience and invention
Male 5: Producing
Male 6: And generating a space for thought and discussion
Female 1: Aiming for the inside (of ourselves)
Male 7: And aiming for the endogenous
Male 8: Inviting our people to investigate
Male 9: To discuss, to activate, and to collectivise
Male 10: Making art
Female 2: Inclusive
Female 3: Born from the people
Male 11: What you don’t see in museums
Male 12: Something you want to show.
Male 13: The art of creating and of the collective with the word
Male 14: Painting!
Female 4: With the body, sound, and spirit
Male 15: Accompanying traditions
Male 16: Because rage is our ancestor
Child 1: Blacks!
Child 2: Indigenous!
Child 3: Llaneros (inhabitants of the plains)
Child 4: Gave rise to our arts
Male 17: And they integrated them into one single movement
Male 18: An inheritance transmitted through drums and
Male 19: Decima poetry
Male 20: The beats of Joropo (a Venezuelan dance)
Female 5: And the feet of a dancer
Male 21: That are based on urban expressions
Male 22: That encourage respect for the original (inhabitants)
Female6: For the social
Male 23: For our roots, for the appropriation of spaces that belong to us
Male 24: To achieve the demolishment of the system
Male 25: That oppresses us
Male 26: Making revolution
Male 27: Communicating an alternative for advancing and constructing
Male 28: We do it through communicating
Child 5: (through) the people
Female 7: (through) rebellion
Male 29: (through) what isn’t sold.
Transcription and notes by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com
EPATU Manifesto
EPATU stands for Popular School for the Arts and Urban Traditions, but it is also Spanish for ‘Hey you’. The schools, developed jointly with the Venezuelan Ministry for Communes, are non-formal spaces for youth to learn rap, break dancing, graffiti, and DJ, and are an alternative to the consumerism, violence, and criminal life that young people are often exposed to. Instead, the schools focus on developing cultural, social, and collective awareness.
Translation:
Group: We are a School
Male 1: We take on militancy and we learn to be rebels
Male 2: Always inventing
Male 3: From the grassroots
Male 4: Because we base our knowledge on experience and invention
Male 5: Producing
Male 6: And generating a space for thought and discussion
Female 1: Aiming for the inside (of ourselves)
Male 7: And aiming for the endogenous
Male 8: Inviting our people to investigate
Male 9: To discuss, to activate, and to collectivise
Male 10: Making art
Female 2: Inclusive
Female 3: Born from the people
Male 11: What you don’t see in museums
Male 12: Something you want to show.
Male 13: The art of creating and of the collective with the word
Male 14: Painting!
Female 4: With the body, sound, and spirit
Male 15: Accompanying traditions
Male 16: Because rage is our ancestor
Child 1: Blacks!
Child 2: Indigenous!
Child 3: Llaneros (inhabitants of the plains)
Child 4: Gave rise to our arts
Male 17: And they integrated them into one single movement
Male 18: An inheritance transmitted through drums and
Male 19: Decima poetry
Male 20: The beats of Joropo (a Venezuelan dance)
Female 5: And the feet of a dancer
Male 21: That are based on urban expressions
Male 22: That encourage respect for the original (inhabitants)
Female6: For the social
Male 23: For our roots, for the appropriation of spaces that belong to us
Male 24: To achieve the demolishment of the system
Male 25: That oppresses us
Male 26: Making revolution
Male 27: Communicating an alternative for advancing and constructing
Male 28: We do it through communicating
Child 5: (through) the people
Female 7: (through) rebellion
Male 29: (through) what isn’t sold.
Transcription and notes by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com
Saturday, 5 February 2011
Support the Arab revolutions
Dominoes, by Leon Kuhn.
The uprisings of the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and other states in the Middle East is one of the most inspiring political developments for decades.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Venezuela celebrates ‘Week of Cuban Culture’ with film, music and dance
Originally published by venezuelanalysis.com here.
By Juan Reardon
Mérida, January 21st 2011
Yesterday Venezuela began a weeklong celebration of Cuban culture by commemorating the 130th anniversary of Cuban independence hero José Martí’s arrival and extended stay in Caracas from 21 January 1881 to 27 July 1881.
Organized by Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, the “Week of Cuban Culture” will include numerous film, music, dance, and performance art exhibitions in Caracas as well as the release of recently published books on the historical ties between Venezuela and Cuba.
Venezuela begins a weeklong celebration of Cuban culture. Photo: Wendys Olivo.
“Martí left with his heart filled with Caracas,” said Venezuela’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, Nancy Pérez, during opening ceremonies yesterday.
“But now José Martí has returned in the millions, and thousands of Cubans are in Venezuela doing what Martí professed, they are here in the Missions helping Venezuelans,” she said. Marti is renowned for having said, “Doing is the best way of saying”.
“It is significant that we are here together today, Cubans and Venezuelans, in this homeland that belongs to everyone,” said Cuban ambassador to Venezuela Rogelio Polanco.
“Now, today, we have a Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas (ALBA). Now, today, we have a Bolivarian Revolution that is paving the way for the union of the great homeland. How pleased would Martí be today seeing this [Bolivarian] Revolution and seeing our people fraternally united.”
The Venezuelan and Cuban governments are expected to approve over 200 projects of cooperation in the coming weeks. The projects were to be agreed upon in late 2010, but a second intergovernmental session to finalize details between the two countries was postponed due to record-setting rains in Venezuela.
Apart from yesterday’s opening ceremony, plans for the weeklong event include: a poetic recital entitled ‘Poets Sing to Martí’; the presentation by Doctor Edmundo Aray of the book, Venezuela in Martí, written by Mirla Alcibiades; free screenings of Cuban films for children and adults; as well as the laying of floral arrangements at Caracas’s Plaza Bolívar and Plaza Martí by representatives of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments, including, for example Humberto González, president of Venezuela’s Casa de Nuestra América José Martí and director of Venezuela’s National Library; as well as numerous theatre performances.
The closing event will be held at the Casa de Nuestra América José Martí on January 29, celebrating the 120th anniversary of the publication “Our América,” one of Martí’s most famous essays.
According to Fidel Barbarito, Director of International Relations at Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, the celebrations are part of a newly launched program by the ministry designed to celebrate the culture of friendly nations.
“[The new program] is a way to bring the Venezuelan people closer to the way of life lived in brotherly countries, closer to the historical processes lived by those who share geographical spaces, dreams, ideals of liberty, solidarity, fraternity,” said Barbarito.
During the first quarter of 2011, Venezuela will host weeklong celebrations of a number of countries and cultures, beginning with Caribbean nations, then Bolivia, Ecuador, Russia, Vietnam and Iran, in that order.
By Juan Reardon
Mérida, January 21st 2011
Yesterday Venezuela began a weeklong celebration of Cuban culture by commemorating the 130th anniversary of Cuban independence hero José Martí’s arrival and extended stay in Caracas from 21 January 1881 to 27 July 1881.
Organized by Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, the “Week of Cuban Culture” will include numerous film, music, dance, and performance art exhibitions in Caracas as well as the release of recently published books on the historical ties between Venezuela and Cuba.
Venezuela begins a weeklong celebration of Cuban culture. Photo: Wendys Olivo.“Martí left with his heart filled with Caracas,” said Venezuela’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, Nancy Pérez, during opening ceremonies yesterday.
“But now José Martí has returned in the millions, and thousands of Cubans are in Venezuela doing what Martí professed, they are here in the Missions helping Venezuelans,” she said. Marti is renowned for having said, “Doing is the best way of saying”.
“It is significant that we are here together today, Cubans and Venezuelans, in this homeland that belongs to everyone,” said Cuban ambassador to Venezuela Rogelio Polanco.
“Now, today, we have a Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas (ALBA). Now, today, we have a Bolivarian Revolution that is paving the way for the union of the great homeland. How pleased would Martí be today seeing this [Bolivarian] Revolution and seeing our people fraternally united.”
The Venezuelan and Cuban governments are expected to approve over 200 projects of cooperation in the coming weeks. The projects were to be agreed upon in late 2010, but a second intergovernmental session to finalize details between the two countries was postponed due to record-setting rains in Venezuela.
Apart from yesterday’s opening ceremony, plans for the weeklong event include: a poetic recital entitled ‘Poets Sing to Martí’; the presentation by Doctor Edmundo Aray of the book, Venezuela in Martí, written by Mirla Alcibiades; free screenings of Cuban films for children and adults; as well as the laying of floral arrangements at Caracas’s Plaza Bolívar and Plaza Martí by representatives of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments, including, for example Humberto González, president of Venezuela’s Casa de Nuestra América José Martí and director of Venezuela’s National Library; as well as numerous theatre performances.
The closing event will be held at the Casa de Nuestra América José Martí on January 29, celebrating the 120th anniversary of the publication “Our América,” one of Martí’s most famous essays.
According to Fidel Barbarito, Director of International Relations at Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, the celebrations are part of a newly launched program by the ministry designed to celebrate the culture of friendly nations.
“[The new program] is a way to bring the Venezuelan people closer to the way of life lived in brotherly countries, closer to the historical processes lived by those who share geographical spaces, dreams, ideals of liberty, solidarity, fraternity,” said Barbarito.
During the first quarter of 2011, Venezuela will host weeklong celebrations of a number of countries and cultures, beginning with Caribbean nations, then Bolivia, Ecuador, Russia, Vietnam and Iran, in that order.
Marxist Theory of Art tweets!
I have opened an account with Twitter at http://twitter.com/eugenehirschf.
My first reason is to help promote this blog more widely and at the same time learn more from other people.
The second reason is that my blogging rate is pretty slow. This is partly because most of my posts are in-depth and take a fair bit of work. It’s also because I am so busy with other things that I cannot blog nearly as much as I’d like. Tweeting should help me engage more often, though more briefly.
I’m new to it, so let’s see how it goes.
My first reason is to help promote this blog more widely and at the same time learn more from other people.
The second reason is that my blogging rate is pretty slow. This is partly because most of my posts are in-depth and take a fair bit of work. It’s also because I am so busy with other things that I cannot blog nearly as much as I’d like. Tweeting should help me engage more often, though more briefly.
I’m new to it, so let’s see how it goes.