Zucker’s Folly
Having seen “American Carol” on the basis of James Hirsen’s glowing review on Newsmax I am still reacting to this flick’s neoconservative message with a queasy stomach. From my exposure to this movie that David Zucker threw together with Bill O’Reilly, who appears as one of the movie’s characters, it seems that I was viewing a cinematic adaptation of Victor Davis Hansen’s collected rantings in The Weekly Standard. Every war the US entered, or so it was explained, was a holy crusade for democracy. To make this point even more explicit, Kelsey Grammer playing General George S. Patton explains to the caricature of Michael Moore, here called Michael Malone that if Lincoln had not been willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War, black people would still be picking cotton on Southern plantations. Of course there is no reason to suspect that if Lincoln had failed to engage in armed conflict with the seceding Southern states, the result 150 years later would be the continuation of a plantation economy, one that already by 1860 seemed to most of the Western world, including many Southerners, to be anachronistic. Besides, Patton, like Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, greatly admired the Confederacy. His own family had held command post in the Confederate army, an achievement that Patton always returned to in conversation.
Even dumber but predictably neocon was a scene of Neville Chamberlain shining the shoes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, at what was intended to be the Munich conference in October 1938. Never mind, that the Japanese didn’t attend that meeting; and although concessions were made at Munich to the German Nazi government, allowing it to annex the preponderantly German Sudetenland (given to the Czechs after World War One), the English prime minister at Munich did not grovel to Hitler. He finalized an international agreement recognizing German rights to the Sudetenland that had been worked out during the previous month. Contrary to the false impression conveyed in the movie, Chamberlain was not an appeaser by nature. He was a man already dying of cancer who was stalling for time because the British in October 1938 were not psychologically prepared to plunge into another bloody conflict that might be on the scale of World War One. Chamberlain, by the way, did support a declaration of war against Germany in September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland. And even then the British continued to stall so that they could mobilize adequately against their continental foe.
The movie is a clever takeoff on Dickens’s Christmas Carol, and it offers lots of laughs, mostly from the comically overweight Moore/Malone, who is the modern-day unpatriotic version of Scrooge, being brought to his senses after visits from long dead American military heroes. I also guffawed at the rallies held by perpetually adolescent professors protesting American belligerence, events I have sometimes attended as an observer at which the mental decrepitude of my academic colleagues is fully in evidence. A Rosy O’Donnell “recreation” of the violence of “radical Christians” is in fact the funniest thing I’ve seen in a movie, and particularly since all of my leftist acquaintances honestly believe that American is succumbing to Christian fanatics who are as violent as Muslim jihadists. In this movie Rosy fabricates stories that become “documentaries,” about nuns and priests who seize airplanes and who shoot passengers while offering Christian prayers and brandishing copies of the “Holy Bible.” I not only have run into the nutcases who believe such stuff. About half my acquaintances with PhDs fall into this category.
The movie, however, also pushes a simplistic neocon belief, namely that those who challenge American armed efforts to oppose our undemocratic enemies are unpatriotic. Anyone who questions these periodic adventures is deemed a fool, and indeed no better than the silly war protestors at Michael Moore/Malone’s “Hate America” rallies. Thus America Firsters who tried to keep the US out of World War Two were supposedly precursors of the anti-Vietnam War Left and prefigured the silly profs and coeds who are shown hanging around Malone. This association is factually inaccurate, as Justus Doenecke and Wayne Cole have amply demonstrated in writing about the opposition to America’s entry into World War Two. Although some America Firsters underestimated the nastiness and aggressiveness of Nazi Germany, there is no way that they could be reasonably described as unpatriotic or as soft on the enemy’s ideology. Unlike the Red Diaper babies who thronged the ranks of the anti-anti-Communists of the 1960s, America Firsters were thoroughly patriotic Americans, who often came out of Midwestern and Prairie State isolationist backgrounds. Many, like Robert McCormick, had served in World War One and to their consternation, had discovered the lies that had been used to push Americans into the European conflagration. Pace Zucker-O’Reilly, these earlier dissenters were not like the academic protestors I still vividly recall from the late 1960s. With few exceptions, these apparent enemies of war of my own generation were loudly and overwhelmingly pro-Communist.
The movie’s identification of patriotism with support for the war in Iraq, however, takes on a ludicrous aspect, probably not entirely intended. Malone’s nephew, who is a strapping young American soldier, leaves his wife and two badly handicapped children (one modeled on Dickens’s Tiny Tim), to fight for his country against terrorists for a democratic Iraq. In the next to the final scene we see Malone profusely apologizing to his soldier-nephew for not having previously recognized the nobility and necessity of the sacrifice he is about to make. Needless to say, I would be delighted if the staff of the Weekly Standard resigned their lucrative posts to go fight in a war they’ve incited, but I’m not sure the soldier who was on their wave-length in the movie was acting responsibly. If his children were as gravely impaired as the movie suggested, then his first obligation was to stay with them rather than to leave for a military tour overseas. Although possibly his military position forced him to go, the movie created the impression that he was leaving of his own volition, as a patriotic act. Do Zucker and O’Reilly really think that this young American father and husband was behaving correctly by abandoning his wife with two special-needs children? Allow me to register my doubts.
Comments
I myself often make a point of dropping by the library to read Kristol’s Monday op ed in the NY Times (refusing to buy it of course) in order to feed an angst addiction that has replaced Single Malt Scotch but one wonders if this movie is by somebody as patently low brow as O’ Reilly, exactly why would anyone watch it, let alone pay to do so?
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If he saw the military as the only way to get health insurance and provide food and shelter for his wife and special needs kids he would certainly go into the military. Bush and McCain fought tooth and nail to make sure that he wouldn’t be tempted to leave the Army for the temptations of VA luxuries as well but the damned Congress passed it over the veto.
He has to fight for freedom. We now have reporters covering Palin confined to Free Speech Zones and they aren’t even allowed to talk to Palin supporters. What hath they wrought?
http://blogs.tampabay.com/breakingnews/2008/10/under-the-watch.html
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Oh please! This movie sounds like a neocon version of “S.A-Mann Brand”. Bravo to Dr. Gottfried for pointing out the cartoonish worldview of the people who made this piece of trash.
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“Do Zucker and O’Reilly really think that this young American father and husband was behaving correctly by abandoning his wife with two special-needs children?”
Of course. They also believe Mrs. Todd Palin is behaving correctly by neglecting her special-needs child.
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Since the President’s Classicist seems to have serially disinformed his tutee as to the outcome of the Sicilian Expedition , Xenophon’s long march and Emperor Valerian’s encounter with his Parthian opposite number, someone should send the White House a cautionary copy of the Rogers& Hart classic , The Boys From Syracuse, as its lyrics suggests what awaits at the stage door when their production of The End of History folds:
“ Come with me
Where the food is free
Where the landlord never comes near you
Be a guest in a house of rest
Where the best of fellows can cheer you.
When day ends
You’ll have lots of friends
Who will guard you well while you slumber
Safe from battle and stife
Safe from the wind and gale…
You’re never bored by politics
You’re privileged to miss a row
Of tragedies by Sophocles
And diatribes by Cicero…
Come with me to jail !
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How could any of you claim to love America, but not support her troops? I don’t see how I can have a rational conversation with any of you.
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Then don’t. I support our troops to the extent that I don’t want them to die for lies and delusions… for the schemes of others, and other nations.
Tell me, before we close off all contact: Why are we occupying Iraq?
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Paul writes: “In this movie Rosy fabricates stories that become ‘documentaries,’ about nuns and priests who seize airplanes and who shoot passengers while offering Christian prayers and brandishing copies of the ‘Holy Bible.’ I not only have run into the nutcases who believe such stuff. About half my acquaintances with PhDs fall into this category.”
About half of my nation’s citizenry (and 75% of its political class) would agree with this “atheology,” and consider Rosy to be a profound thinker.
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Abe Yuskivitz,
As a Vietnam veteran, and a supporter of that war but a non-supporter of the present wars, I would ask: Will you support the troops them when they carry out orders to shoot you?
Recent changes in domestic laws governing internal military deployments such as the end of Posse Comitatus, creation of Northern Command, etc., suggest the probability of future conflicts between the military and the citizenry. A military, and those who serve it which attacks its own citizens does not deserve respect, allegiance or support.
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I didn’t mean to compete with Kevin’s achievement by posting a second piece on the same
neocon movie. In fact I didn’t even read his superb dissection until after I had put
my commentary on this website. On second thought, however, our reviews focus on
different aspects of Zucker’s folly and can be read in succession without showing much overlap.
While I stress the movie’s historical distortions, Kevin looks more closely at its use (or
misuse) of popular culture.
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Mr. Johnson, Mr. “Yuskivitz” is spoofing. He is apparently good at it because you are not his first victim.
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I am surprised by the many times I have read on this website that the Czechs were “given” the Sudetenland. The term Sudetenland didn’t even emerge until the early 20th century. Those lands were part of the Bohemian kingdom for a thousand years. Even during the Austrian Empire, Bohemia was still recognized as a kingdom. If the Czechs were given any land after the war, it was Slovakia, which was historically a part of Hungary.
Bohemia could be broken up only on the grounds of ethnic nationalism, which isn’t a conservative concept. I think I’ve said this three times on this web site, and I am sure it will pass unnoticed again, but with our borderlands increasingly Hispanic, we don’t want to champion the idea that sovereignty is grounded on purely ethnic considerations.
As he is an erudite historian, I am surprised to hear this comment from Professor Gottfried.
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Grant Havers:
‘About half of my nation’s citizenry (and 75% of its political class) would agree with this “atheology,” and consider Rosy to be a profound thinker.’
It’s the same in Finland. Then again, here people also tend to think that neoconservatism means conservatism. They don’t know about anything else. Paleocons? - Never heard of them…
Finnish people see Bush as a fundamentalist Christian crusader, not as a Zionist stooge. And because of Sarah Palin, the Finns believe that only Saint Obama can save US from turning into a fundamentalist theocracy. I’m not kidding. Like US Republicans call leftists “fascists”, a typical Finnish person thinks that Republicans are a semi-fascist Christian party. Fascism here, fascism there, fascism everywhere.
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Comedy cannot take sides and remain comedy, so that “left-liberal comedy,” as on Saturday Night Live, or “neo-con comedy,” as in the new “American Carol” movie as described by Paul Gottfried, is necessarily a contradiction in terms. The Marx Brothers were probably Roosevelt-loving liberals, but their films were purely anarchic. In Groucho’s phrase, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” That’s why the man was so side-splittingly funny. The funniest ancient comedian, a Greek-Syrian named Lucian, was, like the Marx Brothers, entirely without tendency. In his satires, he abuses everyone equally, and that’s why he’s as amusing today as he was two thousand years ago, or just about. Someone should write a study on the decline of comedy from, say, Jack Benny to Bill Maher. As Mort Sahl used to say respecting the progression of presidents, “Darwin was wrong.” (Tom Bertonneau, Oswego)
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I recently had to ask while arguing with devout liberals, “Tell me exactly HOW you are being oppressed by the religious right?” The only thing one person could come up with was the mere presence of opposition to gay marriage. I asked that if there were any real influence by the religious right, would we really be seeing the kind of degrading garbage we see on our TV screens? Bush/Cheney Co. is more like the satanic rite than the religious right. Even conservative Christians are split between evangelical state worshiping, war mongering crypto-zionists and those who are trying to walk the walk.
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If only people realized that mediaeval jews in Europe only ever wanted to make money—from the Crusades or the ascendancy of a potentate, or a local landed bigwig—there wouldn’t be any fuss. Is there a weapon that can cleanse us of all hateful propaganda? Maybe a meltdown machine will do, anything that will melt flesh and skin from bone.
God I hate the British...and the Irish. Smart Alecs! That Joyce for example!
Avi, Bulgaria
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There’s enormous power in the victim Role, no power in being the Actual victim.
Anyone who has a franchise on the Role has to demonize others who then become the actual
victims.
But to do this, of course you have to have the media. It all began when Balfour offered
jewish press magnates Palestine if they through their papers and media in the u.s. would demonize
Germany, so as to bring the u.s. into the very First World War on the side of England.
It worked. Prior to the propaganda blitz in the U.S. papers the American population sided with Germany during the First World War. Then popular sentiment switched to favor England against the dirty hun.
Ever since then the u.s. press & media including Hollywood - have only been an instrument of
manipulation of public *perception.
Even Stalin said once ‘moving pictures’ were invented now he doesn’t need his army anymore, that with this kind of propaganda and its effects it alone was sufficient for him to rule the world.
There’s enormous power in the victim Role, no power in being the Actual victim.
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@ Corporal Chaos. Shouldn’t your nom de plume be “CaptainKlan”?
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@ CptChaos
Don’t try to reason with top, he is the worst kind of Israel-first scum. There is no reason to bandy words with this witless worm, unless you wish to waste your own time.
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Captainchaos (with whom I don’t disagree in principle) has sadly outsmarted himself,
barring a miracle, by which I mean divine intercession in his behalf.
He misses the metaphoric point which occurred to Abe as he was about to sacrifice his own
son Isaac (in the fable.) Standing there within the angels of air and of water of sunshine
and of earth something dawned on Abe an angel of a thought, don’t sacrifice the possible
on the altar of the impossible.
Captainchaos, a part of your pain is that currently you have no ‘people’ as a practical matter,
and I agree you should but you don’t until you live within a coherent, traditionalist community.
Yes then too there will be naturally within it, a genetic continuity as well.
That’s also known as eugenics which does tend to apparently produce over time possibly
a brighter person etc., along with other liabilities in terms of health from too much inbreeding,
and a gradual diminishment of the penal bone. Makes sense people tend to become a bit finer
as a result, less animalistic?! (Look at the Greek statues for example.)
Right now your plague (in terms of what is preventing, what it is you perceive you want) is the
*mass society. And yes as well as those who would like to get rid of the white race which
I assume there are always those enemies. But otherwise I agree with you.
However on the other hand I recommend, when at the bottom of a ladder looking up at the roof
which is where you metaphorically speaking want to be i.e. with your people as it were. It is best
to climb up one rung at a time. Rather than standing at the bottom and on principle complaining
you ‘should’ be at the top in terms of the top being with your people in a coherent, traditionalist
community, etc.
Otherwise you sacrifice the possible on the altar of the impossible, no?
If paul s. says you need the media and you shoot it down if that was what you were doing, what
is your *strategy, besides the hackneyed, apparently impotent mantra – “whites deserve to be
allowed to exist as a separate race or gene pool - and I’m going to stand right here at the bottom
of the ladder until that is the case? Or, conversely ‘we’ have no future.” -?- That’s your plan?
You could be then the worst enemy of white people in disguise, whether you mean to be and
are a shill,or simply are so unwittingly. Perhaps your handle should be Captainactuallyantiwhite?
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“Time is growing short, we very well may need to take a few rungs at a time. We must be aggressive, we must force the issue of White genetic continuity onto the table.” -Captainchaos
I agree. How’s that?! What more can I say except I agree with that prinicple which I stated above. My question is what’s the plan?!
When Paul S. above pointed out that there is enormous power in the victim Role; no power in being the Actual victim… And that anyone hoping to avoid being the Actual victim needs an equal say & ownership share in how things are depicted in the media, it seemed to me like the beginning of a plan.
What’s yours? I don’t mind your beating your chest and roaring - that’s good too – but what else?!
P.S. by the way your argument is precisely the argument put forward by Jews & also backed up by THEIR media for why they need to be in Palestine. Jews tend to be a serious lot, in that you don’t see them beating their chests about anything until for example they already HAVE the media and whatever else they needed to implement their intention. What’s your plan, besides you say ‘time running out.’
What should we do – “set you in chains at the top of the hill… and send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille and you can die happily ever after.” As one popular song writer put it. Again that’s good too – but is there any other plan, bud?! … errr, “the lonesome organ’grinder cried...”
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Captainchaos,
Any rebuttal of the big ‘H’ ought to include a correction of lies. I believe this to be necessary for intellectual integrity.
I do agree that what is needed is a “soundbite” that encompasses a correction of lies, along with graphic descriptions as to how the “Tales of the Holocaust” are used to justify illegal aggressions, murders, and looting of nations.
Any wordsmith in the audience willing to take on this challenge to shine?
H.F. Wolff
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The West is *hubristic in terms of not knowing its own normal limitations.
That’s because they made via Christianity a *transcendent god—[by it’s very definition
transcendent means *unknowable by one’s own will(s) alone]—except it was made ‘as if’ it’s knowabale. … Because the fable of Jesus-CHRIST is held to be actual and historical in its details. For this very same reason Jews are *hubristic. They too similarly ‘believe’ the transcendent actually spoke to “them” via Moses on Sinai and later to them all in camp [BLAH-BLAH-BLAH], and so the transcendent becomes NOW *knowable by an act of their own will(s) alone afterward - (that’s HUBRIS.) (To this day no one has ever ‘found’ that mountain by the way, i.e. Sinai. And no one has found any evidence whatever that a large number of people was ever in that desert area anywhere, never mind roaming all around and camping for 40 years. These are instructive fables. It’s because we human beings are special, we’re conceptual creatures with hearts and souls or unique individual totalities. And add if you wish under G-d, but at least remember if you believe in a transcendent G-d, by definition he can’t be known by you by an act of your own wills alone. Give the transcendent at least that, if you allege you believe. Can you even know your own wife by an act of your own will alone or neighbor or mother or father? … How much less then can you know the transcendent if such exists by your own will alone. Good thing I’m *not G-d, I’d be insulted and wipe you all out for that hubris.) Then, a question becomes appropriate - does what these fables teach ‘get us anywhere today’ worthwhile? And the appropriate questions about that CAN be asked without being accused of blasphemy. Since we now know we can’t *know the transcendent by definition, through an act of our wills alone; and so whoever is accusing us of blasphemy is the one in Fact who is blaspheming THEMSELVES. I.e. so, how Do they allegedly *know? They don’t, they *can’t, just like us. We’re all in the same boat.
The tables are turned. Or now we’re all at the SAME table. Not different tables.
CHRIST is a (wonderful) metaphysical construct to help TEACH, not historical detail. Although a Jesus, the Essene Holy man and member of the Essene sect, who authored the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon On The Mount and 4 Essene Gospels of Peace is an historic figure.
Moses never parted the Red Sea & even if he authored, whether inspired by the transcendent or not (possibly so, but *unknowable by an act of our own wills alone) the Decalogue or 10 Commandments (or as Jews consider them the 10 Suggestions.) And so it is a recommended code for communal life, if one wishes to live communally with some degree of civility, coherence, etc. There has been always throughout antiquity the golden rule in this regard which is very simple and elegant: “DON’T do to another what you would not have done to yourself.”
If we don’t know our own limitations we have one more.
One of those limitations though unfortunately, is that MOST people never learn to separate what’s good v. evil, unless they, as it were, believe Santa Claus is Actual not merely metaphoric. They’re in other words yet grown-up *children, most people…
So then to accommodate that, the tradition became to also tell them (i.e. to lie or ‘fib’) that it’s also “history.” That way you know the masses will also WANT to fathom what is good v. evil since it’s sufficiently sugar coated. Only the mature know the value of knowing good v. evil is its own reward.
I suspect that sugar-coating doesn’t work anymore, which is GOOD NEWS possibly since it means people over time are getting more mature. The masses seem to be saying we reject the sugar coating ‘as if’ it’s actual or history, don’t insult us, lets all talk about good & evil then in a more honest light.
I for one don’t necessarily think that is bad… it’s just dangerous, so has to be handled well.
If so then it’s good. Because NOT doing that has been the tradition so far. Although tradition only exists and continues to exist which is *vital, because over thousands and thousands of years of experiencing first hand what works and what does not work. Tradition also *noticed that occasionally it appends itself, and in those rare instances it has to be handled very well, so that what is subsequently built upon tradition, and is *legitimately NEW, happens too so all of the past is not trashed as a result.
If something is added to tradition that is not legimately new and so not sufficiently built upon the past, then tradition will be trashed which is a *tragedy, a *real tragedy. Since then it all goes back to the initially barbaric square one from whence it all began, and we have to start all over again.
However if it is *time to add something to actually append (not change) tradition., and that is *not done, then it also runs the *unnecessary risk (since the time had come) of being tragically trashed.
If we don’t know our limitations we have one more.
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