When the Soviet submarine film "The Hunt for Red October" appeared in 1990, a magazine headline described it with a sigh of relief as "The Last Cold War Movie." And that proved largely prophetic. While the movie industry continues to mine the Third Reich's dozen years, the much longer era of Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe has seemingly disappeared down the media memory hole.
In Germany, "It's forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis," observes historian Hubertus Knabe, "But it's almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison." Hence, a huge hit in Germany was "Good Bye, Lenin!" -- a sweet comedy inspired by the misbegotten Ostalgie fad (nostalgia for the East).
The German drama "The Lives of Others" shows what we've been missing. Perhaps the best movie of 2006, this debut by a 33-year-old, 6'9" writer-director with the heel-clickingly Teutonic moniker of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck depicts life in 1984 under the eyes of the Stasi secret police. They employed one percent of the East German workforce directly and two percent as secret informants.
In a masterful opening segment, Wiesler, a thin-lipped, middle-aged Stasi functionary, conducts a textbook interrogation of a hapless citizen accused (and, in effect, already convicted) of not snitching on a neighbor planning to escape to the West. When the prisoner protests his innocence, Wiesler replies, "If you believe we arrest people on a whim, that alone is enough to justify your arrest." The secret policeman is played with charismatic restraint by East German actor Ulrich Mühe (who had discovered in his Stasi files in the 1990s details about himself reported by his wife). [More in the issue]
In Germany, "It's forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis," observes historian Hubertus Knabe, "But it's almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison." Hence, a huge hit in Germany was "Good Bye, Lenin!" -- a sweet comedy inspired by the misbegotten Ostalgie fad (nostalgia for the East).
The German drama "The Lives of Others" shows what we've been missing. Perhaps the best movie of 2006, this debut by a 33-year-old, 6'9" writer-director with the heel-clickingly Teutonic moniker of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck depicts life in 1984 under the eyes of the Stasi secret police. They employed one percent of the East German workforce directly and two percent as secret informants.
In a masterful opening segment, Wiesler, a thin-lipped, middle-aged Stasi functionary, conducts a textbook interrogation of a hapless citizen accused (and, in effect, already convicted) of not snitching on a neighbor planning to escape to the West. When the prisoner protests his innocence, Wiesler replies, "If you believe we arrest people on a whim, that alone is enough to justify your arrest." The secret policeman is played with charismatic restraint by East German actor Ulrich Mühe (who had discovered in his Stasi files in the 1990s details about himself reported by his wife). [More in the issue]
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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39 comments:
If the 6'9" Florian whatever becomes really famous, he'll tie Michael Crichton and J.K. Galbraith for the title of Tallest Man to Become Famous for Reasons Unrelated to Height :)
Peter
When visiting Berlin, I highly recommend a visit to the Stasi Museum. It's on Magdelenestrasse.
It's true that there are many, many more movies and documentaries made about the WWII, Nazis and the Holocaust than any other historical subject.Take a visit to a bookstore in any Western country, even if they haven't a Jewish community to speak of, and witness the same phenomenon.("In Adolf's Kitchen:A Vegetarian Cookbook" :It'll be out soon,'ya bet.)
So,apparently the stuff sells. I have a theory as to why:the prevalent Common Wisdom (CW) about the fate and character of Communism, versus how people see Nazism.CW says that when Communism fell (1989 or 1992),it also instantly became an historical anachronism.The debate,the question about how to organise national economies,was considered over.
The end result of this solidification of CW was that it became impossible to see Communism as a threat anymore.In addition to that,Communism is usually seen as silly and boring.Certainly, any look at old Soviet propaganda, or an attempt to read Marx's writings, tends to reinforce that view.
Compared to that, Hitler still makes good copy.What Common Wisdom says about the Nazis is that they're not anachronistic at all;we (the Free World) triumphed them only through force of arms; and most importantly, that National Socialism still exudes its seductive evil to people everywhere.
In short, Communism is seen as so last week; Nazism is still lurking out there somewhere, like the perfect storybook villain.
They employed one percent of the East German workforce directly and two percent as secret informants.
Actually, according to this book, up to 20% of East Germans worked with the Stasi at some point in their lives.
Re: Ideological appeal
Nazism is probably the most impopular ideology around in terms of popular appeal, at least in Europe.
Communism, by contrast, is semi-acceptable and semi-chic.
In short, I don't really subscribe entirely to the analysis posted above.
They employed one percent of the East German workforce directly and two percent as secret informants.
Actually, according to this book, up to 20% of East Germans worked with the Stasi at some point in their lives.
Don't need to see any movies on the Stasi. We're all living it, in its reincarnation in the US. It'll be more visible as time goes on, but the secret prisons, torture interrogations, and suspension of haebus corpus is all there.
Remember P.J. O'Rourke's dictum: No woman ever fantasised about being tied to the bed and ravaged by someone dressed as a liberal.
This, I believe, is the cause of the fetish: the human attraction towards evil. The Devil not only gets the best tunes, but, in the case of the Nazis, the best costumes, the best generals, the best weapons, the best iconography and even the most powerful-sounding language. From Göttermorgen to Götterdämmerung, it is the blackest story ever told, and it's still being told everywhere. And some boys will always want to play the baddy.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/10/Spectator121002.html
"Don't need to see any movies on the Stasi. We're all living it, in its reincarnation in the US. It'll be more visible as time goes on, but the secret prisons, torture interrogations, and suspension of haebus (sic) corpus is all there."
*yawn*
You do realize that people tend to object to the bad stuff mentioned above mostly when the government applies that to their own citizens? And not so much when it's done to foreigners that are trying to kill said citizens? No?
"From Göttermorgen to Götterdämmerung, it is the blackest story ever told, and it's still being told everywhere. And some boys will always want to play the baddy."
Fair point. Perhaps I shouldn't draw all of my conclusions from observations made in public life. You're right that there's stuff under the surface too. Still, Communism holds quite a bit of emotional sway, in old forms as well as new. I'd say it's in a better comeback position than Nazism overall.
Alex,
Nice job getting that link off nutjob David Irving's site. ADL and SPLC idiots monitoring this thread are probably jumping up for joy now, knowing they can connect Steve indirectly with bogus holocaust denial crap.
And to think, people still wonder why the congitive elite refuses to think about IQ/race. No one wants to be connected with Nazi crap. If people like Irving, Duke, etc threw in the towel, the public would be much more inclined to listen to IQ realism, and writers like Steve would be get the attention they deserve, rather than having to play second fiddle to bores like Gladwell and Levitt.
With people like you doing their work for them, they're probably laughing their arses off.
Quit trying to police the Internet and let the chips fall where they may.
"Nice job getting that link off nutjob David Irving's site."
Ah, didn't notice that at first. But the article is originally from the UK Spectator, and appears to be on Iriving's site because it disses him. For whatever that is worth.
And yes, nazis and assorted racists are certainly doing splendid negative advertising for a more non-emotional approach to issues like IQ, immigration, etc.
I don't know what Alex's motives were, but since the article is anti-Nazi, I think it's just likely that he remembered reading it in the Spectator, googled it, and happened to find it on Irving's site.
I think anonymous 11:10 and dobeln are both right. Soviet and Eastern European Communism is seen by many as boring rather than evil; even worse, Asian (except for Pol Pot) and Latin American Communism is still seen in many circles as hip and chic. Neither of these attitudes lends itself to a good anti-Communist movie.
Nice try covering my back, James, but anon and Dobeln sound like a couple of old women and I couldn't give two hoots what they think.
I originally read that article on Irving's site, and now he's back in circulation I'm a constant visito r again. With all respect to the journalistic skills of Steve Sailer (SS? Oh, the horror!), he'll never write anything that's a patch on Irving's Hitler's War.
Obviously the horrors of communism were real, but the question I keep thinking is why a movie needs to be made about them, or about the Nazi horrors for that matter.
And I wonder if the preference for Nazi films is because the Nazis themselves made the greatest propaganda film ever, Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and thus the imagery of the Nazis continues to be cinematically powerful. I've heard that they even designed their uniforms to look good on film.
Maybe communists just don't work on film.
From the weird timing department:
Tonight on the Sundance Channel at 9:00 is "Hammer and Tickle: The Communist Joke Book," described by the New York Times TV section thus: "It's said that comedy is just another way of getting at the truth. And nowhere was that more evident than in the humor that reverberated in the gap between political propaganda and everyday reality in the U.S.S.R. Here, Ben Lewis uses animation, archival footage, and interviews with humorists and dissidents to chart the relationship between jokes and oppression in some Eastern European regimes." It sounds more like a "Communists were dumb and silly" account than a "Communists were monstrous and evil" account, but one that does not pretend Communist Eastern Europe was a nice place to live. If Mr. Sailer gets that channel, he should check it out.
Don't need to see any movies on the Stasi. We're all living it, in its reincarnation in the US. It'll be more visible as time goes on, but the secret prisons, torture interrogations, and suspension of haebus corpus is all there.
Sigh. I thought there wasn't anything more tiresome than Jupiter's "NATIVE WHITE CHRISTIAN MALE!!" stuff, but I always forget that lefty fantasies of persecution and the descending night of American fascism will win out in the end.
Communism can't be discussed in Germany for the same reason that no one in France ever thinks, speaks or writes about what they really did during the war.
In both cases, everyone, everyone, everyone, collaborated.
The French Resistance?
Speer at Nuremburg: "What resistance?"
The central question as always:
Who? Whom?
The Communists were sponsored by the same people sponsoring toady's statist, globalist ideologies. By contrasts, for all their faults, and despite the fact that they were assisted by aspects of international finance early on (when it was assumed Hitler was a nut going nowhere), for one brief moment the NSADP stood in opposition to everything international finance stands for.
A conspiracy minded person would note who was deeply involved in communism in Russia, who are the movers and shakers behind Hollywood, and who was on the the Nazi hate list during WWII.
Just about all the above commenters have some good insights. Among them: 1. The Nazis did indeed have the style and panache required for cinematic villians-something the rather drab Stalinists lacked, 2. what we are experiencing in the West today is a variety of neo-Stalinism in the form of "Political Correctness"[a term with origins in the Marxist-leninst left]and the Multicult-so any expose of life under Communism reveals too many uncomfortable parallels to the present state of affairs.
And to think, people still wonder why the congitive elite refuses to think about IQ/race. No one wants to be connected with Nazi crap. If people like Irving, Duke, etc threw in the towel, the public would be much more inclined to listen to IQ realism, and writers like Steve would be get the attention they deserve, rather than having to play second fiddle to bores like Gladwell and Levitt-anonymous 2/19/2007 1:46 PM
The Nazis, KKK and similar types will never disappear because various govt agencies, the ADL and SPLC will make sure of it. It is their bread-and-butter. Recall the recent scandal in Germany when the Federal Court refused to ban the NPD precisely becuase so many state intelligence agents were involved in the leadership of the party. In the US I am convinced (on an instinctive level) that none of the Nazi and Klan outfits could muster a minion without their complements of govt and ADL/SPLC informers.
The Commies were as boring and depressing as a Stalin-era apartment building, and so was the Cold War. Who wants to watch a movie about them? Your promotion of this movie sounds like the conservative version of "Eat your peas! They're good for you!" No thanks. I'd rather have my Swastika burger with Auschwitz fries.
c23
"Nice job getting that link off nutjob David Irving's site. ADL and SPLC idiots monitoring this thread are probably jumping up for joy now, knowing they can connect Steve indirectly with bogus holocaust denial crap."
Even more joyous that they have drones like you doing their work for them.
I would say anyone with an open mind and an university level IQ who spends 3 hours reading revisionist literature would quickly become a revisionist. (Which is why nowhere do you encounter any serious debate; any anti-revisionist debate that you do find spends 90% of efforts making the case that revisionists are horrible people, not in answering their challenges.)
I don't want to cause Steve any more problems than he already has, but I'm 99.9% certain that he's read Butz and Faurisson and knows what a farce the "gassings" claim is. Can't blame him for keeping silent.
Anyone offer me odds on how long this comment will last?
Re the greater cinematic interest in Nazi Germany versus Soviet Russia: The Nazis have fascinated for a long time because of the contrast between how advanced German society was (culturally and otherwise) before the war and the Nazis brutality toward Jews, gays, the handicapped and other groups they considered subhuman. The Germany of Beethoven, Bismark, Heine, etc. producing Nazi genocide has something of a man-bites-dog element.
That there has been less cinematic interest in the horrors of Communism is partly because there's nothing surprising about backward Russians, Cambodians and others behaving brutally toward their countrymen. It's a dog-bites-man story.
BTW, Daniel:
Your comment is still there. I've never seen Steve censor his comments. That said, there are still Holocaust survivors here in the New York area. If you come out here, I could introduce you to one if you're interested.
Dave
Backward Russians? Yeah, they'd only produced Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nijinsky, Peter Carl Fabergé, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky. Really nobody at all. Just a bunch of dumb muzhiks.
"Your comment is still there. I've never seen Steve censor his comments. That said, there are still Holocaust survivors here in the New York area. If you come out here, I could introduce you to one if you're interested."
A "holocaust survivor" should really mean someone who was gassed but didn't die, or who, at a minimum, was slated to be gassed, *saw* and can describe, *without contradictions* , a gas chamber (saw it up close), but cheated fate at the last minute. To my knowlege there exists no such person.
The common definition of "holocaust survivor", on the other hand, is someone who was in the camps and came out alive. But this will not do. No one denies that Jews were rounded up and sent to camps. What is denied is that there was any sort of planned, organized effort to exterminate them there, specifically by means of gassing them. No such effort, then, despite unquestionable Jewish hardship and suffering, no "holocaust".
So, Dave, it's not about whether this person you know claims he survived an effort to exterminate him and his kind by gassing, it's about whether he can prove such an effort existed, or at least offer sufficient evidence to suggest it was likely, or even possible. To my mind, the evidence screams "unlikely" and at times whistles "impossible".
Of course, "everyone" believes, often fanatically, that the evidence is overwhelming that gassing occurred. But then at one time "everyone" believed, just as unquestioningly and fanatically, that the sun revolved around the earth, that Jesus rose from the dead, that...you get the picture...until the evidence suggested otherwise. Listen closely and you might hear history rhyming.
I don't wish to put Steve on the spot here. Calling out the holocaust is not a wise career move and there are bigger fish for Steve to fry at the moment. I might just suggest to him that the cause of truth would still be served by allowing my comments to stand.
Anyone who wishes to correct my views, ideally by providing me with the key piece/s of evidence they have which they believe establishes the truth of the gassings (which of course they possess, right, or else why would they be so adamant?), can email me at danielsosa@auswww.com
Russia as a country was historically backward in social organization despite producing some great intellects. The Chinese had 4000 years of culture, but the British still kicked their butts.
As for Holocaust denial: so all the gas chambers were faked? All those pictures of mountains of corpses? Patton puking? All those people with numbers on their arms?
Holocaust humor: I imagine there was quite a bit of gallows humor in the camps.
The scene is a bar in Berlin in January 1933, filled with Nazis. Goering is skulling stiens of beer with the brownshirts, Goebbels is sipping cocktails with a couple of groupies and Hitler is seated with a wild-eyed Hess discussing pupil diagnostics.
An American journalist enters, sees the full crew and realizes he's sitting on the scoop of the century. He asks the barman: "Which one shall I ask for the absolute bottom line on the Nazi plans?" "Goebbels, of course" answers the barman, "He knows everything." The journalist approaches and says "I want the bottom line on what this Nazi thing is." Goebbels flashes him a smile and says "We intend to kill six million Jews and one postman." The journalist's mind races. "But why do you want to kill one postman?" Goebbels shouts over to Hitler: "See Adolf, I told you no-one gives a fig about the Jews!"
Daniel,
The Holocaust survivor I had in mind to introduce you to wrote a book about his experiences. You can order it here. He was a friend of my late father, who was also a survivor (of the Warsaw Ghetto and two concentration camps).
Obviously, neither he nor my father were gassed, as they survived their experiences in the camps (though, in both cases, they were the only members of their families to do so). By your logic, the fact that both survived means there was no genocide.
Also by your logic, the "question" of the existence and use of gas chambers (a question only to you and a handful of revisionists) determines whether there was systematic attempt by the Nazis to murder Jews. Two questions for you:
1) If you forcibly take a man away from his home, imprison him, beat him, starve him, make him a slave laborer, subject him to exposure, and force him to live in unsanitary conditions -- if you do all this, and he dies of a heart attack during his enslavement as my grandfather did, have you not killed him?
2) What of the systematic murdering of Jews by more prosaic means such as rounding them up and shooting them? this book by Christopher Browning draws on the testimony of a police battalion of Germans who murdered thousands of Jews this way. Do you deny that this systematic murder happened? Does this not count as genocide?
Dave
You all are overintellectualizing it.
Why there are no movies about Ukrainian famine and other Stalinist crimes?
For the same reason why there are no movies about genocide in Congo and other crimes of colonialism. For the same reason why there are no movies about the genocides in Africa that are going on now.
For the same reason why Hollywood WW2 movies are about American and British soldiers and nearly completely omit the Eastern front and China.
For the same reasons why there are numerous movies about American Civil War, and none about contemporary Taiping war in China, which produced about hundred times more causalties.
Because none of these victims were Westerners. Of all people, one would expect Steve Sailer to understand this.
Leaving aside the gas chambers for a moment, how many Jews do you suppose died in the camps due to the beatings, starvation, exposure and other torments they were subjected to by the Nazis?
I would say about three hundred thousand total died from the effects of starvation and exposure, but almost all in the last year of the war and almost all because of the Allied bombing campaign which made transport of food and medicine impossible.
For Heaven's sake, the Nazis moved prisoners West with them in the face of the Red Army invasions - for the sake of safety. Even Elie Weisel was given the choice of staying in a camp to await the Red Army or to travel West with the Germans. Which do you suppose he opted for?
Doesn't anyone else think it funny to find this on a blog on the evils of the Stasi:
"Nice job getting that link off nutjob David Irving's site. ADL and SPLC idiots monitoring this thread are probably jumping up for joy now, knowing they can connect Steve indirectly with bogus holocaust denial crap."
Anonymous
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Seems that even Irving-haters understand that here in free America we are being monitored for our thoughts. Thank you Zionists! Your contributions to freedom in the Western World will take us in the same direction you took Russia when your ancestors helped "liberate" that country. We Americans should be thankful for our Bill of Rights; to date, we risk only personal and professional ruin for our historical questions rather than the fate suffered by the curious in Europe: certain imprisonment in a Zionist Gulag.
There were no Nazi gas chambers, no genocidal "Final Solution," no horrific justification for the founding of Israel. If there were, there would be no Iron Curtain sealing off the historical debate, no ADL operatives monitoring the border wire, no Southern Poverty Law Center investigating thought crimes, no AIPAC bribing the Politburo.
You can decide to suspend all common sense and natural skepticism and see good in the Zionist Iron Curtain, but you can't do that and love truth and liberty. You can only do that and be a dupe.
It's interesting that Holocaust deniers assume the truth of the gulag as proven (as, of course, they should, since the gulag, like the Holocaust, did exist), but I have no doubt that anyone determined to be a gulag denier could have just as much fun distorting evidence and cherry-picking data as Holocaust deniers do. I bet some first-hand accounts of the gulag contain minor factual errors that, like minor factual errors in first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, could be harped on endlessly by the mendacious.
Mr. Kabala,
What's interesting is how you've failed to notice that there exists no Iron Curtain around the history of the Soviet gulags: no pejorative name for those who question the Gulag narrative, no prison sentences for those who beg for the hard evidence, no pathetic assertion that its survivors deserve protection from historical inquiry. The gulag history is open to all to study, question, and refute. In this, it is like all history -- except the one that you believe deserves a level of totalitarian protection common only to big lies.
Holocaust denial is a term invented by the Holocaust Industry. What it describes is as fictional as the fiction of the gas chambers. No concentration camp scholar doubts that hundreds of thousands of internees perished; there is no denial of great suffering, injustice, and death, thus, there is no denial.
What the Holocaust Industry demands from the rest of the world is that it accept its narrative without question, accept the existence of gas chambers for which there exists no evidence, accept the never-ending reparations bill for it all, and imprison anyone who questions its version of history. These demands are unprecedented in academic inquiry and non-existent in human relationships. Scholars do not accept dogma, and people do not surrender their innate skepticism, yet that is exactly what, under threat of ruin and loss of liberty, international jewry demands of us all.
And you defend it?
More Holocaust humour, this time from Emo Phillips:
"My brother-in-law is from Berlin...we met at a Deli in New York recently and over breakfast, he told me, Y'know, you just can't get a good bagel like this in Germany.
I said: Well, now whose fault is that? "
One final point: Amon Goeth (not Goetz) was not "prosecuted" for cruelty to prisoners; charged with stealing confiscated Jewish property for himself rather than handing it over to the government, and the charges were dismissed. So he doesn't work as an example of alleged Nazi defense of prisoners from cruelty.
James Kabala points to yet another example of the breathtaking dishonesty of the Holocuast deniers.
In his latest post, Udolpho provides a pentrating analysis of conspiracy theorists and promulgators of "alternative" historical theories, which applies to a large extent to the Holocaust "revisionists"; I was reminded in particular of the jolly soul who on this thread attempted to convince us that the Nazis were actually benevolent protectors of the Jews they dispossessed, imprisoned, enslaved and executed en masse:
Conspiracy theorists acquire an off-putting calm – they seem to hope to outlast skeptics as if reasoning were a feat of endurance. To this effect they deploy wildly conflicting insinuations and evidence to exhaust the rational observer of mental energy, rather than arguing for a single, compelling explanation. It is very similar to the technique magicians and con men use to overwhelm their audiences and targets – distract and confuse. The conspiracy theorist memorizes questions about many aspects of his subject, then releases them into the flurry of conversation from as many directions as possible. Of course in such situations many questions of this nature are immediately unanswerable without resort to external references (the questions themselves may be based on inaccurate assumptions).
regarding Geoth:
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/shindler.html
Although there were orders to administrators from the National Socialist government that concentration camp inmates were not to be brutalized, the camps themselves varied from well-run, fundamentally decent places of confinement, to pure hell-holes, depending to a large degree on the quality of the Nazi leadership in each concentration camp.
Some commandants such as Amon Goeth and Karl Otto Koch were little more than criminals, while others like Hermann Pister were incorruptible and supervised the most humane facilities they could under the circumstances, given the scarcity of food and medicine in wartime Germany under conditions of saturation bombing by the Allied air forces.
There are many instances of attempts by the German military to secure humane conditions within the concentration camps. For example, in 1943 SS Judge Konrad Morgen of the Haupt Amt Gericht (SS-HAG) was assigned to investigate and prosecute brutality at Buchenwald.
Morgen was so successful in correcting conditions there that Himmler gave him an expanded staff and unlimited investigative authority in the camps. Morgen's next target of inquiry was Krakau-Plaszow and its commandant, Amon Goeth, the arch-fiend of Speilberg's film.
In Spielberg's "Schindler's List" Morgen's entire investigation of Goeth was reduced to a scene in which fleeting reference is made to Goeth having his books "audited." If you blinked, you missed it.
The crucial truth that Steven Spielberg withheld from his audience is that in September of 1944, Goeth was arrested by the Central Office of the SS Judiciary and imprisoned on charges of theft and the murder of concentration camp inmates.
Spielberg was certainly aware of this fact, since the arrest is mentioned in chapter 31 of the book by Keneally upon which the movie is allegedly based.
[Verification of the arrest and/or prosecution of Commandant Goeth by the SS can be found in Reuben Ainsztein's Jewish Resistance in Nazi Occupied Eastern Europe, p. 845; in the affidavit of Obersturmbannfuhrer Kurt Mittelstaedt, chief of the SS Central Judiciary at Munich and Morgen's immediate superio; and in the testimony of Morgen himself (cf. vol. 42, IMT "Blue series," p. 556].
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