Goldhagen & Spielberg's Zwolfkinder

[Steelhead]

An astounded Roy Gordon quotes Steelhead, then sez:

>> But Goldhagen's facts haven't been assailed, rather
>> his controversial conclusion that the seeds of the Holocaust were deeply
>> embedded in the German culture,in its myths, music, films, economics and
>> philosophy. Even if you don't accept this thesis, the book is worth it for
>> its detailed history of the little known but horrifically villainous
>> Einsatzgruppen and the sadistic and eliminationist death marches (mainly
>> involving women and children) at the close of the war.
>
>Spielberg undoubtedly should have beaten Goldhagen to it and tacked it on.

But that's just the point, Roy. Spielberg could not entertain a single
premise of Goldhagen's argument (or Hannah Arendt's or Robert Jay Lifton's
or TRP's)--to have done so would have resulted in a very, very different
film--a film that might have tried to at least hint at some of the
geo-political, social, religious, technological, and economic impulses
driving the Holocaust.

At best, this movie is a simple and contrived Christian morality play-about
tribulation, deliverance, redemption and salvation, right?, where Germany
is redeemed for its little episode of mass pyschopathology through the rise
of the born again Schindler and his "Teutonic capitalism with a human face"
and the genetic stock of the European Jews is "saved" by the 1,000
Schindler-Jews, many of whom find their way back to the redemptive soil of
the Holy Lands where they have reproduced in Malthusian progressions. But
school children across America are safe in the knowledge that this all
happened long ago, in the black-and-white past, to people we know little
about, for some oddly elusive reason, that our government and religion had
no role it, indeed fought bravely to oppose it, and that those "mad men"
responsible for it met with a swift and cleansing justice (or at least some
psycho-therapy), and that it will never, ever happen again.

(All this seems quite strange, really, when you consider that SL is a movie
by a Jewish director with abosolute control of the project--but, in the
end, of course, Schindler's List is not very much about Jews, is it? Once
again the Jews (as Andre Schwartz-Bart--whose Last of the Just is just
waiting to be filmed by Terry Gilliam--could have predicted) are treated as
mere objects for "inexplicable" acts of torture and sadism, not unlike,
really, the unsuspecting and helpless victims of that great white shark.
Even Ben Kingsley's character is basically just a pawn of the great patron
and crisis entrepenuer Oskar Schindler, who is shown giving a Christ-like
blessing to the Schindler-Jews arriving at the safety of his new factory in
Brinnitz (check it out!) et. al. This is a film made for Christians (but
what sect? Lutherans? A-and, say, those Catholics come out unscathed, too,
don't they)--did he use a marketing focus group, or what?)

>> In an interview in LOOT a few years ago, Christopher Simpson
>> suggested there is documentary evidence of this and that the man was merely
>> trying to save his own ass as he forsaw how the war was going to end.
>
>Is this in the book (I don't know.)  Is it publicly available, other than
>someone 'suggesting' it?

The "someone" suggesting it is Christopher Simpson, a professor at American
University, who, along with Deborah Lipstadt ("Denying the Holocaust"), is
one of America's leading scholars on "interpretations" of the Holocaust and
the coercive uses of propaganda. The interview appeared in the spring 1994
issue of the now sadly defunct LOOT magazine, a journal of media criticism
published in NYC by Chomsky, Edward Herman, and the folks at CovertAction
Quarterly. Back issues should be available in most libraries.

Schindler may have been an active participant in the so-called
Himmlerkries, a council of German business executives and Himmler's ranking
SS officers that coordinated slave labor policy and industry cooperation in
the death camps themselves.

>> Actually, I think the full story (although Kubrick, as always, was well
>> ahead of the curve) is hardly known at all--since most of the damning
>> evidence was destroyed by the Nazi's or remains sealed by the US State
>> Department. Some facts continue to emerge. For instance, there is the
>> strange case of George Bush's grandfather, the investment banker Herbert
>> Walker, among whose clients during the war were GAF and its parent
>> company...drumroll...IG Farben. George's father,
>> Prescott Bush continued this tradition at the Nazi-linked firm Dillon,
>> Read. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that George Bush thought Schindler's
>> List was
>> "one of the best films I've ever seen."
>
>Very little would surprise me about George Bush, but I'm really surprised at
>this argument.

What's surprising? That oilman Bush would go out of his way to praise a film
that scoots across the surface of what was really going on in Nazi-occupied
Europe, while he turns a blind eye  to--in fact, tacitly supports--similar
acts of contemporary genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, Guatemala,
Sudan, Irian Jaya, Myanmar, Kurdistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Chiapas,
Chechnya...acts undertaken on behalf of many of the same corporations
(Shell Oil, Standard Oil,
GE, Textron, international banking houses, the mining and chemical
conglomerates) involved in the Holocaust (and exposed by Pynchon in GR),
often funded by the US Govt., employing American trained mercenaries, and
in pursuit of the same political objectives?

>Re Night and Fog: "In a control tower a French gendarme was clearly visible.
>This visual evidence of collaboration was intolerable to the authorities.
>After two months of negotiations, the producers of the film agreed to alter
>the
>image (and the evidence of history) by covering the gendarme's uniform." (from
>_Alain Resnais_ by James Monaco (1978, p 22.)
>
>I mean, how could they???  Distory history?  In a documentary?  Intentionally?
> Just knuckle under?  So they could satify their egos and get it distributed?
>Wow, I'm sorry I ever saw the film.

But I _do_ find this an egregious distortion, a kind of insidious
propaganda. If Resnais was responsible for it, then he should be held up
for public obliquy and the record corrected. I'm glad Monaco wrote it up,
and you quoted it.

Steely