The Eichmann of Ballona

[Steelhead]

A quivering, davemarc, who sounds like he may be on the Spielberg/Shoah
Project dole--or would like to be--shouts:

>Please, Jeffrey St. Clair, don't feel obliged in the least to rehash the
>debate--or to trigger it again with your arrogant pontificating, hyperbolic
>moralizing, and neglectful factchecking.  Whoops.  Too late.

I love the repititous incantation of my name. Quite intoxicating, really.

>Once again Jeffrey St. Clair trots out this asinine comparison between
>Spielberg and Riefenstahl.  Riefenstahl, the artist who was near the top of
>the Nazi regime but for decades and decades
>claims to have known nothing about its offenses against humanity.  Years
>before the Final Solution, Fritz Lang, the first pick for the job Leni got,
>figured out that he ought to get his ass out of the country (and make
>anti-Nazi propaganda films) rather serve Hitler, but Riefenstahl stayed and
>stayed and basked in the Nazi limelight.  She shot miles and miles of film
>under the Nazi regime, but how much of those pro-Nazi commercials depicted
>the suffering of the Jews, the gypsies, the communists in anyway?  Precious
>little.

Fritz Lang was an artist; Speilberg and Riefenstahl filthy propagandists.
Spielberg feeds visual junk to the masses for money; Riefenstahl sold her
talents to darker forces. I don't like Leni Riefenstahl or her films. She
should have stayed in jail a long time, right there with that elusive Von
Braun, whose achievements in ballistics and aspirations of technological
transcendence are implicitly celebrated in many of Spielberg's films.

>And Jeffrey St. Clair, who
>doesn't have a problem demonizing Henry Ford for distributing anti-Jewish
>tracts, insists on championing her in order to criticize Steven Spielberg,
>who happens to spearhead the Shoah Project (though you wouldn't know that
>from reading Jeffrey St. Clair's rants).

Did I champion her, davemarc? I said she was a superior film-maker to SS.
That's not saying much, in my opinion.

As for the Shoah Project, Spielberg claimed that all of the "profits from
Schindler's List" would be funneled to this foundation. But it turns out
that 90 percent of the money (about $30 million as of last summer) funding
the Shoah Project comes from corporations. Many of them with past links to
the Nazi regime. Spielberg also asked for and received a $1 million grant
from the National Endowment of the Humanities, even though the staff
stridently objected on the grounds that the project was already
well-funded, Spielberg is a near billionaire, and there were worthier
applications. SS took his case to Senators DiFi and Barbara Boxer, who
pushed the grant through in a special congressional appropriation. I wrote
a 3,000 word article on the subject for City Pages and the New Statesman.
Part of it also turned up in an article in Counterpunch. It was extensively
researched, relied dozens of interviews, and included a detailed
examination of the Shoah Foundation's filings with the IRS.

Spielberg is a corporate welfare cheat of astonishing proportions.
Spielberg and his billionaire allies, Katzenberg, Geffen, Bill Gates, and
Paul Allen, have demanded more than $150 million in tax inducements from
the State of California and the City of LA to build their fucking
Dreamworks studio that will annihilate the Ballona Wetlands, the last
greenspace in LA county and a vital stop on the Pacific Flyway for millions
of migratory birds. Some species will be extirpated from the region by this
project. That is viewed as a kind of genocide to the Deep Ecology crowd, of
which I reluctantly, at times, count myself.

Money that should have been going to help inner city LA will now end up in
the pockets of billionaires. Families in Compton may go without water or
electricity because of this massive diversion of needed funds. The taxes of
the poor are going up, so that Dreamworks can pay nothing at all. This
means that people will have to work more hours to bring home less pay so
that Stevie can have his studio on the cheap. That's political extortion
and a kind of slavery, isn't it?

Will children be harmed by this amazing transfer of wealth? You bet. The
Playa Vista/Dreamworks project is the biggest development in the history of
LA. It will feed 200,000 new commuter trips a day, adding an estimated 13
tons of air pollutants into the poisonous LA atmosphere a day! More
children will develop asthma, and more elderly and infirm people may well
die as a result. That's a kind of homocide, isn't it? A gassing of the
weakest members of the LA community. Courtesy of the kind hearted folks at
Dreamworks.

>Maybe Jeffrey St. Clair's not aware that these days there's just a teensy
>weensy debate on whether or not any movie can have a single theme (and
>maybe he's not aware that "both" should only modify a list of two
>components).

Yes, Spielberg, in particular, is noted for the "complexity" of this
"themes." Right up there with Antonioni, Greenaway and Von Trier on the
complexity scale.

>Schindler enacted a lower, more problematic, more debatable,
>more questionable, form of righteousness while advancing himself.  That's
>clear in the film.

My point is the man should have been brought before the Nuremburg Tribunal,
and, if convicted, thrown in jail--not immortallized as a hero. Perhaps,
spared execution, but certainly locked up for a long, long time.

> The socio-political implication: Germany can
> be rebuilt with capitalist and social/democratic institutions and we'll
not
> have to worry about another spasm of genocidal tendencies breaking out.

I said it was an implication. To me, the Schindler morality play resembles
a Marshall Plan in miniature, carrying the absurd message that through
capitalism work really can set you free (and keep the West safe from
Commies.) Say, where were those Soviet troops--posed to liberate
Auschwitz--in SL, anyway?

>Oh boy, so Jeffrey St. Clair's found another academic he can like:
>Goldhagen, whose book appeared after the book and the film Schindler's
>List.  Perhaps when Steely makes his own two hour docudrama about the
>Holocaust, he'll manage to cover every aspect of the story and anticipate
>future scholarship in the process.

Forget Goldhagen. To get a much different perspective on what the Germans
were up to in the first half of the 20th Century try:

Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950);
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1971);
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986);
Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide (1979);
Orlando Peterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982);
Raul Hilberg The Destruction of the European Jews (1971)
Hebert Kelman, Crimes of Obedience (1989)

>Jeffrey St. Clair's been informed repeatedly about the Shoah Project--he even
>>seems to have done some research about it--yet he seems to forget about it
>whenever he launches these idiotic diatribes.

See above.

>I'd never accuse Jeffrey St. Clair of perpetuating a
>Big Lie (that's Riefenstahl's specialty), but there are so many omissions
>and mistakes in his posts that I'm beginning to think he's a specialist in
>little lies.  I'm even beginning to have trouble bringing myself to read
>his articles because I've found so many of his assertions here to be
>specious.

My writings may be specious, but they do tend to survive the best assaults
of the armies of fact-checkers that now plague all freelance journalists
these days. But please don't belabour yourself on my account, davemarc. And
besides, my writing doesn't depend on a fetish for concealed
tape-recorders, as--if the reports of your session with Chrissie are
accurate--yours appears to do.

Steelhead