Hollywood is completely obsessed with the Holocaust. Partly because of its own Jewishness, also the reason why, among other things, Hollywood so rarely depicts God. Partly because the Holocaust didn’t happen in America (unlike slavery, or the genocide of the Native Americans), or with direct American participation or collusion. And partly because, as with the saturation teaching of the Holocaust in British schools, there is no doubt who are the bad guys, therefore who are the good guys, and which side splendidly triumphs in the end.
But nor is there any moral ambivalence about Stalin’s Purges, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or a whole host of other things. And they didn’t happen in, or with the participation or collusion of, America, either. Is the shadow of McCarthyism still so long, that the treatment of those who were even so much as accused of certain sympathies still places those sympathies themselves beyond reproach?
Nor is anything ever made about the ongoing global persecution of Christians, perhaps because much of that is a result of at least American-backed (and British-backed) policies in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, and elsewhere.
The answer, I am afraid, lies in how Hollywood depicts the Holocaust. The Holocaust of, say, the Gypsies, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses (of whom in Germany Hitler killed every single one), or numerous others has never, that I can recall, received the big budget blockbuster treatment.
The life of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) would make a wonderful film, but it is precisely her Jewish ethnicity that is the problem. The life of Saint Maximillian Kolbe stands no chance. The anti-Zionism of both the Orthodox and many of the Communist or Socialist Jewish victims is also left unmentioned, as is the fact that the Zionist project in Palestine was already several decades old by then, and spent the War fighting against Hitler’s enemies while trying to do deals with him.
And the impact of this on popular culture, not only in America but throughout the world, is almost impossible to overstate.
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Indeed the Holocaust was in Europe.....but the "Living Room" (I cant spell the German word) in the eastern part of Europe was not much different from Manifest Destiny, the westward expansion of United States at the genocidal expense of native Americans and Hispanics.
ReplyDeleteHollywood has indeed depicted this westward expansion.....but oddly not as genocide or a Holocaust (as I believe it to be)
To be fair, there were nowhere near as many people living in the American West at the start of the nineteenth century as there were living in Eastern Europe in the twentieth. Which makes it all the odder that it was felt necessary to kill quite so many of those that there were.
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteI am continuing our discussion from before.
A few points about your new post. First, people are persecuted because of the views of the persecutors, not due to what outsiders do. Hence, Christians are persecuted by Communists because Communism teaches derogatory things about religion. Christians are persecuted by Muslims because Islam teaches derogatory things about Christianity (and Judaism). In the case of Christianity, Islam teaches that the Christian trinity is a form of "shirk" (i.e. idolatry) and nearly a form of paganism.
Hollywood is moved by what gets people to the cinema house and to buy and rent videos. So, if stories about the Holocaust of Jews did not "sell," they would not be made.
At the same time, your list of themes from Hollywood overlooks movies about African Americans. Such movies have done well at the box office. There have also, in recent times, been movies about American Indians - i.e. native Americans. So, I think you do not go to the movies enough.
Now, it is certainly the case that Jews are well represented - in fact, disproportionately represented - in Hollywood. But, this is also true in most areas in which the intellect plays a role. So, the material available to make movies from comes from those who write - and, Jewish authors are in abundance.
For the record, the core of the Jewish army that fought in Israel's war of independence was made up of Jewish veterans of Britain's armed forces. They were the elite force in the Jewish army. Moreover, Jews did not fight Hitler's enemies during WWII. [Source: 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris They fought with the British.
Regarding our earlier topic, I accused you of nothing. My comment were about Williamson and those who think like he thinks - not about you. His, no matter how you spin it, were not a mere misstatement of history. They were a statement made to support his political or religious agenda. And, as I noted, all those I know of who endorse his noted theory are Antisemites.
'As nuncio to Bavaria, [Eugenio] Pacelli [later Pope Pius XII] personally helped World Zionist Organisation representative Nachum Sokolov to meet Pope Benedict XV in 1917 to discuss a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And in 1926 Cardinal Pacelli encouraged German Catholics to join the Committee Pro Palestina, which supported Jewish settlements in Palestine.' [Ed West in this week's Catholic Herald]
ReplyDeleteAnd to think, all the time those evil Zionists were 'fighting against Hitler’s enemies while trying to do deals with him.'
Poor old "Hitler's Pope" just can't win, can he!