Hollywood's Holocaust

Hollywood’s dislike of Britain is readily observable and easily explicable, but we choose to ignore it. Perhaps if Middle America realised both how German it was (it is amazing how many of them do not know that) and how German the British Royal Family was, then, however paradoxically, the ridiculous screeching against George VI by the usual suspects might not be so sympathetically received. But here we are.

Those usual suspects are the Global Zionists. They do not merely want rule by Jews: reserved Jewish representation in the Iranian Parliament cuts no ice with them, nor does the restoration of historic synagogues for what must therefore be thriving Jewish communities in Syria and, under the aegis of the Muslim-Christian alliance that includes Hezbollah, in Lebanon. They have less and less affection for Israel, where even the emerging Jewish minority is already predominantly non-Ashkenazi, while even among the Ashkenazim it is increasingly Haredi.

What they want is rule by secular Ashkenazim who agree with them, as huge numbers of secular Ashkenazim do not. In a word, rule by themselves, with any challenge screamed down as anti-Semitic (which they notably branded all criticism of the Iraq War), as the work of self-hating Jews, and, above all, as redolent of the Holocaust. If, as is increasingly the case, Israel will not deliver that, then the American imperium must be made to, regardless of little details such as American or Israeli election results, or the character and Constitution of the American Republic. And the global reach of Hollywood is a key part of the American imperium.

Hollywood is completely obsessed with the Holocaust. Partly because of its own Jewishness, which is 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 Maximilian Kolbe stands no chance. The anti-Zionism both of the Orthodox and of 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. As is the fact that the Holocaust, far from being why the War was fought, could not have happened if the German public had not been distracted by the War. As is the fact that the repression of the Arabs in Palestine, which drove some of them into support for Hitler but without which the Zionist project could never have been realised, was only made possible by the freeing up of British forces due to the signing over of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich. As is the fact that that driving of a Palestinian Muslim leader into the Nazi camp translated into his recruitment of Balkan Muslims for the SS, the origin of the movement that expressed itself in genocidal Bosniak separatism and which continues so to express itself in Kosovo, the Bosnia thus created having a constitutional ban on Jews and Gypsies becoming Senators or President.

And the impact of this on popular culture, not only in America but throughout the world, is almost impossible to overstate.