(THE SCENE: WTFN’s Los Angeles studios. The TV set is bedecked with posters and other Oscar accoutrements. Host Lance Boyle is sitting in his usual club chair. The opening theme music dies down as does the audience applause.)
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“It can’t be a coincidence that the same themes get recycled, as if time has stood still for studios to reinforce anachronistic stereotypes. One of this year’s nominees, The Imitation Game, tells the story of Alan Turing, the pioneering computer scientist whose work in cryptanalysis helped the Allies decode intercepted German messages. There’s no reason that this excellent film shouldn't have been made but just how many WWII-era films are audiences supposed to sit through? How long are people expected to return to this era’s black-and-white moral universe and think that the “Germans-are-the-enemy” schtick has any contemporary relevance? WWII ended 70 years ago, yet for Hollywood it is just yesterday.
“Is Hollywood little more than a creatively bankrupt propaganda factory propping up the dying myth of Western moral and political superiority? To discuss this and other Oscar-related matters is WTFN’s own Miriam Kale! (Camera pulls back to reveal a two shot. Audience applause.) Welcome Miriam!”
MIRIAM KALE: “Hello, Lance. That was quite the prologue! It’s a lot to consider.”
BOYLE: “So, do you agree that Hollywood is in the business of indoctrination rather than entertainment?”
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BOYLE: “I understand that when it came out it was banned in many theatres, caused riots in Boston and Philadelphia and helped revive the popularity of the Klan.”
KALE: “That’s true, which shows just how much influence movies can have on the public’s attitudes.”
BOYLE: “Let’s move forward to World War II and how movies of this era influence the public today. What was your impression of The Imitation Game?”
KALE: “I liked it, and it’s my pick for Best Picture. It is, as you said, a WWII-era film that has all the requisite moral stereotypes, including anti-homosexuality, but I do not put this in the same category as gratuitous fare like The Monuments Men. The Imitation Game is a human story about someone most people have never heard of but should.”
BOYLE: “Is there a danger that audiences will tire of movies that preach an outdated morality featuring enemies and heroes that no longer exist?”
KALE: “Sadly, no. Audiences are far less discriminating about historical movies than they should be, but the idea of revisiting a moral universe where the U.S. is a hero not an oppressor cannot be underestimated. But more than that, Hollywood will continue to churn out these movies—good, bad or indifferent—because that is its function.”
BOYLE: “Are there no critical war movies being made?”
KALE: “The last one I can recall is Avatar. Despite its great writing and special effects it lost out to the inferior The Hurt Locker on what I can only surmise was for political and/or sexual reasons. Although both movies depicted the horrors of war, the message in each was different. In Avatar, James Cameron delivered a sublime attack on the U.S.’s imperial insanity in the Middle East, whereas Kathryn Bigelow gave us a manipulative pro-war movie by showing how soldiers are damaged by the war in Iraq. Avatar was designed to make people question the mass murder of people for the sake of a natural resource; The Hurt Locker made us feel sympathy for the aggressors, thereby forcing us to identify with the morality of their mission. Contemporary ‘war movies’ now preach the gospel of anti-terrorism, as defined by Israel and the U.S.”
BOYLE: “On that note perhaps this is a good time to discuss your pick for the Leni, which is, after all, rooted in the WWII era.”
KALE: “Good idea, Lance. As the audience knows, the Leni Riefenstahl Award is given to the movie that best depicts holocaust propaganda. The academy created a separate category for holocaust movies some years ago because of the sheer number of such films and the disproportionate attention they receive at Oscar time.
“This year, I have boiled it down to two possible winners. The first is The German Doctor, film by Lucia Puenzo, who also wrote the screenplay and the novel on which it is based. Set in 1960 Argentina, this work of fiction tells the story of a chance meeting between a young girl and a mysterious doctor at a gas station. The doctor turns out to be Josef Mengele, the Nazi concentration camp doctor, who proceeds to perform growth experiments on the girl. Puenzo, daughter of Argentinian filmmaker Luis Puenzo, wanted to focus not on Auschwitz but on the girl’s family and the experiments.”
BOYLE: “What did you think of it?”
KALE: “Preposterous and a waste of time. Audiences do not need yet another Mengele movie especially a pointless fictitious contrivance. The numbers proved it. The opening U.S. box office weekend was all of $34,259. The film cost $2 million. This was clearly an experiment that failed.”
BOYLE: “So, which film won?”
KALE: “The other one.”
BOYLE: “I would never have guessed. ”
KALE: “Open the envelope and see.” (She hands him the now familiar Oscar envelope. He opens it along the seal, and shows it to the camera.)
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BOYLE: “The winner is Walking with the Enemy, directed by Mark Schmidt. What’s it about? Although, I can probably guess from the title and the poster.”
KALE: “This film, based on a true story towards the end of the war in German occupied Hungary, flogs all the right clichés for good Holocaust® propaganda: it features historical characters, moralizes with a sledge hammer and views history selectively through a Jewish prism. The movie is inspired by the story of one Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum, a Hungarian Jew who poses as an SS officer so that he can discover what happened to his family and rescue other Jews. In addition to turgid narrative and cringeworthy dialogue, the film is also an insult to history.”
BOYLE: “How does a film with a historical base insult history?”
KALE: “The first clue is that it is ‘inspired’ by a true story. In plain English this means a kernel of fact is smothered under a pile of Hollywood schlock. Second, Schmidt misrepresents the relationship between Nazis and Jews. Although many Hungarian Jews were deliberately killed in the last few months of the war, and we are shown the obligatory scenes of Jews being herded into railcars for the concentration camps, one crucial factor is omitted.”
BOYLE: “That is?”
KALE: “The ruthless murder of Hungary’s Jews would not have been possible without zionist collaboration. The most notorious Jew to collaborate with the Nazis was the Hungarian Rudolf Kastner, who, as a major leader of the Hungary’s Jewish Agency Rescue Committee, betrayed hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Nazis in exchange for safe passage of a few hundred, mostly his own family members. According to Adolph Eichmann, who was responsible for the trains that took Jews to the death camps—the same trains we see in Walking with the Enemy—Kastner put no value on Jewish life. Here’s Eichmann in his own words, as published by Life magazine:
Dr. Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel.… As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the S.S. and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders. . . . I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal… ‘You can have the others,’ he would say, ‘but let me have this group here.’ And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews. . . . That was the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ I had with Kastner.” (cited in Ben Hecht, Perfidy. p. 231)
BOYLE: “Wasn’t there a famous trial about Kastner?”
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“Audiences are far less discriminating about historical movies than they should be, but the idea of revisiting a moral universe where the U.S. is a hero not an oppressor cannot be underestimated.” Miriam Kale | ||
Greenwald has proven beyond any reasonable doubt this grave charge.... I shall not touch here upon all the many contradictions —endless in number —in which Kastner contradicts himself in connection with this affidavit. It is enough for us that a Jewish man, an ex-Zionist leader, dared to recommend [mercy], almost in the name of the whole Jewish people, for one of the major sharks of the German war criminals before the authorities who detained him, and to cause, alone or together with others, the release and evasion of punishment of this great criminal.
“Ben Hecht’s book Perfidy, has the judges’ findings and the whole sordid history of the Kastner case. Unfortunately, the verdict was overturned in the Israeli Supreme Court, but it was a purely political decision based on tortured rationalizations of Kastner’s conduct. The truth could not be allowed to stand, because it would have exposed Israel’s creators to be Nazi collaborators.
“Walking With the Enemy did not tell an honest story about what happened to Hungary’s Jews because that was not its purpose, so Mark Schmidt rightly deserves the Leni although his film is not up to the standard of The Reader.”
BOYLE: “Didn’t Walking With the Enemy have serious production problems? It was supposed to be released in 2012 but had to be pushed back to 2013, and then finally to April 2014. I also read that Ben Kingsley was added after the movie was completed!”
KALE: “Yes, indeed. He was cast in the role of Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s pro-Nazi regent who was opposed to anti-Jewish persecution. The reshoot caused continuity problems and choppy editing. Not even the beatific countenance of Sir Ben could save this disaster.
BOYLE: “Yet it was still released as if its producers didn't care how bad it was.”
KALE: “Remember, Lance, Holocaust® films don’t have to be good, although it helps. They just have to get made to sustain the zionist mythology. As long as they are made, there will always be a Leni winner!”
BOYLE: “Is this why you think World War II is still alive in Hollywood?”
KALE: “To a large extent that has been the case, but we also have to remember that more than ever the U.S. has to milk this period for all it’s worth. Today, the moral compass of the era has completely switched polarity: The erstwhile allies have become the new fascists doing to the Middle East and Muslims what the German fascists did to Europe and the Jews. The U.S. needs to recycle its historical image because that image is now little more than a second-hand zionist projection of deliberate human cruelty.”
BOYLE: “Is the investment paying off? Given all the time and money that goes into staging these films, I have to think producers are taking a bath.”
KALE: “Walking with the Enemy had a budget of $80 million and took in $370,000 during its opening weekend. That virtually makes it a straight-to-DVD embarrassment. The irony is that the more that Hollywood flogs the cult of Jewish victimhood, the more that audiences will refuse to worship at the altar of Holocaustianity.”
BOYLE: “Any last words before we break for commercial?”
KALE: “Given the rise of a police state in what used to be a republic, I think it’s time to come full circle and make a film called Death of a Nation. It could be based on a book called The Lobby: A Historical Romance of Zionism in America.
BOYLE: “It would indeed be fitting. Thanks as always for your insights, Miriam. (to camera) We’ll be right back.”
(Theme music and fade out)
