[quote]Ken Kaniff wrote:
The result is that even today some germans internationally face prejudices and in some cases even discrimination because of something that happened in their country long before they were born, which is a monument of the stupidity of some people. [/quote]
It seems even Austrians are targeted.
But don’t go naming any names, they might get all ad hominem on your ass.
[quote]pat wrote:
lixy wrote:
Charlemagne wrote:
Then I got to thinking. How come there are no movies about these genocides? I would like for somebody to make a movie about these atrocities. I am sure there are some amazing stories out there that happened during these periods.
One word: Lobby.
When any of the other groups achieve some sort of prominence in Hollywood, we may begin to see more movies about Pinochet, Mao and the others. For now, The memory of the Holocaust will be hammered in people’s heads lest they ask questions about the Zionist state.
Because everybody knows the holocaust didn’t happen! It’s just a Jewish conspiracy!
Do you support the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews? You certainly seem to hate the jews quite a bit. What has a Jew ever done to you?
What you said is horseshit. While the other events were even more tragic, the sheer baberism of the holocaust and the purposeful genocide of an entire people burns it into memory. Also, we had full access to the scope of the tragedy and a means to study in depth, something we didn’t have with the other events. It is also intrinsically tied to a rather significant event in history called World War 2. Americans were one othe ones who discovered the concentration camps, so it ties in with our history very closely.
You add the fact that it was around 12 million people who were kill for just being who they were. 6 million were Jews, about 4 million were Catholic , and 2 million were miscellaneous folks, like gays.
You can shove you Jewish conspiracy crap. [/quote]
So the deaths of hundreds of millions of Chinese, Ukrainians, Russsians, Cambodians is not worth making a movie out of? I simply stated that there are alot of Holocaust movies but no other movies on these other atrocities. Is a Jewish person’s life worth more than these people’s?
[quote]Professor X wrote:
Uncle Gabby wrote:
Mao’s henchmen didn’t make lampshades out of human skin.
Please go into more detail about this. This is one I hadn’t heard.[/quote]
It’s kind of loathesome trying to find good information on the net, especially about a topic like the holocaust which is plagued by deniers, and people with agendas. Apparently, the story of the lampshade came from a film Billy Wilder made about Buchenwald, and that is probably where I saw it.
According to this website a lampshade from a Holocaust museum that was purported to be made of human skin was tested, and turned out to be goatskin. But the lampshade from the Billy Wilder film, which as I recall had a tatoo on it, has never been found.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040604.html
At any rate, I’m not familiar with the website I linked too, but it seemed the most knowledgeable and unbiased of the search results I found. As with all information gleaned from the internet, I would take it with a grain of salt.
Somebody already beat me to the link.
As far as my statement about starvation goes, I do believe much of it was intentional, especially Stalin’s eradication of the Kulaks. But I think it is wrong to overlook the utter incompetence of Stalin and Mao’s regimes.
I’m not downplaying the crimes of socialism. Nation wide, long term political oppression coupled with extreme acts of violence just doesn’t capture the imagination like a full scale industrial mobilization for the purpose of the complete extermination of entire races.
[quote]Ken Kaniff wrote:
I was sitting in the theater this weekend watching previews of movies coming up. The movie “Defiance” was one of them. The movie is about Jewish brothers saving Jews from extermination in Poland/Bylorusssia during WW2.
As I sat there I got to thinking. How many movies/shows have there been made about the Holocaust or have some type of reference to it. “Schlinders List”, “The Pianist”, "Uprising’, “Escape from Sobibor”, “Band of Brothers”, “Sophie’s Choice”, “Sunshine”, “Life is Beautiful”, etc.
In one of my classes we were exploring the rise of Communist nations and the absolutely brutal conditions that those living in them faced. In Russia there was something like 12-14 million people who died as a result of Stalin’s 5 year plans. In China it was even worse, with Mao killing something like 30-40 million. Pol Pot killed something like 2-3 million. We watched some short documentary video on the subject.
Then I got to thinking. How come there are no movies about these genocides? I would like for somebody to make a movie about these atrocities. I am sure there are some amazing stories out there that happened during these periods.
Ive been wondering since a long time why the holocaust, despite not being the only/first/last/biggest genocide in history, is the genocide that 99,99% of all media attention in the western world is focused on.
The result of that obsession is that some people arent even aware the thereve been other genocides. The result is that even today some germans internationally face prejudices and in some cases even discrimination because of something that happened in their country long before they were born, which is a monument of the stupidity of some people.
Most ironically that proves exactly where racism comes from, which is people buying negative suggestions about a group of people they know nothing about.
[/quote]
This is very true. People in America can name some obscure SS officer but wouldn’t be able to name one classical German author, poet, artist.
[quote]Charlemagne wrote:
This is very true. People in America can name some obscure SS officer but wouldn’t be able to name one classical German author, poet, artist. [/quote]
Not true. Everyone knows who Beethoven is, even if they don’t know he was German. The vast majority of people are also familiar with the works of Brecht, even if they have never heard his name.
[quote]Charlemagne wrote:
Then I got to thinking. How come there are no movies about these genocides? I would like for somebody to make a movie about these atrocities. I am sure there are some amazing stories out there that happened during these periods. [/quote]
The film industry and the individuals that make it up - Hollywood, for shorthand - are and have since the early 20th century been attracted to left-wing politics, and radical politics in particular. Hollywood was, of course, one of the main avenues for American Communists during the heyday of American Communism generally.
Modern Hollywooders have no interest in exploring the atrocities of political movements that are so close to home. Even though Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon, in addition to its class-warfare component, it had a race-warfare component, and the racism of the Nazis is easy to distinguish it from other radical political movements, at least at first glance. That makes it an easy target to highlight its horrors - it is, in the minds of those sympathetic to radical politics, the low hanging fruit of condemnation, because racism is just plain odious, whereas hating the oppressive “rich” can be contextualized (so they think).
So at the core, Hollywooders don’t want to open the door to ideologies it gets awfully near or is at least sympathetic to. It starts an argument about left-wing (not necessarily liberal) politics that they’d just rather not have.
That Nazism gets all the attention because of its uniqueness is a historical misunderstanding, of course - Hitler’s views on “the Jewry” were practically copied-and-pasted from Marx - and it is a great lie that Nazism and Communism were quite different. But for now, Hollywood and its monied backers prefer to keep quiet about the horrors of radical left-wing politics of the 20th century - else they may have to answer some hard questions about their modern ideologies.
[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
Charlemagne wrote:
This is very true. People in America can name some obscure SS officer but wouldn’t be able to name one classical German author, poet, artist.
Not true. Everyone knows who Beethoven is, even if they don’t know he was German. The vast majority of people are also familiar with the works of Brecht, even if they have never heard his name. [/quote]
You just proved my point. They don’t know they were German. But mention Reinhard Heydrich, Amon Goth, Himmler, Hans Frank and you can bet that they will know that they were German. In America there is a real sense of German=Evil. And why wouldn’t there be? In many, many movies, novels, and video games the bad guys are German. It is drilled into our heads from the time we are young. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be any movies depicting germans as bad guys. Of course there should be, the Nazi’s were despicable. but it seems like whenever Hollywood needs a good bad guy there is always the old reliable German.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Charlemagne wrote:
Then I got to thinking. How come there are no movies about these genocides? I would like for somebody to make a movie about these atrocities. I am sure there are some amazing stories out there that happened during these periods.
The film industry and the individuals that make it up - Hollywood, for shorthand - are and have since the early 20th century been attracted to left-wing politics, and radical politics in particular. Hollywood was, of course, one of the main avenues for American Communists during the heyday of American Communism generally. [/quote]
I don’t know whether to burst out in laughter or to cry at the thought of one of a very knowledgeable person when it comes to American politics still buying into such myths that are straight out of McCarthy’s handbook.
[quote]Charlemagne wrote:
You just proved my point. They don’t know they were German. But mention Reinhard Heydrich, Amon Goth, Himmler, Hans Frank and you can bet that they will know that they were German. In America there is a real sense of German=Evil. And why wouldn’t there be? In many, many movies, novels, and video games the bad guys are German. It is drilled into our heads from the time we are young. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be any movies depicting germans as bad guys. Of course there should be, the Nazi’s were despicable. but it seems like whenever Hollywood needs a good bad guy there is always the old reliable German.[/quote]
Two generations of Americans spent their youths fighting the Hun, what do you expect?
Actually, most Americans can’t find germany on a map, and think WWII was fought between Benjamin Franklin and Christopher Columbus for the control of Vietnam. If they are smart enought to know who Himmler is, they are smart enough to know who Beethoven is.
From an entertainment point of view, the Nazis were just more interesting. Better flags, better uniforms, cool fucking superweapons like rockets and jet planes, even the German language sounds more sinister. Film producers also tend to imitate what has been successful in the past. Someone makes a movie about the holocaust, it makes a lot of money and wins a lot of awards, then that makes it all the more likely that someone will make a movie about the holocaust in the near future. Even if there were a dozen holocaust movies that were flops, when a producer is making his pitch he will still point to the one or two successful films as examples of the kind of money a holocaust movie can make.
People like to see complex conspiracies, but most decisions are based on profit and a lack of original thinking.
Er… I’ve seen more Communist atrocity movies than I have Holocaust movies… though I suppose that has more to do with me avoiding Holocaust movies like the plague.
But yes, there are more Jews than former USSR citizens in America, hence we get more Holocaust movies. Just like we have more Westerns than we have Chinese epics (that aren’t imported).
It has to do with the market for such movies, not a conspiracy. Holocaust movies win oscars and make money, movies about Communist Russia won’t pull in as much at the box office, simple as that.
[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
Charlemagne wrote:
You just proved my point. They don’t know they were German. But mention Reinhard Heydrich, Amon Goth, Himmler, Hans Frank and you can bet that they will know that they were German. In America there is a real sense of German=Evil. And why wouldn’t there be? In many, many movies, novels, and video games the bad guys are German. It is drilled into our heads from the time we are young. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be any movies depicting germans as bad guys. Of course there should be, the Nazi’s were despicable. but it seems like whenever Hollywood needs a good bad guy there is always the old reliable German.
Two generations of Americans spent their youths fighting the Hun, what do you expect?
Actually, most Americans can’t find germany on a map, and think WWII was fought between Benjamin Franklin and Christopher Columbus for the control of Vietnam. If they are smart enought to know who Himmler is, they are smart enough to know who Beethoven is.
From an entertainment point of view, the Nazis were just more interesting. Better flags, better uniforms, cool fucking superweapons like rockets and jet planes, even the German language sounds more sinister. Film producers also tend to imitate what has been successful in the past. Someone makes a movie about the holocaust, it makes a lot of money and wins a lot of awards, then that makes it all the more likely that someone will make a movie about the holocaust in the near future. Even if there were a dozen holocaust movies that were flops, when a producer is making his pitch he will still point to the one or two successful films as examples of the kind of money a holocaust movie can make.
People like to see complex conspiracies, but most decisions are based on profit and a lack of original thinking. [/quote]
Agreed. Money is the bottom line. Anyone using this occurrence to make it seem like liberals are to blame is just as insane as the far left wackos they seem to despise so much.
[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
That’s sums it up pretty well. I would add that most of the victims of Stalin and Mao died of starvation, which was the side effect of their incompetent management of the economy. [/quote]
Good post, but millions of people who were isolated and starved on purpose in the Ukraine, many more were herded off the death camps in Siberia. Mao’s henchmen also did their share of killing.
While millions did die by incompetent economic policies, millions more were deliberately murdered.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
Uncle Gabby wrote:
Charlemagne wrote:
You just proved my point. They don’t know they were German. But mention Reinhard Heydrich, Amon Goth, Himmler, Hans Frank and you can bet that they will know that they were German. In America there is a real sense of German=Evil. And why wouldn’t there be? In many, many movies, novels, and video games the bad guys are German. It is drilled into our heads from the time we are young. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be any movies depicting germans as bad guys. Of course there should be, the Nazi’s were despicable. but it seems like whenever Hollywood needs a good bad guy there is always the old reliable German.
Two generations of Americans spent their youths fighting the Hun, what do you expect?
Actually, most Americans can’t find germany on a map, and think WWII was fought between Benjamin Franklin and Christopher Columbus for the control of Vietnam. If they are smart enought to know who Himmler is, they are smart enough to know who Beethoven is.
From an entertainment point of view, the Nazis were just more interesting. Better flags, better uniforms, cool fucking superweapons like rockets and jet planes, even the German language sounds more sinister. Film producers also tend to imitate what has been successful in the past. Someone makes a movie about the holocaust, it makes a lot of money and wins a lot of awards, then that makes it all the more likely that someone will make a movie about the holocaust in the near future. Even if there were a dozen holocaust movies that were flops, when a producer is making his pitch he will still point to the one or two successful films as examples of the kind of money a holocaust movie can make.
People like to see complex conspiracies, but most decisions are based on profit and a lack of original thinking.
Agreed. Money is the bottom line. Anyone using this occurrence to make it seem like liberals are to blame is just as insane as the far left wackos they seem to despise so much.[/quote]
I do not see it as a conspiracy, I do think however that the mindset of a person telling a story influences the story.
How many people regard National Socialism as a “right” movement when they clearly stated they were a socialist workers party? How many people know hat fascism started as a workers movement, which is why calling military dictatorships “fascist” is nonsense?
How many movies were made about the Nazis taking the guns away from the German citizens and how effective the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was, with just a few stolen guns?
The Holocaust is used by all kinds of people to tell all kinds of stories and the kind of stories NOT told about it are as important as the ones that are told.
It does not take an agenda, people blinded by ideology are enough.
[quote]lixy wrote:
I don’t know whether to burst out in laughter or to cry at the thought of one of a very knowledgeable person when it comes to American politics still buying into such myths that are straight out of McCarthy’s handbook.
[/quote]
Not surprising you whiffed the point - the existence of a Hollywood “black list” is ipso facto evidence of the presence of left-wing radicalism in film circles. After McCarthyism - starting in the 1960s - Hollywood began to get comfortable and less admonition for its attachment to political radicalism.
The Hollywood “black list” doesn’t help whatever point you were trying to make - the New Left expressly stated that it wanted to affect mainstream culture by taking over academia and the arts. Nothing new there, even with McCarthy’s overreach. The only thing the era of McCarthyism teaches us is that there was a time when we were much less tolerant of Communist activities and sympathies, not that there weren’t any Communist activities and sympathies.
This would be a lot more fun if you actually got smarter over time. How many years have you posted here now, only to get worse over time?
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Charlemagne wrote:
Then I got to thinking. How come there are no movies about these genocides? I would like for somebody to make a movie about these atrocities. I am sure there are some amazing stories out there that happened during these periods.
The film industry and the individuals that make it up - Hollywood, for shorthand - are and have since the early 20th century been attracted to left-wing politics, and radical politics in particular. Hollywood was, of course, one of the main avenues for American Communists during the heyday of American Communism generally.
Modern Hollywooders have no interest in exploring the atrocities of political movements that are so close to home. Even though Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon, in addition to its class-warfare component, it had a race-warfare component, and the racism of the Nazis is easy to distinguish it from other radical political movements, at least at first glance. That makes it an easy target to highlight its horrors - it is, in the minds of those sympathetic to radical politics, the low hanging fruit of condemnation, because racism is just plain odious, whereas hating the oppressive “rich” can be contextualized (so they think).
So at the core, Hollywooders don’t want to open the door to ideologies it gets awfully near or is at least sympathetic to. It starts an argument about left-wing (not necessarily liberal) politics that they’d just rather not have.
That Nazism gets all the attention because of its uniqueness is a historical misunderstanding, of course - Hitler’s views on “the Jewry” were practically copied-and-pasted from Marx - and it is a great lie that Nazism and Communism were quite different. But for now, Hollywood and its monied backers prefer to keep quiet about the horrors of radical left-wing politics of the 20th century - else they may have to answer some hard questions about their modern ideologies.
[/quote]
Exactly. Said twice as elegantly as I could too. I had a teacher who wore Che Guevarra earrings. She always talked about her sweet Che and such. I had to debate another one in a panel on Iraq. Given the opportunity, this hateful liberal would have guys like me marching off to the death camps in no time. Remember too that it was a liberal that rounded up a quarter million Americans with yellow skin and threw them in internment camps.
Now, in today’s USSA we don’t see much about those Americans put in internment camps do we? Hollywood cranks out movies such as “The Motorcycle Diaries”, but never do you hear about those hundreds of thousands dead that you can blame on Che Why? The answer is simple: as we move further and further to a socialist nation, those in power don’t want you to know that [i]the only way socialism will work is if they kill those of us who get out of line[/i]. Not to bring guns into it like I always do, but why do you think liberals champion gun control? It’s harder to kill off an armed populace. Thank you very much but I’d rather keep my republic.
mike
[quote]Professor X wrote:
Agreed. Money is the bottom line. Anyone using this occurrence to make it seem like liberals are to blame is just as insane as the far left wackos they seem to despise so much.[/quote]
Utter nonsense - look at the number of antiwar movies that have been cranked out since 2003 that have flopped in terms of receipts.
Hollywood loves politics, and loves to make political films. Unfortunately, those political films are always one-sided, and the desire to produce them is not driven by the opportunity to make money.
Hollywood - generally speaking - has no interest in producing a political movie that fits outside a left-wing narrative. Left-wing types generally like to whistle past the horrors of Communism, preferring not to answer hard questions about radical politics - that is why you will see Che Guevara t-shirts, but not Eichmann t-shirts. It is not much of a secret.
If you aren’t aware of this, just chalk it up to yet another area you aren’t particularly informed of.
[quote]Charlemagne wrote:
You just proved my point. They don’t know they were German. But mention Reinhard Heydrich, Amon Goth, Himmler, Hans Frank and you can bet that they will know that they were German. [/quote]
Yeah, but that’s got nothing to do with any Nazi connection. Throw out Billy McDaniel and Tommy McDrunk and I’ll know they’re Irish. Give me Ahmed Saladin or Osama Jihad and I’ll know they’re muslim. How about Shaneequa Johnson? Black. Peace Williams? Hippie. Jaque Lafluer? French. Don’t assume that because you can tell that they’re German names that people automatically know they’re Nazis.
mike
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Professor X wrote:
Agreed. Money is the bottom line. Anyone using this occurrence to make it seem like liberals are to blame is just as insane as the far left wackos they seem to despise so much.
Utter nonsense - look at the number of antiwar movies that have been cranked out since 2003 that have flopped in terms of receipts.
Hollywood loves politics, and loves to make political films. Unfortunately, those political films are always one-sided, and the desire to produce them is not driven by the opportunity to make money.
Hollywood - generally speaking - has no interest in producing a political movie that fits outside a left-wing narrative. Left-wing types generally like to whistle past the horrors of Communism, preferring not to answer hard questions about radical politics - that is why you will see Che Guevara t-shirts, but not Eichmann t-shirts. It is not much of a secret.
If you aren’t aware of this, just chalk it up to yet another area you aren’t particularly informed of.[/quote]
I think your conspiracy theory point of view on this is no more out of line than what you criticize many others for when it comes to this country as a whole. I think you can chalk up the types of movies made to what the general public is willing to PAY FOR way more than some attempt by liberals to control all media.
I agree with the other poster when it comes to “where the hell are the movies about Asians being thrown into camps here in America”, but I can also see the other side that so many are against any notion that America is faulted from a historical standpoint. This is why there has been almost no media story telling of issues like the Tuskegee experiments in movies either. Do you blame that on liberals as well?
We hear from many extreme conservatives any time a movie is even made where an American soldier is represented as the villain, yet you turn around and blame liberals when a movie isn’t made about Asians thrown into camps here in America.
Your point of view is the same that cries “liberal media” only when it suits you but ignores that same media any time it presents a view point you agree with.
The truth is much more likely in the middle than either extreme, regardless of what you think you know from your omniconscious perspective that you truly believes puts you so far above me.
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
Uncle Gabby wrote:
That’s sums it up pretty well. I would add that most of the victims of Stalin and Mao died of starvation, which was the side effect of their incompetent management of the economy.
Good post, but millions of people who were isolated and starved on purpose in the Ukraine, many more were herded off the death camps in Siberia. Mao’s henchmen also did their share of killing.
While millions did die by incompetent economic policies, millions more were deliberately murdered.
[/quote]
Yes, I mentioned those in one of my other posts. One of the interesting things about the war on the Eastern Front is how the germans were greeted in Ukraine and elsewhere as liberators. Peasants would come out to touch the black crosses on the vehicles of the crusaders against godless communism. The poor bastards were quickly disillusioned by Nazi brutality.