← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · triskelion
Thread ID: 10944 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-11-05
2003-11-05 21:50 | User Profile
The talk about the Matrix movies (none of which I have seen) prompted me to post an article about 3 films I have seen. QUite frankly, this is one of the best articles I have seen and I can't recomend it strongly enough if you have 15-20 minutes to read I really great piece.
Three Propaganda Films Compared:
Schindler's List,
Rosewood,
and Jud Süss
Propaganda is something that the American instinctively feels belongs to someone on the other side of the fence. The word conjures up visions of "Nazi propaganda" or "Communist propaganda." Depending on his political persuasion, the American will view propaganda in his own country as being either "extreme right-wing" or much less usually "extreme left-wing." Rarely does he consider that his newspaper, the films he sees in the cinema, the television programs he watches on T.V., are filled with their own propaganda that is aimed directly at him. Yet all these media, and Hollywood films most spectacularly, do have their propagandistic aims. Often a single film will contain several of them. These aims may be catalogued by examining the propagandistic points made in a given film, and then by working backwards, as it were, to find and articulate the director's propagandistic purposes.
In this article are examined three films: two recent Hollywood films, Schindler's List and Rosewood, and one that is normally considered the non plus ultra of propaganda movies--Jud Süss.
"But Rosewood and Schindler's List aren't propaganda," the protest will be heard. "What occurs in the films really happened."
It must be pointed out here that whether a given incident or series of incidents really happened or not is irrelevant as far as their use as propaganda is concerned. Jacques Ellul, in his well-known study Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, writes: "For a long time propagandists have recognized that lying must be avoided. 'In propaganda, truth pays off'--this formula has been increasingly accepted. Lenin proclaimed it. And alongside Hitler's statement on lying [Note: This statement was made when Hitler was commenting on British anti-German propaganda in WWI, not when he was referring to Nazi propaganda] one must place Goebbel's insistence that facts to be disseminated must be accurate." It is the use of a truth or true occurrence that makes it a component of propaganda. It is known that both Schindler's List and Rosewood are based on historical incidents; it is less well known that Jud Süss is also grounded in history: in 1733, the duke of Württemberg appointed Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the historical character on which the film is based, chief of all his financial affairs. After the duke's death in 1737, Süss was tried on charges of embezzlement and treason and sentenced to death.
Schindler's List
Briefly, the plot of Schindler's List--released by Universal Pictures; produced by Steven Spielberg, Gerald R. Molen, and Branko Lustig; directed by Steven Spielberg--concerns one Oscar Schindler, who starts off taking advantage of the Jews in Nazi-controlled Poland by first borrowing capital from them to start his business, an enamel works, then by employing them cheaply as workers in his factory. During the course of the film, Schindler is moved by the graphically-depicted suffering of the Jews. When he is faced with the prospect of losing his Jewish workers to Auschwitz and what is implied in the film as certain death, he sacrifices all his wealth and risks his life to keep them with him and to sabotage the German war effort.
A rather thin plot for a film of three hours and seventeen minutes. In fact, the film is a series of loosely-connected sequences in which Germans murder and otherwise maltreat Jews.
The Portrayal of Germans in the Film
In Schindler's List, the Germans--all of them soldiers and prison guards--are portrayed as debauched, cruel, and barbaric. The film makes no distinction between SS soldiers and members of the regular German army, the Wehrmacht. Indeed, such a distinction would only lessen the force of Spielberg's propagandistic thrusts.
The stigmatization of the Germans occurs throughout the film. In the cabaret and party scenes they are portrayed as piggish, swilling whoremasters. As they carouse, they sing in German a song that Americans know to these words:
We love to go a wandering along the Mountain track, And as we go, we love to sing, our knapsacks on our back.
This song of innocence, of love of nature, is in the film associated with depravity and mass murder. Here is one way in which Spielberg subtly implies that America, not merely Germany, bears guilt for the fate of the Jews in WWII, given that both countries share the same gentile, Western culture.
The German soldiers subject their helpless Jewish victims to every kind of depraved treatment, including of course murder. The Germans shoot Jews to death during the clearance of the Kracow ghetto, make them run naked through mud during a physical examination, and transport Jewish children off in trucks, presumably to their death.
The Germans laugh and joke as they murder Jews. The German soldier's main occupation seems to be pulling a Jew out of line and shooting him through the head. Indeed, this type of scene is repeated so often that one almost begins to suspect that Spielberg is caricaturing his own depiction of senseless murder. The soldiers have a devil-may-care-attitude as they throw the bodies of murdered Jews onto a huge pyre: they laugh, they howl--one even fires his pistol into the human bonfire, as if he were participating in some glorious celebration.
English in the film is the language spoken by the Jews, Schindler, and the German officers with whom Schindler speaks, while the German soldiers tend to speak German, barking their orders out like Sergeant Schultz in the 1970s T.V. series Hogan's Heros. The Polish language is heard in the film when a woman guard at Auschwitz--whose inmates are depicted as exclusively Jewish--tells her female charges that they are going into the disinfection-shower chamber.
Besides Schindler, the main German character in the film is Ammon Goeth, who is in charge of every anti-Jewish operation in the movie, as well as of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Spielberg chose to portray Goeth as the stereotypical weird German. Goeth has the same sort of stage German accent that Peter Sellers employs playing Dr. Zempf in Kubrick's Lolita. Moreover, Goeth lisps and is rather effeminate. Perhaps Spielberg based Goeth's characterization on his conception of the homosexual S.A. commander Ernest Rohm, purged by Hitler in the 1930s, for the director is making clear reference to the stereotypical image of the Nazi as homosexual sex pervert. Doubtless out of fear of offending the Hollywood homosexual establishment, Spielberg takes great pains to portray Goeth as a promiscuous heterosexual. Still, all the suggestions of debauched homosexuality are there: the lisp; the womanish, smooth, bloated features; the feminine vanity displayed by Goeth's continual gazing at himself in the mirror and by his having his servant girl manicure him; the distended belly resulting from constant carousing. Indeed, Goeth seems a kind of Nazi Oscar Wilde. The only thing missing is Goeth's attempted seduction of his servant boy--but imagine how homosexual Hollywood would have reacted to that scene!
Spielberg avoids stereotyping Goeth as a drug addict, like the treacherous singer in Rossellini's Open City, and the industrialist's perverted son in Visconti's The Damned. It would hardly have been accepted by Hollywood high society to see a heroin or cocaine user demonized by Spielberg as a Nazi, so the director wisely avoided what would nowadays be considered a politically-incorrect characterization.
At one point in the film, the viewer is treated to a scene of Goeth's shooting from the balcony of his villa with a hunting rifle the Jews in the concentration camp under his control. Though everyone else is wearing heavy clothing, Goeth is shirtless and with his suspenders hanging down looks like a British Army officer in some tropical colony. This seems to indicate another attempt by Spielberg to indict the West.
Western culture is again stigmatized in a scene in which, while the German soldiers are machine-gunning Jews in house in the Kracow ghetto, one of the soldiers finds time to dash off a piece on a piano. Two other soldiers stop at the door and look on wonderingly.
"Was ist das? Das ist Bach?" one asks the other. "Nein, nein! Mozart!" his comrade replies.
Here we have a reference to the cliché of Jews entering the gas chambers to the strains of a waltz. And by giving the soldiers a familiarity with and appreciation of two of the West's greatest composers, Spielberg is again making the point of the impossibility of detaching German anti-Jewish violence from its larger, Western context--unless Spielberg considers Bach and Mozart to be specifically German composers, rather than belonging to the larger Western musical culture.
Schindler's List does contain a Good German, of course: Oscar Schindler himself, the protagonist of the film. His succession of acts of kindness towards and his successful efforts to save the lives of his Jews throughout the film culminate in the sequence in which he bids farewell to them.
The war has just ended, and as he takes leave of his Jews, Schindler is in appreciation of his efforts on their behalf presented by them with a gold ring bearing a Talmudic saying in Hebrew: "Whoever saves one [Jewish?] life, saves the world entire." Greatly moved by this gift--which has been fashioned, by the way, out of the gold teeth of one of his Jews--Schindler starts to repeat "I could have got more [Jews] out!" and breaks into tears.
By this point, Schindler has spent his entire fortune in his efforts to keep his Jews with him and out of harm's way. He has even sabotaged the German war effort by producing defective shell casings, thus exposing himself to the charge of treason and consequent execution. Luckily for him, the war ends before his deception is found out.
Here we have a propagandistic point quite explicitly made: A Good German/Gentile is one who willingly forfeits his wealth and is ready to give his life so that Jews may live.
Schindler achieves the ultimate reward for his efforts to save Jews during the war: At the end of the film, the viewer is informed that in 1958, Oscar Schindler "was declared a righteous person by the council of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and invited to plant a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous."
The Portrayal of Poles in the Film
The Poles' reaction to the transport of the Jews from their homes to the Kracow ghetto is to throw filth at the line of dispossessed Jews. The Poles' attitude towards the Jews is summed up by a little Polish girl's shouting at them gleefully over and over, as they are pelted with filth, "Goodbye, Jews!"
A Polish child is also used to make another point. On the way to Auschwitz, a train full of Jews bound for a concentration camp passes some people in the fields. A little boy smiles at the Jews in the train while mimicking cutting his throat with his finger. This establishes again the anti-Semitism of the Poles, as well as Spielberg's perception that they knew of the gassings in the camps and delighted in such knowledge.
The Portrayal of Catholics in the Film
Another issue Spielberg deals with is the Catholic church's role in the National Socialist policy towards the Jews. There are two sequences involving a Catholic church. One is near the beginning of the film, when the viewer sees that the mass is used as a cover during which Jews can conduct business in church. The liturgy of the mass is heard, in Latin, to remind the viewer of the historic role of the Catholic church in persecuting the Jews. The second is near the end of the film, when Schindler approaches his wife as she participates, kneeling, in the celebration of the Mass. The unexplicitly-stated message here is that the Polish Catholics in particular and Catholics in general connived in the maltreatment and massacres of Jews by hypocritically continuing to attend mass and pray while they instead should have been out hiding Jews, protesting against their treatment, etc.
The Portrayal of Jews in the Film
The Jews in Schindler's List are invariably portrayed as innocent victims of German mayhem. There are no bad Jews in the film, no Jewish partisans, no Jews that make even a token resistance to the violence being visited on them. Like calves stumbling into the shambles, they go meekly to their doom. Even the character who plays the "kapo," which is a Jew who collaborated with the Germans in their mistreatment of Jews, is depicted as a well-meaning buffoon. Indeed, at one point in the film, a Jewish woman acquaintance of his tells him, "You look like a clown." That the kapos' treatment of their Jewish charges in the concentration camps has been historically documented as extremely inhumane is ignored by Spielberg.
Of course, to portray the kapos as they really were would have defeated one of Spielberg's purposes, which is to portray the Jews as tribally incapable of any wrong action against anyone, and therefore completely undeserving of being singled out by the Germans for mistreatment.
One propagandistic point regarding the Jews that Spielberg makes effectively is that all Jews are in the same boat: rich or poor, reform or orthodox, they are all Jews in the eyes of a menacing gentile world and all can suddenly face the same fate. A wealthy family of well-dressed, bourgeois Jews finds itself transported to the Kracow ghetto and living in a house with orthodox Jews in their traditional costume. This propagandistic point is made to reinforce the solidarity of Jewish viewers, especially so-called assimilated Jews, who might feel loyalty to whatever nation they happen to reside in, forgetting that the gentile world is waiting to pounce on them, assimilated or no.
The mistreatment of Jewish children is particularly focused on (as the mistreatment of black children is focused on in Rosewood; a full discussion of this crude albeit extremely effective propagandistic technique follows below). In the Kracow ghetto, in order to hide from the murderous Germans, Jewish children are forced to immerse themselves in the human excrement of a privy. (In this scene, Spielberg is quite possibly alluding to Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale, in which Jews murder a Christian boy and throw his body into "a wardrobe
ââ¬Â¦where as this Jewes purgen hire entraille.") In one scene in a concentration camp, Jewish children are separated from their parents and loaded onto trucks, presumably to be taken to the gas chambers. And Spielberg gives a nice propagandistic touch by having an armed German guard smile benevolently as he briefly caresses a small child on its way into what is meant to be the gas chamber at Auschwitz.
The Question of the Gas Chambers
Spielberg makes his argument against the holocaust revisionists in a scene set in a women's dormitory in a concentration camp. A woman starts a conversation with her fellow-inmates thus:
"The trains arrived and the people were driven out with clubs. They were lined up in front of two big warehouses. One was marked 'cloakroom' and the other 'valuables.' And there they were made to undress. A Jewish boy handed them pieces of string to tie their shoes together. They shaved their hair. They told them it was need to make something special for U-boat crews. And then they were herded down a big corridor to bunkers with Stars of David on the doors and signs that said 'Bath and Inhalation Room.' The SS gave them soap. They told them to breathe all the time because its good for disinfecting. And then they gassed them." Another woman comments: "You know, it's ridiculous. I cannot believe it." The story-teller answers: "I didn't say I believed it, I said I heard it." "From who?" "From somebody who heard it from somebody who was there." "You know, if they were there, they would have been gassed." Other women in the room contest the veracity of the account with comments such as:
"It doesn't make any sense. We're their work force. What sense does it make to kill your own work force? We're very, very important for them."
This conversation is Spielberg's attempt to present the holocaust revisionists' view on the gas chambers, that is, that they did not exist. Cleverly, he has Jews themselves doubting the existence of the chambers by saying, "It's ridiculous. I cannot believe it."
How does Spielberg answer this argument? He could have chosen to film a scene of the Jews actually being gassed in a gas chamber. Instead, he chooses to have them enter a shower room that the viewer assumes is a gas chamber but which turns out to be a shower room after all--much to the viewer's relief. Why not depict an actual gas chamber and its functioning? For one thing, no one has as yet come up with a working model of a gas chamber. Even the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. does not contain one. Any attempt by Spielberg to depict the insides of a gas chamber would have been picked apart on technical and documentary grounds. Therefore, Spielberg wisely chose to steer clear of this gaseous minefield.
For another thing, the suggestion of a thing can be much more powerful than its actual depiction. Spielberg manages to suggest the gas chamber by showing a long line of men, women, and children going into the entrance of what appears to be an air raid shelter. Above the chamber is a towering chimney, belching smoke. For viewers familiar with holocaust lore, long-line-of-Jews + entrance-to-bunker + chimney-belching-smoke = gas chamber.
Smoke, in fact, plays an important part in the imagery of Schindler's List. The film starts with a candle's being lit, then going out and smoking: the candle's smoke is segued by the smoke of a locomotive of a train bringing transported Jews to Krakow. And then, of course, there is the smoking chimney. This smoke imagery serves to remind the viewer of the six million Jews gone up in smoke, to whose memory the film is dedicated.
In his study of propaganda, Ellul states that "once the individual has been filled with and reshaped by propagandaââ¬Â¦the smallest dose now suffices. It is enough to 'refresh,' to give a 'booster shot,' to repaint, and the individual behaves in striking fashion--like certain drunks who become intoxicated on one glass of wine. The individual no longer offers any resistance to propaganda; moreover, he has ceased to believe in it consciously. He no longer attaches importance to what it says, to its proclaimed objectives, but he acts according to the proper stimuli.ââ¬Â¦The individual is arrested and crystalized with regard to his thinking."
Spielberg's suggestion of the gas chamber is a typical example of Ellul's "booster shot," and is much more powerful than showing an actual, working chamber on screen. The critics of Spielberg who say that he has had the imagination to filmically create everything but a gas chamber are wrong: he had the imagination--and the good sense--not to create one!
To the holocaust enthusiast, but not to the general viewer, the bunker-like structure is instantly recognizable as the celebrated gas chamber/crematorium building at Auschwitz.
In one scene in the film, Spielberg gets his Holocaust lore a little mixed up. The belongings of Jews who have just been loaded onto a train--presumably to a death camp--are being sorted by Jewish workers. A soldier empties onto the desk of one worker a large bagful of gold teeth. The worker is appalled but dare not show his feelings. According to holocaust lore, the gold teeth were extracted from the corpses of Jews after they were gassed. What is a bagful of gold teeth doing among the possessions of Jews who had packed their belongs presuming they were to be relocated? Did the German gas chamber attendants send the gold teeth of their gassed victims back to these victims' relatives?
Propagandistically, this mix-up is a serious flaw in the film, given that it suggests that Spielberg is just throwing together Holocaust clichés indiscriminately to create a kind of Holocaust tone poem, instead of making a film based on historical reality. However, the scene in which the incongruity occurs is rather short, and doubtless most viewers do not pick up on it.
The success of Schindler's List both as a propaganda film and as a creative work is severely compromised by its dejÃÂ -vu quality. It is a rehash of images from such Nazi/Holocaust-genre films as Open City, The Night Porter, The Damned, and Seven Beauties. The lack of plot is another problem, as is the lack of a creditable main character. Clearly, Chaplin's dictum, "Nothing transcends personality," was ignored by Spielberg when making this film. That Schindler's List should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, plus six other awards, illustrates how creatively bankrupt Hollywood has become.
Rosewood
Rosewood--released by Warner Brothers; produced by Jon Peters; directed by John Singleton--is "based on a true story," as the film's opening title tells us. It concerns the burning in 1923 of Rosewood, a black township in Florida, by residents of Sumner, a neighboring white township. In the opening sequence of the film, news comes to the sheriff of Sumner that a Negro has escaped from a chain gang. While making the rounds of the town to inform the inhabitants of the escape and to be on the lookout for the convict, the sheriff comes upon a white woman who tells him that she has been beaten by a black. The gossipy white townspeople soon turn the story of the beating into one of rape. What starts out as a search for the escaped convict/rapist soon degenerates into an orgy of shooting and of lynching blacks.
The Portrayal of White Men in the Film
The viewer is introduced to white depravity early in the film, in a scene in which a boy is hunting a wild boar in the woods near the town of Sumner with his father, Duke. Duke is the Archetypal Cracker or Redneck or Piece of Poor White Trash--a bearded, bloated ruffian who spends his time shooting and lynching blacks between gulps of bourbon.
When his son cannot shoot the boar, Duke takes the gun from him to do the deed himself. He scolds his son. "What are you, an Audubon fella? You a bird-watcher?" He tells his son that this will be the first boar the boy smokes himself. "You know what them Seminole Indians say? You don't? They say you only supposed to kill what you gonna eat. They say it's a sin if you don't. Ha! Damn Seminoles!"
After he has killed the boar, Duke then reproves his son for having a black friend: "I don't want you round with that colored boy no more. It don't look right, my boy trailing after a nigger." When the boy protests, the father slaps the back of his head.
Here, all packed into a few short minutes at the beginning of the film, Singleton establishes the equation that White Southerner = Practitioner of Cruelty to Animals = Anti-Ecologist = Racist = Child Abuser.
Duke seems to live on whiskey and nothing else. Later in the film, when asked what time it is, he takes from his pocket the watch of a Negro he has earlier murdered, scrutinizes it, and announces: "It's bourbon time!"
The undistinguished white men in the film, the residents of the town of Sumner, are a kind of Duke in the plural. In their hunt for the "nigger," they torture a black boy with a noose till he gives the name of another Negro, a blacksmith, who unwittingly helped the real perpetrator to escape. The smith is shot to death, then hanged. As the white mob pulls him up by the rope, they fire their guns into the air exultantly.
The next day, the circuit judge comes to the jail to examine the smith's body. "Multiple gunshot wounds, missing ears, finger, various other partsââ¬Â¦ Cause of death: mischief at hands unknown," is his judicial rendering of the facts.
These and the multitude of other such scenes in the film establish the savage brutality of whites.
The white men in the film are almost invariably depicted as porcine, drunken layabouts, in contrast to the blacks, who drink in the film only at a party on New Year's Eve, and who are usually seen working.
There is off-camera violence done to blacks as well. During a meal at Sylvester's house, we are informed that a colored man had been burned in another township the previous summer for winking at a white woman.
As reports of the violence spread across the land, whites from the surrounding areas join up to massacre the blacks. In a scene critical of the religious devotion of white Southerners, a group of whites is participating in a baptismal ceremony at a river, singing, appropriately enough, "Shall We Gather at the River."
When news of the violence is brought to the group of whites taking part in the baptismal ceremony, the men immediately start to load their guns, which the viewer assumes they always bring to a baptism. In one significant shot, a man fetches his gun from its resting place atop a Ku Klux Klan outfit. As the joyful anti-black hysteria builds, murderous white racists from all over the land gather at Sumner, one of whom waves the obligatory Confederate flag. There are the obligatory Ku Klux Klan members in their white hoods as well. As a twist, the Klan members carry not only the Confederate flag, but the American one also.
"Shall We Gather at the River" is a song sacred to many Americans. Indeed, National Review magazine, in its "100 Great Conservative Movies " issue, included in its list of chosen films the western My Darling Clementine, and singled out the sequence in which the settlers sing the hymn, commenting: "[Director] Ford's evocation of the church dance, accompanied by 'Shall We Gather at the River,' is a beautiful metaphor of civilization settling the wilderness." In Singleton's film, the metaphor is reversed: the hymn now symbolizes savagery destroying civilization.
By associating a sacred hymn like this, a quasi-national anthem, with the brutal, senseless murder of innocent men, women, and children, Singleton makes the propagandistic point that the murderous violence in the film does not appertain merely to a specific time, town, or state, but that it is as American as apple pie. Singleton makes a similar point by showing members of the lynch mob waving the American flag.
Scenes of grisly mayhem and torture follow in quick succession. In one of them, two blacks are hanging from nooses. The white townspeople are gathered round, as if at some wonderful celebration. One of the blacks is still alive and convulsing as he strangles to death. A white man cuts his ear off, then holds the gruesome trophy up to the exultant crowd.
In another scene, a group of white men have their picture taken in front of the charred corpse of a hanged black. The entire town of Rosewood is in flames. Black men and women seem to hang from every tree. Duke, the Archetypal Cracker, executes a black by shooting him though the head, Schindler's List style.
In a scene set on a country road, a truck arrives with a load of murdered blacks. They are dumped into a mass grave like so much garbage. Duke insists that his son view the grave. The boy starts to cry.
"Why you crying, boy?" his father asks him.
"There's babies in there."
Duke slaps his son, then tells him:
"Nigger's a nigger, boy."
There is a Good White in the film, Mr. Wright, the owner of a general store in Rosewood. However, he is not so good at the beginning of the film. (Like Schindler, he "grows.") A married man with two children, Mr. Wright is introduced to the viewer while the shopkeeper is in the process of copulating with his colored girl shop assistant. The only white man who lives (with his family) in Rosewood, Mr. Wright seems to stay there so he can take advantage of the black inhabitants of the town by selling them merchandise at inflated prices.
From the beginning, the shopkeeper disapproves of the violence towards the blacks, but his conversion to total rightness comes when the white mob, with Duke as its spokesman, nearly turn on the him for being a "nigger-lover." Henceforth Wright takes sides unequivocally with the blacks. His solidarity with them is made manifest when he gives Mr. Mann, the black hero of the story, some bullets for his empty revolver. Wright then arranges a rendezvous with a train in order to convey a group of black children hiding in the swamp to safety. The children flee towards the train through the swampy woods in a long sequence doubtless meant to be suggestive of Harriet Beecher Stowe's description of Eliza and her child crossing the Ohio River on the floating ice.
There is also in the film a group of Good Whites, from another township, who at gunpoint prevent part of the drunken lynch mob from driving into their town. "Turn around!" says the leader of the Good Whites. "You ain't bringing all this into our town. Our coloreds are law-abiding folk."
Duke's son must also be considered a Good-White-in-the-Making, given that at the end of the film, he rejects his father's cruelty and leaves his home and the man who sired him, saying to his father, "You're not a man."
The two white train engineers cannot really be considered Good Whites, since they are extremely reluctant to carry the black children out of the reach of the white mob--though they eventually do so--because the safety of their train is more important to them that the safety of the children.
The Portrayal of White Women in the Film
The casus belli of the Rosewood incident is the story invented by the white woman of her beating at the hands of the black. The creator of the fiction is Fanny, the town slut--an indolent, alcoholic tramp. While her husband is away, she entertains a friend. We find her stomach down, head on a pillow, squealing and grimacing while her lover works away behind her, in a scene surely intended to represent the sexual act contro natura. Her contorted face gradually takes on a look of beatific satisfaction. Thus does Singleton establish the sexual depravity of white women. When, after the love-making, she reprimands her lover for being unfaithful and strikes him, he responds by beating and kicking her severely, so that her half-naked body afterwards looks as if it had been used as a football field. Here we have established white male cruelty and brutality towards women.
It is the appropriately-named Fanny who starts the violence by running out into the street and crying for help. "A nigger! It was a nigger! He broke into my house, and he beat me up. It was a niiigger, it was!" The viewer is given to understand that she does this in order to give her husband some plausible, uncompromising explanation for her bruises. Though Fanny insists she was not raped, the gossipy white townspeople soon turn the story into one of carnal violence.
Fanny is not the only twisted white woman in the film. In the scene of the cutting off of a Negro's ear while he is choking to death at the end of a rope, a white mother--part of the onlooking, appreciative white crowd--reproves her small son for covering his eyes at the horror: "See the nigger? They got him. No, you got to look and see. You got to remember this. It's something you got to remember. Look!" This establishes that Southern women, though they did not actively participate in lynchings, were just as savage and bloodthirsty as their men. It also conveys the idea that white racism is taught by parent to child, which implies that an extra-familial authority (the federal government?) must take the place of white parents in the South if their children are not going to grow up murderous racists.
Just as there is a Good White Man in the film, there is also a Good White Woman--Mrs. Wright, the wife of the general store owner. When her husband hesitates, she insists on hiding in her house blacks fleeing from the white mob. When the shopkeeper is later absent, and the white mob wants to search her house for hidden Negroes, she challenges the whites with a shot gun and drives them off.
The Portrayal of Blacks in the Film
The black hero of the film is Mr. Mann, a taciturn, puissant WWI veteran who was not drafted, but enlisted. A stranger to Rosewood, he is immediately embraced lovingly by every black person in the town. He wants no trouble, but soon finds plenty of it, as he battles the berserk whites, survives a lynching, and saves the black children from being slaughtered.
Another important black character is Sylvester, a composer who seems to be patterned on Scott Joplin. The viewer meets him at the very beginning of the film, when he is seen sitting at his piano composing. He is the creative, intelligent, proud black, who stands in contrast to the inhabitants of the white township, none of whom are portrayed as artistic or intelligent--or even quite human, for that matter.
Then there is Sarah, a matriarchal black woman, who works for Fanny. Staunchly moral, she disapproves of the white folks' debauchery, which stands in contrast in the film to the blacks' sexual modesty and all-around decency. Sarah is at Fanny's house when the white whore is beaten, and the matriarch knows that the real perpetrator is white. But out of fear, she will not come forward with the true story. Her fears prove justified, as she is eventually shot dead by a member of the drunken white lynching mob when she finally tells them that the man they are searching for is white.
There is also a black school teacher, a young woman named Scrappy, who seems to fall in love with Mr. Mann the moment she lays eyes on him. Scrappy teaches her pupils by reading them a cute children's story. This is in contrast to how Mr. Wright teaches his sons, which is by reading them a violent cowboy story in which the threat of cutting off someone's ears is made.
As in Schindler's List, the mistreatment of children of the targeted minority group is focused on in Rosewood. The white mob, still searching for the escaped convict/rapist, attacks Sylvester's house while a child's birthday party is in progress. The whites pepper the house with bullets as the children cower under the dining room table. During a break in the shooting, the children manage to flee and hide in the swamp. The end sequence of the film is devoted to these children's attempts to flee to safety, as they and their guardians--who include Scrappy, Mr. Mann, and eventually the Good White, Mr. Wright--struggle to deliver them to the safety of a train that will convey them out of harm's way. Singleton makes it obvious that if the white lynch mob finds the children, the whites will massacre them. Indeed, the whites have already killed some children--"babies," as Duke's appalled son says--and thrown them into a mass grave. The genocidal nature of the whites' murder of black children is parallel to the Germans' transportation to their eventual extermination of Jewish children in Schindler's List. Indeed, Rosewood is a kind of black Schindler's List; both films form part of a recent Hollywood film type, which might be called the "White-Christian-
Genocide-of-Persecuted-Minorities" genre.
Near the end of the film, Singleton gives us the icing on the propagandistic cake. In the scene in which the mob is attempting to lynch Mr. Mann, the truth comes out: it seems that none of the white men believed the story of the "nigger" attacker; they all knew--some of them personally--how and with whom Fanny spent her afternoons. So the hunt for the putative escaped convict/racist was just an excuse for the whites to indulge in their favorite pastime: shooting and lynching black men, women, and children.
The film ends with the following advisory:
"The official death toll of the Rosewood massacre, according to the state of Florida, is either--two WHITES and six BLACKS. The survivors, a handful of whom are still alive today, place the number anywhere between 40 and 150, nearly all of them AFRICAN-AMERICAN."
Jud Süss: "The Most Controversial Picture of All Time"
Both Jud Süss and Schindler's List start with a Hebrew chant. But the story lines of the two films differ radically immediately after.
Since the film Jud Süss--directed by Veit Harlan--is unofficially banned in this country (don't look for it in Blockbuster's alongside of Schindler's List and Rosewood), a more detailed account of the German film's plot will be given here than has been given of the two recent American films.
Jud Süss opens in Stuttgart in 1733. A new duke has just come into power, and he wants to give a gift of jewels to his wife, who has now become the duchess. The duke's representative is sent to Süss to buy the jewels. In the street outside Süss' house, one Jewish onlooker explains to an inquisitive fellow-Jew: "Süss has to give money to the duke, so we can take, take, take!"
Here Harlan establishes how Jews insinuate themselves into gentile governments: by lending money to selfish rulers.
Süss--with sidelocks and beard, and sporting a skullcap and caftan--agrees to do business with the duke but gives as a condition that he must be permitted to enter Stuttgart, which is forbidden to Jews. "But even if you had a passport," the duke's representative protests, "you could never get into Stuttgart looking like that." "I'll take care of my appearance," Süss assures him. When the representative has left, Süss' assistant upbraids him: "What will the rabbi say if you shave and cut your curls?" "Don't you see?" says Süss. "I am opening up the way for us all. Soon we will all dress in silk and satin."
Here Harlan establishes the chameleon-like nature of the Jew--always ready to change his foreign appearance in order to infiltrate gentile society and institutions.
In the next scene, we see Süss shorn of his long locks and beard, dressed as any gentleman of the time would be, riding in a carriage toward Stuttgart. His carriage overturns, and he is given a lift by the pretty, innocent, German Dorthea, the daughter of one of the duke's honest ministers, Sturm. Dorthea is impressed by Süss' urbanity, and asks him where he has travelled. He tells her Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon.
"But where do you feel most at home?" she asks him.
"At home?" he quips with a mocking smile. "Everywhere."
"Don't you have a home?" she insists.
"Yes, the world," Süss answers.
The point had been made by the National Socialists that the Jews were behind an international communist conspiracy to destroy Western civilization, that Karl Marx himself had been Jewish. The propagandistic purpose of the above-mentioned scene is to establish that the Jews are loyal to no country, certainly not to Germany--that they do not feel any attachment to any of the host countries in which they reside. They are never French, British, Austrian, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese--but Jews.
Süss presents himself to the duke, a bloated, pampered, degraded field marshal, his days of military glory long over. Egocentric, debauched, the duke desires an opera company, a ballet company, and a personal corps of bodyguards. His ministers have refused him the first two; Süss offers to provide them, on credit. The duke--not too bright and extremely susceptible to flattery--accepts these and other services from Süss, till the ducal debt becomes astronomical. Süss offers to forgive the debt if the duke will give him the administration of all the roads in the kingdom. The duke agrees, and Süss, now become finance minister, proceeds to put heavy taxes on the roads. In consequence, the price of everything, especially food, which is of course transported to the town along the roads, goes up.
When a blacksmith refuses to "buy back" from the government a part of his house that overlaps onto the state road, Süss has that part of the house destroyed. Süss' carriage is subsequently mobbed by protesters as he passes by the destroyed house, and the finance minister orders his driver--who does not follow the order--to drive over the people blocking the way.
Thus does Harlan establish Jewish disregard for gentile life.
The smith attacks Süss' carriage with a sledgehammer, and Süss orders the man arrested for murder.
Süss organizes a "white slave market" for the duke, procuring him the youngest, most beautiful women in the duchy. The finance minister also convinces the duke to lift the ban on Jews in Stuttgart, to authorize that all Süss' actions be covered by the duke's authority, and to have the blacksmith hanged.
The Jews, portrayed as foreign-looking rabble, enter Stuttgart en masse, chanting in Hebrew. Süss by now controls the tax on everything. The townspeople are enraged. Members of the duke's council go to him to protest the admittance of the Jews, and quote Martin Luther to him:
"Set fire to their schools and synagogues, get rid of Talmudic teaching, forbid them to practice usuryââ¬Â¦"
The duke interrupts with the remark: "Fie on your Luther!"
The closest Jud Süss comes to having a Good Jew is in the character of the rabbi, who heads the synagogue to which Süss belongs, and who repeatedly tells the finance minister not to interfere in the affairs of the gentiles. The rabbi does let himself be manipulated by Süss, however. An astronomer and master of the occult, the rabbi is approached by Süss and asked to give some false astrological advice to the duke.
At first the rabbi demurs, but Süss manages to persuade him. Taking the astrological advice as a sign to dissolve his council, the duke does so, thereby strengthening the finance minister's authority, as Süss had planned.
The finance minister wishes to marry council member Sturm's daughter, Dorthea, but the father refuses and has his daughter married in a secret ceremony that very night to her true love, Faber. Süss then has Sturm arrested on the specious charge of treason against the duke.
When the townspeople protest Sturm's arrest, Süss tells the duke that mercenary soldiers must be brought in to put down the "rebellion." To get the money for the soldiers, Süss goes to his synagogue, where he asks the rabbi during a service to get the money from the congregation. The rabbi demurs once again, saying, "Will you make war against the gentiles?" but agrees when Süss convinces him that the security of the Jews in Stuttgart rests on the financial and military support of the duke. Harlan gives a nice propagandistic touch in the Süss-rabbi dialogue, when Süss lapses into Yiddish, pronouncing the German world for beautiful, "schöne," as "shayne."
The discordant Jewish chanting during the parading of the Torah in the temple service is contrasted with Sturm's daughter singing a plaintive German song in the scene that immediately follows.
"The Jews are financing our Duke's war against his own people," a council member remarks when he learns of Süss' successful mission to the synagogue.
Süss uses the protest against Sturm's arrest to persuade the duke that he must bring in the mercenaries immediately and proclaim himself Supreme Sovereign, like the king of France. So that the duke will not be compromised by personal involvement in the coup, the finance minister arranges that it take place while the duke is at the festival for the imperial court in Ludwigsburg.
Meanwhile Faber, seeking to forestall the coup, is arrested and tortured. His wife, Dorthea, appeals to Süss for her husband's release. The finance minister attempts to seduce her, encouraging her to give in to his advances by having her listen to the screams of her tortured husband.
She prays for deliverance. Süss says, "Praying? To your Christian God? The Jews also have a god, the god of revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
This short speech of Süss' is a reference to the stereotype of the Jew who is lacking in kindness, charity, and humanity. It reinforces the image of the Jewish god as a god of vengeance, as opposed to the Christian god, a god of love.
Süss forces Dorthea down onto his bed, which is adorned with a star of David, and the scene ends abruptly.
Faber is released, and goes looking for his wife. He finds that she has drowned herself. As he lays her corpse before Süss' door, the townspeople revolt, headed by von Roeder, one of the duke's old comrade-in-arms who in the film symbolizes the German landsmann's ingenuous loyalty to the Fatherland.
Von Roeder then forces the soldiers guarding one of the gates of the town to open it so that he may go to Ludwigsburg to petition the duke. One of Süss' German supporters is shot to death in an armed attempt to frustrate von Roeder's mission. "He was a good Jew lackey (Judenknecht)," one of the loyal Germans remarks ironically.
Here Harlan makes the point that Germans who betray their country by abetting Jewish intrigues will eventually meet an untimely end.
Knowing nothing of the revolt against him and the duke, Süss arrives in Ludwigsburg to await with the duke the arrival of the couriers both men expect will bring news of the successful coup. The duke has been drinking heavily and is complaining of heart problems. He calls for his favorite medicine: champagne.
To the astonishment of both the duke and Süss, von Roeder arrives with a petition from the people. He reminds the duke: "You are still under the [constitutional] oath you swore to the people of Württemburg. Do you want to keep this oath, or will the Jew turn you against your own people?"
In a fit of outrage, the duke draws his sword, then collapses dead on the ground. Süss is arrested.
In the dock, Süss' beard has grown back. He has once again become a Jew in appearance. He is found guilty of immorality, pandering, and high treason. Members of the blacksmith's guild, holding aloft the guild's symbol, delight in the verdict, and remind Süss of his responsibility for the blacksmith's execution.
While deliberating the sometime finance minister's sentence with the other councilors, Sturm calls their attention to a passage from an old book of German law: "When a Jew mingles his flesh with a Christian, he should be hanged."
A noose around his neck, Süss is hauled high over the gallows in a special iron cage. He screams, "I am innocent! I am just a poor Jew! Let me live!" just before the floor of the cage is pulled open.
After the execution, Sturm speaks for the entire council, reading from a decree: "'All the Jews must leave Württemburg in three days. They are banned from all Württemburg. Proclaimed in Stuttgart, February 4th, 1738.' May our descendents hold firmly to this law, so they can save themselves much sorrow, and save their goods and lives, and the blood of their children and their children's children."
Thus the film ends.
Interestingly, the director of Jud Süss chose to omit from his film an anti-Jewish propaganda element that would have completely demonized the Jews: the ritual murder accusation, which concerned the folkloristic tradition of Jews' sacrificing Christian children in order to use their blood to make the matzoh for Passover. There is in fact a reference to this practice in the eponymous novel by the Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger on which Jud Süss is based. In the book, a debauched German peddler named Kaspar Kieterle accidently beats his lover--a fifteen-year-old girl--to death, then blames the killing on a Jewish peddler, Jecheskel Seligman Freudenthal, with whom Kieterle had been in competition. He does this by making "incision here and there in the flesh" of the corpse, depositing it in the yard of the inn where Freudenthal is staying, then telling the story that the girl had disappeared after going to see the Jew, who had promised her a string of coral beads. "Horror upon horror!" writes Feuchtwanger. "An innocent Christian child murdered by the Jews, her blood drained for the Passover feast, her mangled corpse cast to the swine." Freudenthal is arrested and charged with murder.
It would have been easy enough for Harlan to change this story around. He had already taken a plot element from Feuchtwanger's book and transformed it to suit his propagandistic purposes: in Feuchtwanger's novel, Süss' young daughter (who is nonexistent in the film) commits suicide in order to forestall the lascivious intentions of the duke; in Harlan's film, Sturm's daughter commits suicide after she has been raped by Süss. Harlan could easily have taken the ritual murder plot element from the novel and twisted it so that, instead of being traduced, the Jewish peddler actually kills the German girl for her blood. After all, Julius Streicher had already dedicated a whole issue of his anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer to the ritual murder accusation. It would appear Harlan felt either that the German audience would have been alienated from his film's propaganda message by the inclusion of such a scene, or that he felt that to demonize the Jews in such a way was beyond the bounds of even wartime propaganda.
General Conclusions
It is clear from the analysis of these three films that if we take Jud Süss as a yardstick by which to measure the virulence of the racial propaganda film, Hollywood has surpassed the Nazis in this particular cinematographic genre. Schindler's List excites anti-Christian, anti-Western sentiment, just as Rosewood excites anti-white sentiment, far more than the relatively restrained Jud Süss excites anti-Jewish feeling.
One reason for this is that in the two American films, many Jews and blacks are murdered, while in the German film, there is no mass murder. But surely the fundamental difference between Jud Süss on the one hand, and Schindler's List and Rosewood on the other, is that Jud Süss belongs to the "closed" category of propaganda films, while the other two films belong to the "open" category of such films.
In Jud Süss, Süss himself is to blame for the misfortunes of the Germans; the other Jews are background characters, and seem as much manipulated by Süss as are the Germans. Specifically, the rabbi--the closest the film comes to portraying a Good Jew--seems more concerned with the spiritual life of his people than with Süss' machinations and realization of temporal wealth and social standing. (In this, the rabbi is close to the original characters in Feuchtwanger's novel that he seems to be based on: Issac Landauer, Court Treasurer to the Duchy of Württemberg, who continues to wear his Jewish dress even while working for the gentiles, and who is contemptuous of Süss' fashionable dress and social climbing in the gentile world; and Rabbi Gabriel, the mystic cabalist whose concerns are far removed from the temporal world.)
In Harlan's film, the villain is punished for his misdeeds. In fact, Süss' execution at the end of the film is portrayed as the just desserts for his having ordered the execution of the innocent blacksmith--even though Süss is not tried and put to death specifically for that crime. However, the viewer is left with the feeling that justice has been served. We are back to Aristotle's "purging of the emotions." The audience leaves the theater feeling that Süss has been properly punished; the viewers' hearts are at peace. They do not cry out for vengeance, for justice--because justice has been done on screen.
Thus is the film Jud Süss closed in the propagandistic sense.
The situation in Schindler's List and Rosewood is very different. In the former, the crimes of the Germans, the Poles, and the Catholics are portrayed brutally and bloodily, but none of these groups are punished for their misdeeds. True, in Schindler's List, concentration camp commander Goeth is hanged--immediately after intoning a rather pathetic "Heil Hitler"--but his execution hardly compensates for the enormity of the crimes committed against the Jewish people. Indeed, were the scene of the hanging of Goeth to be omitted, the film's cumulative effect would be no different. For in Schindler's List, it is the entire German people, the entire Polish people, the whole Catholic world, that is responsible for the mistreatment and murder of the Jews.
The film ends with Schindler's Jews heading for the Promised Land, Israel. But even as they escape their tormentors, these latter go unpunished. Spielberg could have included in the film a scene in which the concentration camp guards were executed by the victorious Allied forces, as actually happened in the camps. He chose not to, because such execution would have implied that justice had to some extent been done, and so made the film propagandistically closed rather than open. Spielberg desires to leave the audience with the feeling that justice has not yet been served, that the Germans, Poles, and Catholics--indeed, that the entire Christian West--have yet to pay for their iniquity.
Thus is the film Schindler's List open in the propagandistic sense.
Again, in Rosewood, though the viewer is informed at the end of the film that the state of Florida has recently granted compensation to the survivors of the lynching bee and to their descendants, the white perpetrators in the film have gone unpunished. White people in general, white Southerners more particularly, and white Southern Christians most particularly, got away with their crimes against black humanity, and none of the mob's leaders paid the price. Duke, the Archetypal Cracker, lives on. A brace of white men are killed, but what does this matter compared to the 40 to 150 blacks who, as we are informed at the end of the film, were really killed in the lynching bee, despite the official toll of two whites and six blacks dead?
At the end of Rosewood, the viewer is left with the feeling that justice has not been served, that the tortured, murdered Negroes of 1920s Rosewood cry out for blood, and will rest uneasy in their graves until their murders are avenged.
Thus is the film Rosewood open in the propagandistic sense.
As regards inciting the target audience to violent action, the open propaganda film is infinitely superior to the closed one: watching the open film, the viewer--if he empathizes with its victims--is left at the film's end with the feeling that he himself must consummate in real life the film's quest for justice and retribution.
The closed film incites to violence to a much lesser degree, inasmuch as in such a film, justice has been done on screen, so the viewer is not moved to action.
One way in which the Spielberg and Singleton films are superior to their National Socialist counterpart is the way in which they portray the Good German or the Good White, and ostensibly dedicate the film to him. The publicity for Rosewood proclaims: "In 1923, a black town in Florida was burned to the ground, its people murdered because of a lie. Some escaped and survived because of the courage and compassion of a few extraordinary people. This film is for them." The video cassette jacket of Schindler's List describes the film thus: "It is the triumph of one man [that is, Schindler] who made a difference, and the drama of those who survived one of the darkest chapters in human history because of what he did." Jud Süss cannot be said to have a bona fide Good Jew, because although the rabbi--the closest the film comes to a Good Jew--is uneasy with Süss' machinations against the gentiles, he does nothing actively to frustrate Süss' efforts.
Spielberg would have us believe that his film was made to honor the German Christian who saves the Jews on his list, just as Singleton would have us believe that his film honors the white shopkeeper who risks his life to save Negro children. By including a Good German in Schindler's List and some Good Whites in Rosewood, Spielberg and Singleton respectively seek to fend off the charge of their having produced films that epitomize the cinema of racial hatred.
But in fact, the viewer of Schindler's List is left with a feeling of horror and outrage at the crimes perpetrated against the Jews by the Germans and their cohorts; Schindler's efforts are but a drop in the ocean of gentile malevolence towards Jews. Indeed, it would almost seem that Spielberg has taken to heart Elie Wiesel's exhortation to World Jewry: "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate--healthy, virile hate--for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."
The viewer of Rosewood is left with an even greater feeling of horror and outrage at the crimes perpetrated against the blacks by the whites, because the black victims are not only murdered, but tortured as well; Mr. Wright's efforts, along with those of the film's other Good Whites, are made insignificant by the broad, innate hatred of the mass of whites and their murderous violence towards Negroes.
A rather crude device that Hollywood makes use of in its two propaganda films, which the German director Harlan avoided, is the Mistreatment of Children technique. In Schindler's List, we have gentile inhumanity towards Jewish children; in Rosewood, we have white inhumanity towards black children. For even though some people might think that hatred of Jews and blacks is justified by the behavior of these two groups, the hatred and murder of children can never be justified. They cannot be held responsible for their parents' sins. The vast majority of viewers find abhorrent the mistreatment of children--any children, regardless of their color or race. Spielberg and Singleton play on this repugnance quite deftly.
As does the persuasive essay, the propaganda film normally finishes with an explicit or implied Call to Action. The Call to Action of Jud Süss has already been mentioned: the film seeks to solidify German support for the expulsion of the country's Jewish population.
What is the Call to Action of Schindler's List? Were America still at war with Germany, the film's propangandistic purpose would be to rally the American people's support for the war by depicting German atrocities. But World War II has been over for some fifty years, and we must look to our present decade, and not the 1940s, in order to divine Spielberg's intention.
The film's Call to Action is suggested by its final sequence, in which Schindler's Jews march off to the state of Israel. This implies that the way for Western Christians to atone for the murder of Jews during WWII is to support the state of Israel, where the survivors on Schindler's list and their descendents live, and where Schindler himself is buried. This is an important propagandistic point for Spielberg to make, given that the U.S. provides Israel with billions of dollars of aid annually.
It is also possible that the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, many of them born and raised in the United States, have interpreted the message of Schindler's List as being a mandate for their expropriation and murder of their gentile neighbors. These Jews might see their anti-gentile violence as being not merely justified but obligatory, a duty that must be fulfilled towards those Jews who were not on Schindler's List. This is a Call to Action that Spielberg would surely deny he intended.
The Call to Action of Rosewood is suggested by its title, at the end of the film, which states that "in 1993ââ¬Â¦the Florida House of Representative granted reparations to the Rosewood families": Blacks must demand from whites compensation for historical wrongs. This could take the form of federally disbursed reparations to blacks to make up for anything from slavery to segregation. Compensation could also take its present form, Affirmative Action, that is, the preferential treatment of blacks in all public and private enterprises.
There exists the possibility, which Singleton would surely disavow, that Rosewood's Call to Action is a call for blacks to murder whites. It is certainly probable that a black viewer, after watching Rosewood, would be filled with rage against whites. The presence in real life of any of the film's elements associated with murderous white racism--such as a Confederate or American flag, a Southern accent, the singing of a Christian hymn by whites--might be enough to stimulate a black into anti-white violence, especially considering that American blacks are bombarded daily though the media with anti-white propaganda.
One last way in which our Hollywood propagandists of today have outdone their Nazi counterparts is this: Hollywood has succeeded in making those whom it stigmatizes with its propaganda believe in their own culpability. Although Jews have protested against Jud Süss since its first release, and continue to do so, very few Germans, Poles, or Catholics have protested against Schindler's List, as have very few whites protested against Rosewood. Hollywood has nurtured in the Christian West a collective sense of guilt vis-à-vis a whole host of peoples, a sense of guilt that continues to be fed by such Hollywood films as those examined here. The fact that Hollywood has no trouble finding white, gentile actors to act in films that demonize whites and gentiles is proof of this. In contrast, one could hardly imagine Jewish actors lining up to be cast as Israeli soldiers massacring the men, women, and children of Deir Yassin; just as it would be impossible to find black actors willing to be cast as Nat Turner and his cohorts butchering white women and children during Turner's celebrated "revolt."
Hollywood's success in making the groups stigmatized by its propaganda eager to luxuriate in their own demonization has made Nazi propaganda techniques anachronistic.
END
é 1998 by Kevin Beary
2003-11-08 01:32 | User Profile
triskelion,
A great article. I think I have seen it before.
2003-11-08 03:20 | User Profile
Thanks for your input. The author used to have a really great site about the mainsream media and it's critics but I don't know what happened to it. I think the reviews are some of the best writen material on the subjects covered i've ever seen. Hopefully, some coverage will be given to the matters raised.