Victory of Faith

Assumed lost, this film now on DVD

MS TRADING, PO BOX 1021, COVENTRY, ENGLAND, CV1 5ZX
Cheques for £25.00 should be made payable to R. JOHNSTON
 

15 September 2003

The sickness that is gripping the apartheid, Zionist, racist 

State of Israel has its wellspring in the 'Holocaust' belief.

This pathological condition leads to a brutalisation of 

human endeavour, and the Palestinians are at the receiving

end of this inhuman treatment, see following photo.

Amazingly, there are 'defenders of the Holocaust  faith' who

cannot reflect upon their own perversions when they evaluate

another human's endeavour - and so they project their abject

selves as saviours, and abuse those that have worthy attributes,

 as has Leni Riefenstahl.

Zionist Terrorism unchecked

What are Palestinians to do - sit down and die, or resist, and live?

A Zionist occupation soldier aims his assault rifle
at a Palestinian child!

French Ambassador to England Daniel Bernard 

Have you ever heard of a SECULAR Christian or Moslem?

Yet, what is a SECULAR Jew?

Leni Riefenstahl: Hitler's beauty was a beast

By LYNN CROSBIE
Globe and Mail
Saturday, Sep. 13, 2003

The last time I wrote about photographer and film
director Leni Riefenstahl -- who died this week at the
age of 101 -- I received a flurry of e-mails, the
majority of which were cranky corrections of my
misrepresentation of her film Reichsparteitag. I also
received a hand-written letter from an elderly man, in
beautiful cursive script, that began with the salvo:
"What's with all the Hitler bashing these days?"

The letter proceeded to detail Hitler's great
contributions to Germany, and, predictably, played
down the Holocaust with the kind of specious reasoning
that has allowed grievous imbeciles worldwide to
continue to revise history toward the promulgation of
still more vicious anti-Semitism, of more paranoid
constructions about who, precisely, constitutes the
root of any given idiot's kampf.

I liked this letter, ultimately, because it best
captured the essence of Riefenstahl, who was,
essentially, history's most dangerous dumb blonde.

In an interview conducted fairly recently, Riefenstahl
discussed her controversial Nazi documentaries, with
knuckle-dragging defiance: "I cannot apologize . . .
for having made the film Triumph of the Will," she
stated. "It won the top prize."

This 1934 film, which documents Hitler's Nuremberg
Rally, was highly praised in its time, by Hitler
particularly, who commissioned Riefenstahl at her
request. While the filmmaker always pleaded ignorance
regarding Hitler's grotesque and fanatical prejudices,
it was she who volunteered her services, after a 1932
rally. By 1932, Hitler's anti-Semitism was explicit,
available, and, effectively, the basis of the National
Socialist Party's program. Almost 10 years before
Riefenstahl pledged her support to Hitler, he
inquired, in his prison memoir: "Was there any form of
filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life,
without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut
even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like
a maggot in a rotting body, . . . a kike!"

Riefenstahl's protestations of obliviousness were
always mendacious: She was photographed in such
amiable postures with Hitler, many believed she was
his lover; she used Gypsy concentration-camp inmates
as extras in Tiefland; and she filmed Triumph of the
Will, a masterpiece of propaganda that views the Third
Reich and its abscess-Fuhrer with the same vacant,
awed gaze she would bring to her examinations of
majestic sea creatures and Nubian tribesmen.

Throughout Riefenstahl's life, critics have debated
the merit of her work in conjunction with its content,
and are generally stymied. While it is possible, if
not necessary, to separate the artist and his or her
work, it is not possible to separate technique and
text, and those who have tried to do so are as
hoodwinked as the German public who devoured Triumph
of the Will and Olympia as heraldic evidence of the
righteousness of the Nazi cause.

No one ever evokes the architecture of Albert Speer as
exemplary, and in spite of his once-eager membership
in the Nazi Party, Speer himself would spend the rest
of his postwar life in penitence, asserting that while
he did not know what was going on around him, he
should have.

As a human being, Riefenstahl was beneath contempt,
and her film work needs to be recast, not as
inviolable instances of art, but as documents that
have historical value, and nothing more.

Like the original punk artists who wore swastikas -- a
fashion detail not one of them has ever accounted for
-- Riefenstahl fans, like Speer, should also know
better.

The kind of radical chic that plagued the 1970s, and
introduced an ironical ennui to popular culture, still
colours our ability to distinguish, for fear of
lacking a liberal sensibility, right from wrong. When
Ray Müller's 1993 documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible
Life of Leni Riefenstahl, debuted, Vanity Fair
published a particularly vulgar shot of the ancient
femme fatale lying in a field of daisies, and this
fatuously daring shot only confirmed that photography
and film are not merely representational, but loaded
with information about the artist's intentions.

The imagination as deployed in art, as Dionne Brand
once noted, is not sacrosanct. Art should never
persuade us that it is a de facto Reichstag,
impenetrable, impervious to our objections, our
strongest concerns.

In The Godfather, one of the capos remarks to Michael
Corleone, a Second World War veteran, that "they
should have stopped Hitler in Munich. They never
should have let him get away with that." Riefenstahl
got away with it for the better part of a century as
we sat back and fought for the blamelessness of art:
We should be direly ashamed.

Walter Mueller responds:

Dear Editor,

It took me a while to eliminate all the vulgarities I
had in mind when writing this letter. I am the
publisher of a newspaper in Northern California. I
have never seen such a hateful piece in my life. The
author should see a psychiatrist, because with that
much hate, the author must be a sociopath. Even if one
considers her bias against the Third Reich era, one
cannot deny the incredible work that Ms. Riefenstahl
has done. She received so many awards, way after the
war, that it is unbelievable to me to see that piece
that ran in your paper. She even received the Emmy
Award in the US. Her biography was a bestseller here
in the US. People like Francis Ford Coppola were
amongst her admirers. It doesn't matter how one feels
about that short time Ms. Riefenstahl was commissioned
by the leaders of the Third Reich. Her lifetime work,
whether or not your braindamaged author likes it or
not, will be remembered forever. She was a pioneer in
photography, cinematography and documentary filming.
In 1956, just for the author's information, Leni
Riefenstahl's movie "Olympia" was still listed amongst
the ten best in the world by the United States Film
Academy.

As a publisher, one of my rules is that I will not
allow my writers to use racial slurs, calls for
violence and the denigration of any ethnic group. Your
author has done so and even slurred women, who so
happened to be blonde. I am amazed that Globe and Mail
lets itself be dragged down into the gutter by
untalented writers like this, who have an ego as big
as the Zeppelin and a serious inferiority complex when
dealing with other women.

Below is the essay that ran in my publication. It is
similar to what was printed in The Sacramento Bee and
other major California newspapers. You are the only
newspaper that has allowed a writer full of hatred, to
spew his bigotry on your pages.

Walter F. Mueller
"The truth is back in business"

==============

PS: I urge you to also drop them a letter, because its the
right thing to do. Here is the e-mail address:

letters@ GlobeAndMail.ca  

The right to voice strong views
An American newspaper recently labelled the Observer Judeophobic. It is not.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Saturday September 13 2003
The Guardian

When Israel was born in 1948, David Ben Gurion said
that the Jewish people had become 'like other
nations'. That was the great dream of  Zionism,
intended by Theodor Herzl to 'answer the Jewish
question', to 'normalise' the Jews so that they could
become as obscure as the Danes or the Dutch; a nation
like all others.

The outcome is painfully clear every time you switch
on the television or open a newspaper, where that tiny
patch of territory called the Holy Land is covered at
more length than all of Africa or India. So far from
obscure, this Jewish state is surrounded by bitter
argument and recrimination.

Last week, the  International Herald Tribune published
an article by Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski under the
headline 'Crossing the line from criticism to
bigotry'. The writers went further than the familiar
accusation against western news media - even against
the  New York Times - of hostile bias towards Israel.

They claimed that Judeophobia, 'hatred or fear of
Jews', had 'infected elements of the British news
media', and that  The  Observer was 'a serial offender
when it comes to bigotry against Jews'. That is a very
serious accusation indeed, and would be devastating if
true.

Several pieces were adduced as evidence. One was a
verse by Tom Paulin, published in February 2001,
describing the 'Zionist SS' killing 'little
Palestinian   boys', the other was a recent column by
Richard Ingrams in which he said that when he saw
letters in the paper about Israel his practice was 'to
look at the signature to see if the writer has a
Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it'.

Personally, I thought both effusions grotesque
(perhaps the most offensive word in Paulin's offering
was 'poem'; has the Trades Descriptions Act no
literary application?) and if either had been an
expression of editorial policy, this paper would stand
condemned. But there must be a presumption in favour
of freedom of expression and variety of opinion, even
if it's easier to suppress everything unseemly or
outrageous in the interests of good taste, or a quiet
life.

An intemperate and vulgar press is always better than
a licensed or self-censored press. The American
journalist Michael Kinsley, a Jewish liberal, has said
how much he admires the London papers (even Ingrams's
Private Eye, with what Kosmin and Iganski call its
long history 'of sarcasm and vitriol vis-a-vis the
Jews') by comparison with journalism in the US,
'paralysed by gentility'.

It is certainly arguable that reporters covering the
conflict in the Holy Land hunt in a pack, just as they
did in Ulster and the Balkans, as the self-appointed
friends of Israel say (Israelis themselves, in my
experience, are less thin-skinned, echoing the
Millwall fans: 'Everybody hates us, we don't care.')

But does  The  Observer have a tradition of 'bigotry
against Jews'? Over the years this paper has been a
by-word for supporting progressive causes, fighting
racism, and employing Jewish writers (to the late Lady
Pamela Berry,  The  Observer was 'a lot of central
Europeans writing about a lot of central Africans')
and for long it echoed the fondness once
felt for Israel on the liberal Left. Twenty years ago
when Conor Cruise O'Brien was editor-in-chief and a
scintillating columnist, he used The  Observer as a
platform for his passionate Zionism.

Everyone knows that the Left and Israel have fallen
out of love, for reasons it would take a book to
explain. But can the alienation of so many former
emotional Zionists simply be ascribed to 'hatred or
fear of Jews'? For Kosmin and Iganski, who have edited
a book called  A new Anti-Semitism?, it evidently can.
They distinguish this new species from
'old Nazi-style anti-Semitism', but they could have
looked further back than that.

Zionism was born in response to the seeming failure of
Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Herzl published
The Jewish State in 1896 amid a tide rising throughout
Europe, a new species of racist Jew-hatred from the
France of the Dreyfus Affair to the Vienna of Dr
Lueger.

What Kosmin and Iganski call the new Judeophobia is
indeed nothing like the anti-Semitism of the
Anti-Dreyfusards. It is entirely to do with the Jewish
state of which Herzl dreamt. It relates not to the
causes of Zionism but to its consequences. That is the
problem. If criticism of Israel, however brutal or
unfair, is construed as anti-Semitism, then this must
represent a grave failure for Zionism. No one cries
'racist' at the fiercest critics of Ireland or
Pakistan. Why is Israel different?

Other British Jews have talked of their pain and
estrangement in the face of mounting hostility towards
Israel. This was precisely what the Jewish critics of
Zionism once foresaw. David Alexander and Claude
Montefiore, respectively President of the Board of
Deputies of British Jews and President of the
Anglo-Jewish Association, wrote in the  Times in
1917, shortly before - and in the unfulfilled hope of
forestalling - the Balfour Declaration which favoured
'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for
the Jewish people'.

The idea, they wrote, of investing the Jews with
'rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the
population' of Palestine was deplorable. It would
'prove a veritable calamity for the Jewish people',
for whom, wherever they lived, the principle of equal
rights was vital. To create 'a Jewish nationality in
Palestine ... must have the effect
throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers
in their native lands, and of undermining their
hard-won position as citizens and nationals of
those lands'. Their words sometimes look very
prescient.

In other words, a Jewish state might not 'answer the
"Jewish question"', but rather complicate it.

Whatever else is said about Israel, it quite obviously
is not a nation like all others, or these very
controversies would not be taking place. And although
Kosmin and Iganski may not realise it, they come close
to confirming that old foreboding that a Jewish state
would compromise the position of western Jews in their
own countries.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers

To see this story with its related links on the The
Observer site, go
to http://www.observer.co.uk

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