Zusammenarbeit

nazi flag

“Two weeks after Kristallnacht, Gary Cooper made a publicity trip to Berlin promoting Paramount’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, one of Hitler’s favorite movies. No major newspaper in the U.S. covered that. In 1938, MGM helped finance the production of German armaments, and the head of MGM Germany divorced his Jewish wife at the Nazi’s behest. She ended up in a concentration camp.” — Annapurna Tosca Sriramarcel, a member of the Oxman Collective

While under Jewish ownership, the New York Times — its journalism expressly devoted to the public good, as per their masthead — published 23,000 front page stories from 1939 to 1945, and only 26 of them of them reported anything on the Holocaust. Let me put that another way. Only twenty-six out of twenty-three thousand.

There’s no other way of taking that news, though. And the thrust of what they did back then, they’re doing today (NOT providing “all the news that’s fit to print”), along with ALL the mainstream media outlets, their first cousins in crime.

Throughout the 1930s, Hollywood studios — many of them operated by Jews — agreed not to make films attacking the Nazis or condemning their persecution of the Jews, in order to continue doing business in Germany after Hitler’s ascent. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. But the big question is — since similar sins of omission are still going on — what we’re going to do about that ugly dynamic.

Actually, you could say there’s more than one dynamic operating here, yes?

MGM, Paramount and 20th Century Fox, three studios that kept making money in Germany through the early 1940s very definitely collaborated with the Nazis by certain standards. But there’s no need to argue about the word collaboration or to dig deeply into all the nooks and crannies that one could explore that have to do with complicity.

The bottom line — even though Zusammenarbeit (Collaboration) was the term used repeatedly by the studios and their Nazi interlocutors — is the sinuous durability of the profit motive. And rather than debate the nuances of this or that historic blending, bending or bothering fact, I submit that we must act together to do something about the worst excesses of present day capitalist horror. At the very least.

I’ll be glad to tell you what I think they are, upon request, but it’s worth noting here and now that movies and newspapers, as a rule, only edify the public accidentally, and the ethics of entertainment (an umbrella under which “news” can be placed these days, for the most part) are always situational.

As William C. DeMille (brother of the famous director) put it, all too prematurely, upon the release of (the very tame) Confessions of a Nazi Spy: “With all hope of profit gone, we can, at last, become properly indignant.”

The Flannery O’Connor Academy is comprised of home schooled teens, for the most part, studying with members of the Oxman Collective*. They write anonymously and exclusively for Countercurrents (CC). They can be reached at [email protected]. The author believes it’s important to underscore that there are far too many films focusing on the Holocaust of the past in lieu of spotlighting present day holocausts which are imposed on the world courtesy of the U.S. And that those abominations are ignored by the mainstream U.S. media.

*All members write exclusively for CC.

 

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