Tagged: WWII

Little Johnny Jewel

In Re the film “Exodus”: there’s no need for any artist to respond to the mewling of the critics and their Stakhanovite insistence on “realism.”

In Re the film “Unbroken”: Japanese nationalists charging someone else with racism is a case of pot calling the kettle, dancing with the kettle, making love with the kettle.

In Re Janet Suzman: No one ever mistook an actor for an intellectual.

Nobility and heroism are inappropriate to describe wars (the actions of individuals are another matter; e.g., the Scholls were heroic and noble). Rather, wars should be judged according to the criterion of moral necessity. WWI — the war to save Empires — was morally unnecessary. WII — the global response to global fascism — was morally necessary.

Pole sloths are the worst part of living in NYC.

Phony

WWII was the only “good war” of the twentieth-century. On the American side, these films sustain the myth of the “greatest generation” of Americans, who weathered the Great Depression, won WWII (singlehandedly), and built a mighty post-war economy. That this same greatest generation also defended racial segregation in the bloodiest of fashions, staged coups around the globe, and violated civil liberties at home (from McCarthy to Hoover) goes without comment.

The most apt films in the WWII genre are the ironic ones, like The Mouse That Roared or Kelly’s Heroes.

Numerology went out of fashion around 1588 CE.

Catcher in the Rye is the greatest post-war American novel.

Even Time Warner rebuffed Rupert Murdoch. He’s toxic.

Sophie Scholl

Unknown

The old Deutsches Historisches Museum in the former East Berlin had an exhibit which proclaimed that the Communist Party had defeated fascism. It also had an exhibit depicting class struggle in the Neolithic Age.

A few neo-fascist German historians tried to muster a positive view of Germany’s role in WWII by extolling the battle on the eastern front as a noble struggle against “Bolshevism.” This led to the Historikerstreit among right-wing and critical intellectuals in the late 1980s.

Connie Sachs: It was a good time back then.
George Smiley: It was a war, Connie.
Connie Sachs: A war we could be proud of.