Sunday, July 25, 2010
Dare I use the "AS" word? This via Harry's Place (with commentary worth clicking through to), Norm Geras brings us news of the views of Oliver Stone from behind the UK Times pay wall. With apologies to Norm, like Harry's I'm lifting Norm's post in full: Stone for a brain
There's an interview with Oliver Stone in today's Sunday Times, and therefore behind the paywall. Those of you without a sub will just have to take my word for it that he comes across as a not very likeable sort of chap; and my impression is that this is also the impression of his interviewer Camilla Long, although I may be wrong about that. Oliver Stone doesn't seem like a man I would want to count among my friends.
Despite this, I will put such personal impressions and inclinations to one side, and try to judge him in a detached way on the basis of his quoted words. And on this basis I would say that his opinions are contemptible and brutish. Here are just two or three of them:
He describes America's attitude to Iran as "horrible". "Iran isn't necessarily the good guy" - his incongruously dark eyebrows shoot up - "but we don't know the full story!"
Ahhh, those hidden facts which might throw a different light on the repression of Iranian oppositionists, on the rapes and the tortures.
The 10-part documentary [which Stone is planning] will address Stalin and Hitler "in context", he says. "Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support."
He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m."
Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? "The Jewish domination of the media," he says. "There's a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years."
No one who has taken any close interest in the history of the Second World War could be unfamiliar with the extent of Russian suffering and death under German occupation. So 'more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people' is a purely apologetic trope, since at that level of human catastrophe the insistence on maintaining a sense of proportion about five to six million Jewish dead is a plain attempt to diminish. And what follows that is then standard anti-Semitism: the Jews control the media and they work hard at it; and this is what accounts for the focus on the Holocaust (rather than any features of the genocide itself).
As I said, and without regard to Stone's personal qualities: contemptible and brutish. (Thanks: DH.)
The bit about Iran was loathsome but unsurprising -- we know Stone is a fool, a leftist (again, with apologies both to Norm and to Harry's, both of whom -- which? -- consider themselves "of the left"), a conspiracy theorist and a moral reprobate -- I'm just not sure I was aware of the depths he was plumbing. I think that the most disturbing part is not what it says about Stone, an individual, but what it exposes about the truth of a certain growing sector of the left that now feels sufficiently confident to speak in this way without shame or discomfort.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Oliver Stone: Not Big on American Jews.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.solomonia.com/cgi-bin/mt4/mt-renamedtb.cgi/18387
Yeah, yeah, he didn't mean it. Look, the guy was free of Zionist domination talking to a European news outlet and figured he could let it flow without fear of Judea-retribution (clearly he's seen Inglourious Basterds). He never counted on... Read More
This is set to roll out with Supporting Teaching Materials set, for educating the children of the United States.
Coming to a K-12 school near you.
You can't use the AS word because, don't you know, nobody is AS. They are anti Zionist (as if they understand what that means) or they are anti-Israel, but none of them are AS. And if you attack them for their ignorance, you are not exercising your right of free speech you are part of the Israel Lobby or the Jewish Lobby, when they let their guard down.
we know Stone is a fool, a leftist (again, with apologies both to Norm and to Harry's, both of whom -- which? -- consider themselves "of the left"),
Call them Liberal if you wish and Stone a Progressive to make some distinction between the confusion of adjectives now distorted into clichés.
Um, what's antisemitic about saying that one particular group of people control a body that is mostly positive (i.e. the media) and that they are hard workers, too?
I'd say Mr. Stone gives Jews quite a lot of credit... perhaps more than "they" or any other minority deserve, but certainly not negative.
Perhaps it's time you use the old "AS" term less readily, and in a less reactionary fashion. It could be potentially damaging Mr. Stone and whoever else you are so happily inclined to brand with that label.
anonymoose, I suggest you limit your liberal tossing of the "racist" label to everyone who opposes your pro-islamofascist, pro-[national]-socialist agenda.
Uh yeah...Oliver Stone outright says that Jews control the media and have been f**king up American foreign policy but anonymaus thinks this should be taken as a compliment. Good one.
An oldie but goodie.
AJC: “Oliver Stone has Outed Himself as an Anti-Semite”
http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=2818289&ct=8540509¬oc=1
An all too typical reductio ad absurdum - one that fails to be recognized as such.
Otoh, how can anyone be surprised by this in the least given Stone's similarly unwitting reductio as applied in an anti-American, anti-Western, etc. vein? It perfectly fits a certain prominent and almost ubiquitous pattern from the Left:
No matter the absurdity, no matter the truncated and tendentious "analysis" needed to reach a certain end - while avoiding reaching any more probing or probative end - virtually any ruse qua argument will be crafted in order to reach that desired end.
The more raw intelligence possessed by the person making the argument, the more they will need to invest in elaborate justifications (e.g., compare the thuggish quality evidenced by Oliver Stone to the elaborations of a Noam Chomsky), but whatever it takes in order to comport with their worldview, that's the road they will take.
Hence, yes, "contemptible and brutish" is an adequate summary, of Stone, of others as well, and there's a quality they are possessed of that results in a certain revulsion as well - i.e. their commitment to all the chicanery, all the tendentious and contorted casuistries they do in fact commit themselves to in order to reach their predisposed ends in the first place.
And once again, we see a Leftist making the same contemptible mistake -- that what Hitler did to the Russians was worse than what he did to the Jews because there were more Russian deaths than Jewish deaths in WWII.
This is a ridiculous argument, and a morally repugnant one. Not all deaths are morally equivalent, as a moment's thought should show. If a punk holds up a liquor store with a shotgun, shoots a policeman, and is shot dead in turn by the policeman's partner, should the dead policeman and the dead criminal be buried side-by-side with equal honors?
No. In our kindergarten example, the policeman was doing his duty to protect the people on his beat; the criminal was committing a crime. One of these two hypothetical deaths was a tragedy; the other was justice. (Harsh justice, perhaps, but sometimes that's the best you can do.)
And so it is here. Russian deaths in WWII were staggering; no one denies that. But they happened in the context of warfare, in which the Russian Army met Nazi forces on the battlefield. The Russian forces, and the Russian people, also had the full force of the Soviet government behind them, able to engage in diplomacy behind the scenes, able to build factories for munitions, and so forth.
The Jews of WWII had none of this. They were confined in a slowly-tightening legal noose, and, when they had hardly any rights left at all, they were systematically rounded up and slaughtered. They did not have the option of facing their attackers as the Russians did; they had long since been disarmed. They did not have a government to advocate for them, or to fight for them; they were completely on their own.
(This makes the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto all the more remarkable. These people had had the spirit beaten out of them for TEN YEARS... and yet they found the will to fight, with pitifully inferior weapons, and to give the Nazis a run for their money.)
Actions have context. An accidental death is not the same as one caused by deliberate murder, and our laws reflect that. (If all deaths were equally tragic, we wouldn't have first and second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and so on; we'd have one category called "death".)
As such, Mr. Stone's logic reminds me of that old chestnut: that the criminal who pushes an old lady into traffic, and the hero who pushes that old lady out of the way of a speeding truck, are equally contemptible, because you just shouldn't push old ladies. (The corollary is that, if you see an old lady in the path of a speeding truck, you should leave her alone, because Pushing Old Ladies Is Bad.)
That attitude -- that pushing old ladies is bad, that death is bad (and therefore more deaths are worse than fewer deaths) -- is a particularly ugly form of moral equivalence. It's also ridiculous in the context of Mr. Stone's anti-Israel stance. He's entitled to his opinions that certain Israeli actions are Bad -- but wouldn't those same actions be just as Bad when non-Israeli nations do them?
No -- suddenly context matters, and we need to see Israeli actions differently than those of her neighbors. (Such context is necessary for the modern anti-Israel viewpoint, for there is nothing -- NOTHING -- Israel stands accused of that her neighbors don't do, as bad or worse. That's not even counting the fact that most of the accusations against Israel are nonsense in the first place.)
So -- does context matter, Mr. Stone, or does it not? Make up your mind, please... and have the courage to explore the consequences of your decision.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
On the subject of one death being equivalent to another -- if Mr. Stone truly believes that the Russians suffered more than the Jews did, then which would he choose for himself: to die on a Russian battlefield with a rifle in his hand, or in a Treblinka gas chamber? Is it worse, in his eyes, to die wearing the uniform of your country, knowing that you are doing your part to protect your homeland and that your countrymen see you as a hero... vs. dying for no purpose whatsoever, as a naked slave with your very name ripped away from you? Is it worse to die like a man, in short, than to be slaughtered like cattle?
Just wondering...
Good analysis, but one small quibble. The Jews of Warsaw certainly suffered in the ghetto; people were dropping like flies from starvation and disease, and the uprising was truly remarkable and extremely heroic. However, what befell them did not begin a decade earlier when Hitler took power. The Shoah hit the Jews of Poland like a ton of bricks in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.
The Jews of Germany, land of Der Sturmer and the most vile antisemitic propaganda had a different story. There's was a more drawn out experience. The Nuremburg Laws, starting in '35 (?) denied education to Jews and banned them from professions. When the German Jews were finally deported, it was not to ghettos in Polish cities but to concentration camps and death camps.
Daniel in Brookline #10, an excellent post.
I add that relative number of dead does not specify who is morally right or wrong.
That more dead on your side does not necessarily imply moral superiority.
I don't have the numbers but I'm guessing that more Germans military and civilians died in WW2 than Americans or brits.
Does that mean that the Germans were the morally superior side?
Of course not.
More so-called "palestinians" die than Israelis (thank G-D!!!) because "palestinianism"/"islamism"/"islamofascism" is a death cult whose followers tell us in their farewell jihadi death cult videos that they crave death while Infidels fear death.
Getting back to the number of Soviet dead, I remember seeing a series on WW2, on PBS several years ago, from the Russian perspective.
One of the talking heads said that the Stalins SU had Prisoner Battalions in WW2.
Stalin emptied the prisons and gave guns to the prisoners and told them to attack the nazis on the battle field - and to clear minefields. If the prisoners retreated they were shot by Soviet army. They had no choice but attack the nazis.
I also note that the islamic republic of iran used their own children to clear minefields during the 8 year iraq/iran war.
And the German army was so shocked by the waves of attacking Soviets, who were shot by the nazis, but were followed by more and more waves of attacking Soviet "soldiers", that they eventually were overwhelmed.
And at the end of WW2, the nazis fled to surrender to the US/UK and not the SU because they knew that the SU would show them no mercy.