Spinning U.S. and the Holocaust, Here and There

Now that I’ve declared my view on this propaganda film, what did the others have to say? Part one, focused on US mainstream media

After having spent a lot of time watching the latest Burns (and Novick and Botstein) docu-epic and even more time writing a detailed review of the film as essentially deep state plus propaganda, I figured I’d commit a bit more looking at what the reviews had to say. Given that the reviewers in the US mainstream media in all its forms (and reviewers in Israel) really do have skin in the game on the propagandistic aspect of the film, these forms of the fourth estate being part of the deep state, there is a kind of dance that goes on between the two that is intended to serve the ultimate purposes being served.

And that’s what I will explore, in detail, here. Gory detail, actually. What I did was to do a basic search for film reviews and then looked at what I found over the first couple pages, having to exclude some because of things like paywalls (like the NY Times) or complete redundancy.

First, for anyone who may be confused as to what the deep state actually is (no, it’s not just the CIA and the FBI and the MIC), the forces behind the state and its actions are dividable into two parts. The first part is the public state, which in a representative democracy is made up of elected officials and what they directly control, acting on behalf of the electorate. The other part is the deep state, the people and things that manipulate the public state to operate against the will of the people or otherwise have control of aspects of government which should be in the public’s control, mostly via its representatives. The deep state is fundamentally undemocratic, which goes without saying.

The current ruling faction within the deep state is what I generally call the Jewish-Zionist faction, and they superseded the previous ruling faction, which I refer to as the WASP Rockefellerist CFR faction, during the last couple decades of the 20th century, when the deep state regained full control of the state with the election of Reagan/Bush, after a couple decades of marginal control and factional infighting. It was during that period, 1960 to 1980, that saw the significant rise of the Jewish faction, including their triptych of political philosophies – cultural Marxism, neoconservatism and neoliberalism. The latter two were first installed into a presidential administration in the ‘80s and then were largely embraced by Clinton in the ‘90s; the third was responsible for the social revolutionary movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s – black civil rights, 2nd-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, open immigration, gay liberation/homosexual normalization – and “matured” into political correctness in the ‘90s and identity politics and social justice warfare in this century.

This view is based on the triple melting pot theory, that American culture in the last century can be divided into three parts based on religious identity – Protestants, Catholics, Jews. That in turn came out of the half-century immigration wave leading into that, from the Civil War to World War I, which brought the country the majority of its Catholics and Jews. After WWI, which is when the story in this film starts, was also the real start of the culture wars in the US, including the deep state aspect of that, the inter-factional fight to define the country’s politics and its culture.

By the way, the Catholic faction was largely defeated in the 1960s, and pretty much finished off at the start of this century with the abuse crisis. That was largely accomplished by the Jewish-controlled media, who spun it toward the hated church itself and away from the actual perpetrators, who were mostly homosexuals, then the leading Jewish proxywarrior group in the culture wars (before BLM brought blacks back into the fight in the last decade).

The new Jewish editor of the Boston Globe Marty Baron, who would go on to become editor of the Washington Post, pushing and steering the story in Spotlight

In some sense Holocaustism is the faith of the Jewish faction, and it’s also kind of the religious component to cultural Marxism, which is built on the concept of victim groups. It is the primary means of this faction maintaining its power in our democracy, because a group making up only 2% of the population cannot enforce its will just based on money and dedication and guile, and certainly not votes. It needs something that blinds the populace to its very presence. Part of that is crypsis – defined in biology as “the ability of an organism to avoid observation or detection by other organisms; it may be either a predation strategy or an antipredator adaptation, and methods include camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle, transparency, and mimicry.” Blacks and Asians and even Hispanics can’t hide who they are, but Jews largely can, and that started with “de-ethnicizing” names (again, see Bret Stevens). But when hiding in plain sight isn’t enough, Holocaustism causes people who see not to see, or to tell themselves they aren’t seeing what they are seeing. Because seeing makes them bad people. It obviously boosts dedication via motivation on the other side of this divide as well.

With that foundation, let’s get into some of the reviews that I found. The first is from Forbes, and asks a fundamental question:

“The other question that instantly presents itself is: Why now? Why make a film about the American response to the Holocaust right now. I don’t know if when they began the film this was the producer’s intent, but clearly as they were making the film, the events of the last six years in the US – immigration, racism, the rise of right-wing demagogues, and the rise of white supremacists made the issues in ‘The US and The Holocaust’ incredibly relevant.”

From the start we can see the defining of this as right vs left – all of the specifics cited here are generally attributed to the right and usually the extreme right. But it’s not clear if this was the intent from the beginning or something that the film just fell into while in production. Forbes continues:

“Several weeks ago, I moderated an event with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein where we discussed the film which they began working on in 2015. Originally, the film was going to be a companion to an exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, ‘Americans and The Holocaust.’ That deadline came and went, and there was the pandemic as well, but now the film is being shown and I believe it will have a significant impact on viewers.”

That’s information I didn’t know. But 2015 is the same year as Timothy Snyder’s Holocaust book Black Earth was published, and I tend to think that was in part related to the events in the Ukraine in 2014. Another book I’ve read this year was also published in 2015, Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and that was a kind of compilation of his various other works on Ukraine, almost certainly inspired by the events there the year before. Plokhy is the leading Ukrainian historian at Harvard and has something of that establishment deep state operative as Snyder. The most notable aspect of his book to me was that he did almost everything he could to avoid really talking about Jews, in a land which has been a major home of Jews (2.7M in 1940) and whose history has been significantly impacted by Jews for centuries.

By 2015 America was reaching a decade and a half of continuous middle east wars, that the product of neoconservatism, and was still recovering from the Great Recession cause by Wall Street, that the product of neoliberalism. These things had caused reactions on both the left and the right, the rise of Occupy Wall St. and the Tea Party. The people were starting to turn ugly, that could lead to “antisemitism”, and one cure, or preventative in this case, for this would be a healthy dose of Holocaustism which could back ‘em down before they went too far.

Another important event in 2014 was the rise to the bigtime of BLM, with the events in Missouri, the rebirth of the black-Jewish alliance that had blacks back and challenging homosexuals as the greatest Jewish proxywarrior group. That, like all cultural Marxist rebellions, is another divide-and-conquer strategy, get the masses fighting among themselves, fracture the society. And Burns & Co. loves them some black folks in their filmwork.

In any case, one didn’t need to see the election of Trump to see that trouble was brewing. The anticipation in 2015 was that 2016 would bring a contest between Clinton and Bush, a reminder of two major sellouts to the Jews and their political philosophies, and it was clear that no one was happy about that prospect. Occupy led directly to Bernie Sanders and the Tea Party led directly to Trump.

The other possibility visible in this Forbes piece is simply that Burns and his Jewish cohorts were doing a little film for the USHMM, then Trump happened and it got blown up into something much bigger.

Back to the theme of Why Now? And the attack on the extreme right, from the LA Times:

“Burns (with co-directors Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) will make that point explicit at the close of six emotionally demanding hours, but it is always there, not far from the surface, in this thorough history of the American response, and lack of it, to Germany’s criminal war on the Jews. Still circulating are the same bad ideas about a singular national identity, racial purity and authoritarian rule; then, as now, conspiracy theories deform political discourse. This is not Nazi Germany, but to judge by the news, there are some who wish it were, and from recent attacks on libraries to the failed putsch of Jan. 6, 2021, there are echoes enough. (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s Hitleresque imperial fantasies give the series a separate, incidental resonance.)”

Well, that speaks for itself. Next up is Salon, one of the most Trump-deranged of all:

“Many have pointed out the similarities between Hitler's rise to power and that of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The two-hour opener makes this plain through the mere description of how the Nazi party's numbers ballooned, enabling Hitler to take power. His followers downplayed the most objectionable aspect of their platform, their antisemitism, to appeal to moderates. Meanwhile, they stepped up their street warfare on groups deemed unpatriotic to convince voters that civil war was imminent. A small group of elite conservatives saw to it that Hitler became chancellor, confident that the weight of office would calm his extreme temperament – another way of claiming confidence that he'd act more ‘presidential.’

“The producers did not create ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ to be a veiled indictment of Trumpism, Republicans or the MAGA movement. They said as much at a recent Television Critics Association press conference for the documentary, which they began producing in 2015 – before Trump became president. Back then, Botstein said, ‘it was impossible to imagine where we would be, not only here in America, but across the ocean and around the world.’ Burns likes to remind journalists that history doesn't repeat, it echoes through the decades and in current events for the simple fact that humanity doesn't change all that much.”

So it can’t be true because the filmmakers said it wasn’t true? So what current events are we talking about, the proxywar in Ukraine? Did that happen because of Trump and his MAGAtard following? Or are we talking about the Protestant power of the 1950s thinking Russia is still communist? Are we still pretending that Putin is the new Hitler too and we are helping protect his innocent victims? Really? Not enough of course, we could do more...

...and from the New Yorker:

“This new documentary lays bare how the United States government was mired by domestic politics during the war and how the American public was largely indifferent to the Holocaust at the time. It sets that indifference against a homegrown tradition of racism, tracing the xenophobia of the nineteen-twenties right up to the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally, in 2017, and the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. If Holocaust memory seems well established today, the film nevertheless arrives at a moment when the nature—and the future—of historical truth, about the Holocaust but also about everything else, is in acute jeopardy.”

There is real irony in that last bit about historical truth being in real jeopardy, given the hack job on truth in this film, and in the mythological aspects of the Holocaust in general. But the general theme we’re seeing here is that the film is reacting to our times, making the Trump/Hitler connection/comparison. The New Yorker continues:

“’The U.S. and the Holocaust’ takes a keen interest in the American political landscape of today, and it rightly sees chilling parallels between the rise of fascism and the Trump Administration’s assault on American democracy. These comparisons have been made in newspaper columns for the last five years, but they can never quite be made enough, especially those that speak to institutional fragility. All throughout, the film points out certain historical antecedents to the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory and the decidedly anti-Semitic ‘America First’ slogan, originally popularized by the likes of Charles Lindbergh, which has since become a rallying cry of the Trump movement.”

No subtlety there. They conclude:

“The persecution and mass murder of European Jews between 1933 and 1945 loom so large in our culture that even our own homegrown brownshirts now have the Holocaust on the tips of their tongues. In recent years, a sitting member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has styled her enemies as ‘Nazis’ and posted a video of a fake-looking President Biden with a Hitler mustache. Beyond the arena of electoral politics, a number of ordinary people wore yellow stars on their lapels to protest coronavirus-vaccine requirements. Given its interest in the contemporary, ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ might have confronted, or at least acknowledged, these fixations and distortions. They, too, turn out to be as American as apple pie.”

Here we’ve migrated from alt-right/QAnon extremism to attacking people protesting vaxx requirements and to sympathizing for Biden, so it’s become more mainstreamed left-right, Dem vs GOP. More, this time from NPR:

“It's not until the final five minutes that the story is brought fully up to date. But those final sounds and images that conclude The U.S. and the Holocaust — scenes with which we're all too familiar, of hate crimes and hate-filled marches — connect the past to the present without Coyote, or anyone else, having to say a word. Once again, Burns and company have made history come to life — and reminded us that our life, right now, is indeed history in the making.”

Yes, history IS in the making – by this film and its companion pieces discussing it in the mainstream media. But enough about the conventional politics use of the film to nazify-to-de-nazify the right (part of the point is to make these people pariahs, so they will stop what they’re doing, or stop others from starting to do what they’re doing). Let’s get to more specifics, first again from the New Yorker:

“In a documentary of more than six hours that examines America’s response to the Holocaust, a crucial part of the story is still somehow missing: the postwar era, in which ‘the Holocaust’—specifically under that name, a name now rejected by some within the Jewish world for its implication both of Jewish passivity and of a divinely sanctioned sacrifice—became in many ways an American fixation. From the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann until the present day, what we have come to call ‘the Holocaust’ has become a national frame of reference, a constant source of comparison, and even at times a Cold War morality play whose final act has yet to be written.

“In ‘We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962’, the historian Hasia Diner, whose voice would also have been welcome in this documentary, dispels the pernicious idea that American Jews were somehow quiet or passive about the horrors of the Final Solution in the immediate aftermath of the war.”

Now this gets to the era before the beginnings of the rise of Holocaustism, in the way that I described it in my review, which I said started in 1961. That was the creation and selling of a mythology, but if one defines that as simply true history, then they have to deal with the period before that, when people didn’t or wouldn’t understand that history – if it was just history why was it parked for 15 years? Or did people realize or at least suspect that the story had been politicized and exaggerated to condemn the Nazi leadership and to de-nazify the German people? Did they really think the Germans were shrinking heads and making mattresses out of Jewish hair and soap out of Jewish body fat? We are now more than 60 years beyond that period, so that piece of history can now be easily manipulated. Continuing:

“But beyond the Jewish community, American public responses to the Holocaust coalesced into a narrative shaped by the sensibilities and the naïve self-image of an ascendant superpower. Look no further than the immensely popular miniseries ‘Holocaust,’ which first aired in 1978, and whose depiction of two families in Germany, one Jewish and the other Christian, was the first time many Americans grappled with the Holocaust as a distinct narrative. Despite its public splash, many survivors attacked the show as kitsch. Reviewing the series for the New York Times, Elie Wiesel said that it ‘transforms an ontological event into soap-opera.’ The question is why so many Americans were—and are—still attracted to this ‘soap-opera’ rendition.”

I love that they bring up the Weasel to make this point, the guy who wrote his Holocaust memoir Night in 1960 about his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager, where he describes Jews being thrown alive into flaming pits in Auschwitz but never mentions gas chambers. The wiki on the book says this: “Translated into 30 languages, the book ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir. Wiesel called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account.” Uhh, yeah.

Note that by 2013 and this film the Weasel’s memoir was referred to as a novel

That reminds me of the book Fragments; here is the wiki intro on that: “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a 1995 book, whose author used the pseudonym Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purports to be a memoir of the Holocaust. It was debunked by Swiss journalist and writer Daniel Ganzfried in August 1998. The subsequent disclosure of Wilkomirski's fabrications sparked heated debate in the German- and English-speaking world. Many critics argued that Fragments no longer had any literary value. Swiss historian and anti-Semitism expert Stefan Maechler later wrote, ‘Once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch’.”

No shit, Sherlock. Wilkomirski’s real name is Bruno Dössekker, btw, and his book came out during the boom in survival testimonials, including infamous ones like diamond-shitter Irene Zisblatt’s in The Last Days, which eventually resulted in her book The Fifth Diamond, and wolf girl Misha Defonseca’s (real name Monique de Wael) Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, published in 1997. That boom was part of the “denier reaction” and also part of what became known as the Holocaust Industry, because of the book published in 2000 under that title written by Norman Finkelstein.

More from the NYer:

“As with any historical atrocity, narratives about the Holocaust, its meaning, and its relevance are not handed down from on high; they are actively constructed. What we talk about when we talk about the Holocaust—or the Shoah, the Hebrew word for catastrophe or utter destruction, as the event is often referred to in countries such as Israel and France—differs wildly from nation to nation, and indeed the story that Americans now tell about one of history’s greatest crimes diverges significantly from the stories told in Israel, the former Soviet bloc, and Western Europe.”

It’s obvious that even history can vary depending on one’s point of view, but “differs wildly”? That doesn’t really sound like a historical account to me, unless one is talking about how it is utilized, which gets us back to propaganda. We’ll see how the story changes when I get to some Israeli/Zionist reviews, btw. I do like the “actively constructed” phrasing regarding Holocaust narratives, I have to say. Continuing:

“A missed opportunity of ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ is examining the emergence of an extremely American stipulation. How, exactly, the Holocaust went from a nameless catastrophe that, as the film amply demonstrates, did not initially appear to sway the hearts of all that many Americans, into a trauma commemorated in a major museum just off the National Mall—years before America’s own historical crimes, such as the enslavement of African Americans, were ever similarly addressed—is an important story that would have greatly enriched this film.”

This is getting directly to the matter of the development and proselytizing of the faith of Holocaustism and “Jewish supremacy” when it comes to victimhood. More:

“In fact, the film coincides with an ongoing exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Americans and the Holocaust’, and was developed with the assistance of the museum’s historians (many of whom appear in it) and rich archives. But the museum itself, established by an act of Congress in 1980 and officially opened in April, 1993, in the midst of the Bosnian war and a year before the Rwandan genocide, is an impressive institution whose story belongs in any broad look at American responses to the Holocaust. Thirty-five years after the end of the war, the museum was—and remains—the U.S. government’s official response. I can think of no better example of what has become of the American response to the Holocaust than the museum’s own dedication ceremony. Wiesel—also largely absent from this film, although few people were as influential in shaping a durable Holocaust memory in the United States—turned to President Bill Clinton as they were both sitting in the rain outside the new museum. ‘And, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something,’ Wiesel said. ‘I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen... We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.’ In America, the Holocaust is now often seen as a ‘lesson’. It means ‘never again’—although both genocide and the menace of anti-Semitism have continued regardless.”

This relates to the matter of the development of claims of genocide in the ‘90s as a means to get the left to suit up for war in the latter days of the Vietnam Syndrome. Claims of genocides also remind people of The Genocide, the one that really counts.

But what we have here is the Weasel again, this time referring to a particular genocide – the genocide of the Bosniaks by the Serbs – which wasn’t actually happening, rather it was a case of this reference being made to get people on the left to suit up. And for what? An American war on the Russia-proxy Serbia, led by Madeleine Albright in the administration. That was an absurdly cartoonish characterization of good and evil, of black and white, and was largely driven by the media.

The big event in Bosnia was Srebrenica in 1995, where 8000 were claimed to have been massacred (Albright claimed 10,000) but there is almost no real evidence for that figure. And the media never discussed the reasons for that action (whatever it really was) by the Bosnian Serbs, which was the killings in surrounding Serb villages by Bosniak warlord Naser Orić and his forces, who would then retreat to the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica. A decade later he was convicted and jailed in the Hague, but at the time he was framed as a freedom fighter by the western media.

But no lessons get learned from that. Example: Chris Hedges, a heroic voice on the left today, was part of that media manipulation, reporting on the war from Bosnia for the NY Times, and even as he flipped alternative resulting from Iraq he has never done a mea culpa on Yugoslavia, has never changed his Serb-slandering story.

The last American mainstream media piece to cover here is from the Atlantic, which is most definitely a Jewish rag (earlier this year Sam Harris did a podcast with four Jewish journalists with the Atlantic on the threat to American democracy posed by Trump, a year after he’d left office):

“It’s rather dismal that this lesson bears repeating, but apparently it does—especially now, when fascist-leaning rhetoric from both everyday losers and world leaders is often treated as just another edgy meme. Burns and his colleagues, however, remind us of the true stakes of that discourse. Their excellent project, which should be required viewing for all Americans, is about not just the Holocaust, but the U.S. and the Holocaust—an apt title for a series that looks squarely at this country’s record of apathy at best, and malevolence at worst, toward the victims of genocide. It confronts a topic that many Americans of every political stripe prefer to avoid: responsibility.

“The question of American bystanderism during the Holocaust is well-trod territory among historians, dating at least to Arthur Morse’s 1968 book, While Six Million Died, and likely heartily debated even earlier. What’s new in recent years is the death of several baseline public assumptions that once guided postwar American life: that America is invariably a force for good, that anti-Semitism died in the Holocaust, and that democracy always wins. With the erosion of those ideas, The U.S. and the Holocaust reveals a dark perspective on democracy’s limits—perhaps even darker than the producers intended.”

So yet again no punches pulled – fuck the goyim. And note the part in italics (mine). Here’s another choice line: “Perhaps that’s the point: 1930s America did not want more Jews, and even fancy, rich ones could barely buy their way in through the golden door blocked by red tape.” I have to credit the writer for allowing how rich Jews could still manage to get in, but the imagery of deeply-held American mass antisemitism rings false - example: remember that in the ‘30s both the mayor of New York City (Fiorello La Guardia) and the governor of New York state (Herbert Lehman, of the Lehman Bros. family) were Jews, as was the guy who was becoming known as the most powerful politician in New York, Robert Moses.

Lehman, FDR, La Guardia - the trio that built the Triborough Bridge; missing is Moses, who really built it

“Is it America’s responsibility to welcome all immigrants, or at least those in obvious danger? This moral question animates the series until it abruptly becomes irrelevant. After detailing how the outbreak of war shut down U.S. embassies and consulates in Nazi-controlled territory, the film moves on to other failures: the failure of the government to publicize the massacres (which were rigorously verified by late 1942), the failure to support underground rescue operations (the State Department even recalled the American journalist Varian Fry when his mission became diplomatically inconvenient), and later, the failure to bomb Auschwitz or otherwise directly target the Nazi murder apparatus.”

So what was this “rigorous verification” of massacres by late 1942? This is the most extreme view yet, and it doesn’t stop there.

“The film’s hero in that situation is a young Treasury Department lawyer and whistleblower named John Pehle, along with his Jewish boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., who authorized a scathing report that painted the State Department as an accessory to mass murder. Morgenthau’s father had been the ambassador to the Ottoman empire during the Armenian genocide, and had tried and failed to get President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. Morgenthau reminded President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this, making early use of the phrase ‘Never again.’ His efforts, we’re told, led Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in 1944, which provided material support to partisan fighters and European rescuers.”

As I said in my piece, one cannot talk about Morgenthau during WWII without talking about the Morgenthau Plan, which likely would have starved millions of Germans to death after the war, a sort of WWI Versailles on steroids. I have seen no one even mention that in any review.

“Watching the rapid collapse of democracies in Adolf Hitler’s path on-screen in 2022 is hard to stomach, given the shellacking that democratic norms have endured in recent years both in the U.S. and elsewhere… But a much darker side of democracy was also at work. Tyranny of the majority, while preferable to other types of tyranny, is nonetheless consequential. Immigration restrictions, for instance, were not a democratic failure; on the contrary, they were what voters wanted. Once war broke out, saving Jews in Europe, even in the limited ways possible, wasn’t merely a low priority; it was not what voters wanted. As one historian in the film notes, ‘The War Department doesn’t want the soldiers to know much about the persecution of the Jews, because they’re worried they won’t fight hard if they think they’re secretly being sent to save the Jews.’ That omission was not a delicate balancing of policy goals. It was an elected government respecting majority sentiment. The failure to even try to save more Jews wasn’t because of some memo concealed by the State Department (despite Breckinridge Long’s efforts, everyone knew) or because it would have derailed the war effort (it wouldn’t have). It was, very clearly, because no one wanted to. None of this means that democracy isn’t our absolute best hope. It is. But something big is missing from the way our democracy envisions responsibility and respect—namely, to whom we think those values apply.”

In other words, the will of the people on issues like immigration and the goals of war should be put aside if they also involve negatively impacting Jews and their desires. Is “the shellacking that democratic norms have endured in recent years” apply when it comes to something like nuclear saber-rattling in Ukraine or endless wars of state destruction in Israel’s neighborhood?

“Not Idly By, an hour-long work by the filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, addresses a similar subject as The U.S. and the Holocaust, but with a very different style. It’s about, and almost entirely narrated by, Peter Bergson, a Jewish activist from British-occupied Palestine who came to the U.S. during World War II to shout himself hoarse about the Holocaust. The U.S. and the Holocaust includes Bergson’s story too—his dozens of full-page ads in major newspapers highlighting massacres that those papers buried in inside pages; his star-studded, stadium-filling pageants; his 400-rabbi march on Washington. But The U.S. and the Holocaust is sad, whereas Not Idly By is angry. Bergson, interviewed in 1978, rages with a Hebrew prophet’s fury. Nobody rages in The U.S. and the Holocaust, because nobody rages on PBS.”

I’ll get to Bergson in the next piece; he’s another slippery character like Wallenberg who has been significantly cleansed in the film.

“The Allies’ defeat of Hitler supposedly lets us off the moral hook for all this. One of the reasons that World War II films have such broad appeal is because many follow a Hollywood trajectory: Good triumphs over evil. Unfortunately, this version of events is false. As one of the historians in Burns’s series puts it, ‘We do rally as a nation to defeat fascism. We just don’t rally as a nation to rescue the victims of fascism.’ The Nazis lost their war against the Allies, but they won their war against the Jews.”

In fact, from a 21st century standpoint, this was perhaps the biggest victory in Jewish history, at least going back to Moses and the Red Sea. Whatever level of horror happened to the Jews in the Holocaust, it gave them a massive club to swing for the rest of the century, and total invulnerability to criticism, at least in the US, Germany, all of western Europe and beyond. Whatever your view of Hitler is, that wasn’t the master plan. Look at the power of Jews in Israel and especially the US, look at Germany on its knees, look at Putin and Russia outcast from the global community because he wouldn’t let a handful of Jewish oligarchs take over the state 20 years ago, look at Ukraine after eight years of Jewish “pro-western” leadership post-Maidan, look at much of the middle east in ruins.

This is a lot like Lipstadt saying in the film the Jews have not replaced themselves, as if there are fewer Jews in the world today than 85 years ago because of the Holocaust – that statement has been made using a 1939 figure (16.9M I believe, up from just over 15M previously) that got inflated by more than 1M in 1949 to get the difference between that and the ‘49 figure (~11M, first “genuine” post-war number) close to the holy 6M, and a current Jewish population figure (14.7M) that uses the strictest definition of what is a Jew; the most liberal of that is something like 22M. (The historical figures were compiled by the Jewish Almanac, btw.) And the issue is perhaps as much assimilation leakage in the US as it is the Holocaust. But even that has a positive Darwinian effect – the weakest Jews ethno-culturally bleed off and only the strong survive to pass on the cultural Cohanim gene.

The last “American” media piece I will address starts to transition to the foreign (or at least dual-loyalty) view, that from the Boulder Jewish News, written by Eliyho Matz:

“Now, America’s response to the Holocaust is rather an important historical issue that the filmmakers have preferred not exactly to tell us. Their story about Bergson is categorically wrong! Their story about the formation of the War Refugee Board is wrong! Morgenthau, the distinguished American Jew, was not behind it, and it was not even Pehle, who eventually ran this Board. The creation of the War Refugee Board was the work of Bergson, Will Rogers, Jr., and Josiah E. Dubois, a lawyer at the Treasury. It was Bergson who worked very closely with them. Elbert Thomas and Guy Gillette, Bergson’s friends in the Senate, did their job, too; without their help too, Roosevelt would not have reacted!”

The Bergson reference is about a bit in the film about an event, as described in wikipedia, “On March 9, 1943, the Group produced a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden written by Ben Hecht, titled ‘We Will Never Die’, memorializing the 2,000,000 European Jews who had already been murdered.” Hecht was a Hollywood scriptwriter and was the guy who wrote a piece in Readers Digest in the middle of the war about the six million Jews who were going to end up dead, reading the tea leaves with amazing accuracy.

But what is “the Group”? To start with, Bergson’s real name is Hillel Kook, the name he was given at birth in Russia before coming to America (in 1940 - how the hell did he and his Zionist cohorts manage that, I thought the border was closed??) and the name he returned to when he moved back to Palestine/Israel; Bergson was just an assumed name he used while in the US. His father was a rabbi and his brother was the chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine. From wikipedia again: “While in America, Kook led a group of Irgun activists under the pseudonym ‘Peter Bergson.’ The name ‘Bergson Group’ or ‘Bergsonites’ eventually became used to refer to all the members of Kook's immediate circle. The Bergson Group was composed of a hard-core cadre of ten Irgun activists from Europe, America and Palestine, including Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, Alexander Rafaeli, Shmuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky. The Bergson Group was closely involved with various Jewish and Zionist advocacy groups, such as the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and the Organizing Committee of Illegal Immigration.”

In case you don’t know, the Irgun was one of the leading Zionist terrorist organizations operating in Mandate Palestine, and they executed the King David Hotel bombing in 1946; the hotel housed the British administration headquarters, and 91 people were killed. The film does say that Bergson arrived from Palestine and was an Irgun member but otherwise frames him as all about saving the Jews of Europe; the pageant is the main feature in the film on him.

For another view of the activist Zionists, Germany and saving the Jews in this period, take a read of this short chapter from Ralph Schoenman’s The Hidden History of Zionism, published in 1982: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/hidden/ch06.htm Schoenman is a left-wing anti-Zionist Jew. Obviously there are very slippery aspects to this account (like this: “But European Jewry had never manifested any interest in colonizing Palestine. Zionism remained a fringe movement among the Jews, who aspired to live in the countries of their birth free of discrimination or to escape persecution by emigrating to bourgeois democracies perceived as more tolerant.”). But that’s a characteristic of almost all Jewish culture-bending and subversive politicking, isn’t it? Sometimes it cuts both ways.

In general, this Kook story is about the broader Treasury story, the framing of Morgenthau as the good guy in the administration. He’s not mentioned in the film, but in one of my videos I discussed Josiah E. Dubois – from his wiki, he “was an American attorney at the U.S. Treasury Department who played a major role in exposing State Department obstruction efforts to provide American visas to Jews trying to escape Nazi Europe. In 1944, he wrote the Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews, which led to the creation of the War Refugee Board. After the war, he was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials prosecuting Nazi war crimes, particularly in the prosecution of holocaust chemical manufacturer I.G. Farben.”

I assume ol’ Josiah was a Jew, and his wiki goes on to say in 1947 he was accused of being one of ten people “in the War Department who had Communist backgrounds or leanings”. That list also included Colonel Bernard Bernstein, Abraham L. Pomerantz, Heinz Norden, Max Lowenthal and Allen Rosenberg, who are also Jews. What all this gets into are the deeper political issues of many Jewish activists in the US during this whole period, which is a matter that has been furiously erased over the years; this film certainly didn’t delve into any of that.

More from Matz:

“Is an American college student better off in his or her understanding of the Holocaust after seeing the filmmakers’ Holocaust fiasco? I doubt it. The filmmakers can twist and manipulate images, they can record individuals telling stories, but that will not hold for a long time. History always plays tricks; someday someone will have to explain why for the entire year 1943 the American nation failed to stand up to one of the most horrific massacres in history.”

This is a first example of the serious trashing of the film, but only on a very detailed level and from the opposite side from me on the appraisal spectrum; there will be more. Btw, Matz worked as Bergson/Kook’s assistant for ten years, and like the film he never mentions his real name.

The next one is kind of a foreign review as it appeared in Quillette, which I guess is based in Australia. This jumped out at me because of the nature of this rag; from its wiki: “Quillette is an online magazine founded by Australian journalist Claire Lehmann. The magazine primarily focuses on science, technology, news, culture, and politics. Quillette was created in 2015 to focus on scientific topics, but has come to focus on coverage of political and cultural issues concerning freedom of speech and identity politics. It has been described as libertarian-leaning.”

But Lehmann’s wiki reveals more: “Bari Weiss regards Lehmann as one of the leaders of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’. Lehmann is seen as part of the intellectual dark web (IDW) due to publishing Quillette which Politico has referred to as ‘the unofficial digest of the IDW’ which ‘prides itself on publishing 'dangerous' ideas other outlets won't touch,’ and critiquing ‘what they see as left-wing orthodoxy.’”

That comes from the infamous coming-out article on the IDW written by Weiss in the NY Times in 2018, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. I refer to the IDW as the leading manifestation of cultural neoconservatism, which is the creation of a new Jewish cultural center that sits on top of the Jewish political center in this century, that again primarily based on political neoconservatism, neoliberal economics and cultural Marxism, with many of the sharp edges trimmed off, some of the extremism of those socio-political philosophies (particularly cultural Marxism). The leading figures in the IDW have been Jewish – Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers Eric and Brett, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, et al; they have enlisted better-known goy frontmen as well, to sell the movement – Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. I don’t now if Lehmann is Jewish, but certainly her husband would seem to be, given the surname she assumed. Btw, the review was done by Thomas Doherty, who is “a cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema... a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University” whose list of scholarship shows a heavy dose of what might be labeled “items of Jewish interest”.

The piece:

“In the curtain-raiser, historian Nell Irvin Painter (The History of White People, 2010) reminds us that the American experience of racism and genocide pre-dates Nazism, a backdrop the filmmakers use as prelude to the nativist revulsion to the flood of swarthy non-Christians pouring in at Ellis Island in the late 19th century. The exclusionists claimed to be following the science, namely the crackpot eugenics promulgated by the likes of Madison Grant, author of the white-panic screed The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Grant was not a fringe voice: like-minded eugenicists included Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and even Helen Keller. An older, Medieval strain of Judeophobic bigotry also thrived, some of it underwritten by automobile magnate Henry Ford, peddler of the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

So here we note the latest and most-notable book by the black historian Irvin Painter, her appraisal of white people – can you imagine a white guy in this film who had written a book called The History of Black People? So who made up “the flood of swarthy non-Christians pouring in at Ellis Island in the late 19th century”? Can’t be all the Italian Catholics pouring in at that time, they’re Christians. Anyway, we get back to immigration, WASP eugenics, Henry Ford and the Protocols, and a new terms I hadn’t seen yet related to this film - “Judeophobic bigotry”, which I do suspect is largely a reference to Catholics.

“It was all fertile ground for a political action group revived by D.W. Griffith’s blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915) and, later that same year, by the lynching of Leo Frank. In 1913, Frank, a New York Jew, was convicted, in an atmosphere of antisemitic hysteria, of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who was found dead in the basement of the pencil factory he managed in Atlanta, GA. After his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, a vigilante group calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan broke into the Georgia State Prison in Millidgeville, drove Frank to a tree outside Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, and lynched him. The episode led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith. Oddly, the Frank case is not mentioned here, but the filmmakers illustrate the mainstream respectability of the Klu Klux Klan with panoramic shots of tens of thousands of robed Klansmen marching down Pennsylvania Avenue against the backdrop of the US Capitol.”

Finally, a discussion of the importance of Leo Frank! In my piece I raised that, mostly related to the Jewish takeover of the NAACP in 1914 and the black-Jewish alliance, but I also mentioned the formation of the ADL in 1913. The KKK juxtapositioning here makes it clear that the Frank conviction and lynching were undeniably the product of antisemitism; Phagan was simply “found dead”, she wasn’t raped and murdered. This is one of the leading examples of antisemitism in American Jewish lore, and it is a matter of faith that there’s no chance that he was actually guilty, and no thought given to the B’B’/ADL manipulations done to stay his execution – after commuting the death sentence the governor of Georgia immediately left the state out of fear of being lynched himself and would not return for over a decade.

In 1982 the other (black) witness, Alzono Mann, who was 83 at that time and in failing health, was apparently paid off enough (by the ADL?) to finger Conley for the murder - never forget, never give up

“On September 1st, 1939, the outbreak of war in Europe confirmed, for many Americans, the wisdom of keeping the door to the nation locked while huddling safely behind it. Having been burned in the Great War, they wanted no part of the sequel. Looking back, it is sometimes difficult to gauge how much of the isolationist impulse between 1939 and 1941 was a principled antiwar stance and how much was functionally pro-Nazi and nakedly antisemitic. But not in the case of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, the most prominent spokesman for the America First Committee. On September 11th, 1941, in Des Moines, Iowa, he brought the subtext to the surface: Jews, especially the moguls in Hollywood and the heads of the radio networks, were conspiring to sucker America into the European maelstrom for their own nefarious purposes.”

So now the dreaded isolationism (but first - conspiracy theorists note: 9/11, using airplanes, occured on the 60th anniversary of Lucky Lindy’s infamous anti-semitism speech about Jews trying to get America into foreign wars!). America wanted no part of WWI either, and Wilson was reelected in 1916 promising to stay out of the war. That the US entered the war only months later may have been at least in part due to the influence of Zionist Jews working on behalf of the British government (and their own interests), who in turn issued the Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild later that year, promising support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Maybe that helps to explain Hitler’s antisemitism, America’s continued isolationism two decades later, Lindbergh’s pointing the finger at the Jews for pushing entry into this war. But the specifics here are interesting, the media and in particular the Hollywood moguls, which I will get back to shortly.

“Bound by the Neutrality Act of 1936 and restrained by a doggedly isolationist electorate, he had neither the Constitutional power to intervene in the Spanish Civil War and confront the Fascists early on, nor the political capital to fight publicly for more generous immigration quotas. FDR was ‘an internationalist presiding over an isolationist country’ who had to be ‘careful not to get too far ahead of public opinion.’ Viewers unsatisfied with the brief for the defense might want to read Phillip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America. What makes Roth’s counterfactual scenario so terrifying—Lindbergh runs for president against FDR on an isolationist platform in 1940 and wins—is that it is so plausible.”

Again, the suggestion that FDR should have ignored the will of the electorate in this democracy, which perhaps is a suggestion of the actual Jewish view of American democracy. And the assumption that America had a side in the civil war in Spain, which was being aided on the opposing sides by Nazi Germany and the communist USSR. But then something else I mentioned in my piece in a tongue-in-cheek manner – he actually raises Roth’s antisemitism nightmare fantasy novel, and does so seriously.

“After that revelation, the wrap-up is rushed and perfunctory, the passage of history suddenly moving into fast forward. An important stop in the aftermath is at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961–62, a ritual of remembrance that, says Lipstadt, marks a pivot point for the postwar reckoning with the Holocaust. (For what it’s worth, my own sense is that, for Americans, Judgment at Nuremberg, the Abby Mann teleplay broadcast in 1959 on CBS’s Playhouse 90 and Stanley Kramer’s all-star motion picture version in 1961, and the publication of Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, were no less important. Also, for better or worse, it was the NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978) that made the word the universal signifier for the genocide of the European Jews.) The other stop is the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which reversed some of the injustices of 1924 and ‘correct[ed] a cruel and enduring wrong,’ said LBJ. This did not settle the issue.”

Again, we’re getting into the birth of Holocaustism in 1961 and the media’s role in that, although he doesn’t cite the epic film Exodus as I did. But Hilberg and Eichmann are here. Then on to the 1965 immigration act that knocked the walls down.

“The final moments of the film misfire: an abrupt and rapid-fire video salad of postwar incidents of racism and antisemitism: the tiki torch bearing neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, the murders of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and, inevitably, the January 6th riots. Ugly and tragic to be sure but not in the same ballpark, indeed the same galaxy, as what has transpired during the previous six hours.”

So some light criticism of the politicization of the film narrative to deal with defining of current events, and the mixing of secular and sacred events, as it were.

“The filmmakers are too hard on Hollywood (an industry which did more to alert Americans to the danger of Nazism than any other for-profit business in the 1930s) and too easy on the Communist Party USA (after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, American communists made common cause with the America First isolationists—until, of course, Hitler attacked Russia, and the party line zig-zagged back to a policy of interventionism).”

The first part is a bit of a head-scratcher given what he said earlier about Lindbergh criticizing Jewish Hollywood moguls. The communist question is a delicate one, given that one is no longer allowed to talk about the hugely disproportionate role of Jews in communism and Marxism more generally. And there certainly were Jewish communists who abandoned the USSR over Molotov-Ribbentrop.

Continued in part two…