Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/26/hitlers-mouthpiece-got-boote.html
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How uncivil of those (((Hollywood types))).
There was one studio who welcomed Riefenstahl
As much fun as it is to joke about, it would be unfair to claim that Disney was a Nazi sympathiser himself. However, his virulent anti-Communism (a result of his bitter fight with the cartoonists union) along with his naiveté at the time that art always transcended politics likely made him more receptive than anyone else in Hollywood to a visit from Der Fuhrer’s favourite filmmaker.
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Do not ask me to be ‘civil’ to those who are incivil to me.
Do not ask me to “tolerate” those who have no tolerance for anyone who isn’t just like them.
Do not ask me to ‘turn the other cheek’ when someone seeks to harm people who have done nothing to them personally.
Do not ask for the respect which you do not have for anyone else.
People who enable injustice, needless inhumane suffering, and whose actions foster chaos and the destruction of the very fabric of ‘civilized society’ are not exempt from public scorn and ostracisation.
Those are the ‘wages’ of their choices.
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I wish I had a business I could kick these people out of. Drat my lack of foresight when I first started stumbling along my career path.
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Why that’s not even polite! Where is my fainting couch? I feel woozy!
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But of course. He was only attending meetings of the German-American Bund for the free beer and sausages. /s
Disney was a Nazi sympathizer. Period. Just like William Randolph Hearst, Lammot du Pont, Graeme K. Howard, John D Rockefeller, Henry Ford, etc. Before the war, they all thought that Hitler was a really great guy with some highly interesting and innovative ideas for how to fight communism and keep those nasty dark people and Jewish people in their proper place.
As soon as the war started, of course, they all got on board with cranking out anti-German propaganda and doing their darndest to make everyone forget how enthusiastically they had schmoozed and pal-ed around with the Nazis just a few years prior.
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What I can’t figure out is why/how Charlie Chaplin would be so chummy with Hearst, that there’s footage of them playing tennis at (IIRC) San Simeon. Maybe it was more to do with Chaplin and Marion Davies both working in Hollywood, and hanging out w/ Hearst was collateral damage.
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I’m aware of that, but I’ve also heard other accounts (summary here) that he wasn’t a regular and that he was there with his German-American (and perhaps Jewish) lawyer mainly to network with people who could get him distribution deals in the Reich via the Bund’s connection with Nazi officials. So not beer and sausages but perhaps contacts and business.
Also, Art Babbitt saw him at only one meeting they both happened to attend (Babbitt out of morbid curiousity) and might have stretched that truth into something more sinister due to their mutual hatred.
I’m not saying Disney was anti-Nazi before the war, but it’s just not clear if he was a Nazi sympathiser like Ford or Hearst or du Pont. I say that in full awareness that he was a casual anti-Semite (being a product of his times), someone who hated (and equated) unions and Communism with the same fervour as any fascist on the Continent, and who as a consequence got involved with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (a nasty organisation in and of itself) during the war and testified for HUAC during the McCarthy witch hunts.
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She must have gotten one of those “genius” visas; like Milo.
Doesn’t inciting murder get your visa revoked?
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Or Melania.
He’s really going all-in on the alt-right, showing its true face. What a waste of oxygen.
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He should be required to live in somewhere like Alabama until his status is sorted out. You know - with his people.
Funny how he stays in areas with no discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation.
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Respect is also earned, so asking for respect means you haven’t earned it.
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I love you for posting that. I am only remotely familiar with Malcolm X but that quote is beautiful.
I really need to read up on that guy especially considering where I lived for the last year and now a kid is shot to death in my neighborhood by the police
Malcolm is worth getting familiar with; he was one of the greats.
Get past the titles of those and listen to what he actually says. He does not promote violence; he warns of what will happen if the violence of white supremacy continues.
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Sarah Sanders is a US citizen and the of the United States. She is the truth averse defender of an obnoxious (although duly elected) President. His policies are mostly terrible and some are disturbingly inhumane. They should be stopped and she should stop defending them.
Leni Riefenstahl, on the other hand, literally hung out with Hitler. She was foreign national visiting from a country that had, by the time of her visit to the US, forcibly annexed Austria.
It may be ethically defensible to publicly shame Sanders (a public figure who has debased our public discourse) but this justification is superficial at best and unbecoming of serious discourse.
It helps nothing, solves nothing and serves for nothing but to overheat the part of the brain that hates. We need less of that.
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Having suffered through Triumph of the Will I beg to differ.
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I don’t see a problem in calling her great and terrible at the same time.
