Like so many of the voluntarily mentally deficient, Simps thinks that his ignorance of something means the same thing as it being untrue. There's a lot of that at Duncan's. It's a similar phenomenon that fuels climate change denial and far less importantly, the denial that evolution happened. They're alike in practice, it's the details of what they deny that's different.
Like so many of our generation, Simps, trained on television and Hollywood movies, was brought up in ignorance of so many things. Only one of those things is the fact that the Nazis explained their entire ideology in terms of the theory of natural selection, Darwinism was suppressed in the English language during the post-war period because it was desired to pretend that Nazism was a peculiarly German aberration when the connections with English language biology, especially eugenics were known in both Germany and in countries where English was spoken in the entire period of the existence of the Nazi party, from the 1920s and 30s, when English speaking biologists, quite mainstream biologists such as Charles Davenport, worked with Nazis to put their racist ideology into practice.
That truth was known and admitted, even boasted of up to the start of the war. I've given many, many citations of Darwinists as mainstream as Leonard Darwin, than whom there was no one with a stronger claim to the mantle of his father making that case by the start of the war. If you're unfamiliar with my blog, look at the archive, I've given that documentation in, literally, scores of posts, with lengthy quotes, with citations and, where available, with links to primary documents in both English and German.
That the movie Schindler's List wouldn't discuss that fully documented connection is something I don't have any explanation of. I saw it exactly once, not long after it came out and I have to admit I don't recall it very well. It could be that,like Simps, Steven Zaillian, the writer and Steven Spielberg, the director of the movie and Thomas Keneally, the author of THE NOVEL ON WHICH THE MOVIE WAS BASED, Schindler's Ark, didn't know that glaring fact of history. I will note that Zaillian has a degree in "Cinema" which strikes me as sort of like having a degree in "Madonnaology" or "Mixology". I used to be that ignorant but, as I grew up, I looked at the primary historical documentation instead of Hollywood movies or novels and found that the connection couldn't possibly be more certain or more abundantly documented.
One thing I never was, in that ignorance, was stupid enough to think that Hollywood movies were a place to look for accurate historical information. Maybe it was instinctual. I recently reminisced with my brother about the first time my mother sent me into the variety store in town to pick up the Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald, the first time I ever encountered a tabloid, the Record American aka, "the little picture paper." I'd never seen or heard of a tabloid but I knew as soon as I saw the garish black and white photo on the cover and the screaming headlines that it wasn't something to be trusted. I would guess I was four or so. I don't remember ever believing in what movies said. Maybe my parents brought me up to be less credulous than Simp's raised him. Or maybe they let him watch TV too much and it made him stupid.
No comments:
Post a Comment