Still Kicking But Taking It In Stride

 'YEAH, got what's going round.  Not Covid but bad enough to not be getting on with.  Will write at length again soon, I hope.  Probably a few little things.  

For now, in light of what Bonhoeffer talked about how the obstinate denial of truth and moral responsibility can overcome human minds on a rational level by going lower, consider how a vague feeling of bigotry insinuated itself into a friend of Marion Pritchard when they went to see the Nazi antisemitic propaganda movie Der Ewig Jude shortly after it was made.

Marion Pritchard, then a graduate student in the Netherlands, recalled seeing the film: 

We went to see this movie and sat and made smart remarks all the way through and laughed at it because it was so outrageous. And yet when we came out of the movie, one of my Gentile friends said to me, “I wish I hadn’t seen it. I know that it was all ridiculous and propaganda, but for the first time in my life I have a sense of them and us—Jews and Gentiles. I’m going to do everything I can to help them, but I wish I didn’t have this feeling.” 

The fact is that mainstream English language, Hollywood movies have consistently had a huge amount or racist stereotyping in them and that the majority of the audience for that are not as sophisticated as these 1940's movie goers were. And consider, also, that Der Ewig Jude was not nearly as popular as the movie called the most antisemtic movie ever made,  Jud Süß, based on an early 19th century antisemitic novel, not a phony "documentary".   A death camp guard gave testimony that after seeing that movie they were more enthusiastic for their job of murdering Jews and brutalizing them before they killed them. In the American civil liberties industry line, the Swedish censor at the time was wrong to ban the movie from being shown in Sweden, which could have easily gone Nazi instead of being "neutral."  The effect of Birth of a Nation in the United States was certainly similar to the effect of that movie in that it revived the KKK, our indigenous analog to the Nazi and fascist movements of Europe.  

I don't think there is any right to do that which is superior to the rights of the intended victims of the propaganda to be protected from that known effect of theatrical, cinematic, TV and radio lies.  I think a lot of the backlash against the civil rights movement was aided, greatly by Hollywood and TV, lots of it stupidly counter-productive.   All In The Family did nothing at all to counter Nixonian Republicans, it encouraged the Archie Bunkers of real life.