Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. — Hanlon’s Razor
Have there ever been two quotes more welcome by criminal conspirators?
When the CEO poisons the water supply, it’s never malicious, just the incompetence of bureaucracy – therefore, conveniently for him, he’s not criminally liable. Attempting to hold an actual human being accountable for their actions is the province of “small minds.” Trying to ascertain the actual truth of “what happened” is for “average” minds. Asking for “just the facts, ma’am” shows one to be a simple mediocrity. The truly “great” should instead ignore the acts and the actors and stay firmly in the nebulous, fuzzy world of “ideas.”
Last week at Counter Currents, Greg Johnson and Fróði Midjord discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes…
I have previously discussed the dubious “anti-war” credentials of countercultural figures Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, who played the part of rebellious hippies within the Hollywood elite. No film better encapsulates their fraud or the fabricated nature of the corporate counterculture than Francine Schoenholtz’s ridiculous 1972 documentary FTA, which stands for “Fuck the Army”. The film follows Fonda, Sutherland, and other performers as they tour Japan and the Philippines, performing unfunny comedy routines and hokey protest songs for American servicemen. Schoenholtz’s previous work included a 1966 series of one-hour plays for PBS called Jews and History – and FTA itself and the culture creation it represents comprise a singular Jewish contribution to American military and pop-cultural history.
The film is as much a promotion of subversion as it is a polemic against the war in Vietnam. The poster, boasting its image of a stoned Donald Sutherland, is an undisguised attempt to associate anti-war activism with drug culture, and much of FTA is devoted to glorifying communism, feminism, vulgarity, bad grooming, and loutish black militancy, with the U.S. characterized as a racist society perpetrating genocide against both the Vietnamese and American blacks. FTA’s pose of revolutionism notwithstanding, is the audience really expected to believe that this troupe of anti-American undesirables would have been allowed anywhere near U.S. military bases overseas unless the production had at least the tacit approval of powerful persons within the American government? Would U.S. Army and Navy personnel be permitted to participate in the production of a film if it authentically sought, as FTA pretends, to goad soldiers into turning their guns against their leaders? It was during the week of the film’s premiere in July of 1972 that Fonda, just to present the anti-war movement in the worst possible light, notoriously visited Hanoi and posed for a photo with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.
Producing and completing post-production on FTA was Igo Kantor, who tells the story of his involvement in the project in an interview he granted for the DVD release of the stupid woman vigilante movie Alley Cat (1984). He remembers that “Technicolor came to me and they said they would like to do a show on Jane Fonda going with a group of people, the FTA group, musical group, all over the Pacific Rim, all of Vietnam, all those countries, and do a show about the counter [to] the Bob Hope Christmas shows,” which were being produced by NBC, then owned by the defense contractor RCA. “The Bob Hope Christmas shows were dignifying the war movement because he was performing for the troops all over, every Christmas he’d go to one of these towns where the war took place and he would have shows – and I was the editor on the Bob Hope Christmas shows for six years. […] But then Technicolor said Jane Fonda would like to do a show to counteract that. Instead of heroining the war, let’s be pro-peace,” Kantor recounts, smiling sardonically.
That RCA would produce television programming “dignifying the war movement” is hardly surprising; but that Technicolor, a subsidiary of the defense contractor Thomson-CSF, would approach Kantor to produce a radical “pro-peace” hippie extravaganza, even hiring the same editor, is more interesting. “So she [i.e., Jane Fonda] went [to Vietnam] and the amazing thing is, here I was working in this building on Highland Avenue [in Los Angeles] and Jane Fonda, I gave her an office upstairs, and she and Don Sutherland were together at that time […] and Bob Hope had an office downstairs, and Bob Hope knew about this and he says, ‘Igo, what’s going on here, what, you’re working on my show, which is pro-war, and you’re working another show that’s anti-war?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I will not mix the footages. They’ll not be the same show, don’t worry about it.’ And sometimes,” Kantor remembers, bemused, “they used to go up and down the stairs and throw darts at each other. Bob Hope and Jane Fonda were, my God, crazy.” So, by Kantor’s own admission, the entertainment industry’s representative pro-war and anti-war exemplars were literally working out of the same building and frolicking on the stairs and enjoying hijinks – but that was surely just a coincidence – right?
I was aware of longtime Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz as an influential figure within what would come to be labeled neoconservatism and consequently never had any interest in wasting my time with anything the man had to say. My interest was piqued recently, however, when I learned that in 1963 he had written an article titled “My Negro Problem – and Ours”. Podhoretz, still describing himself as a “good liberal”1, wrestles in the article with the contradictions within himself between his political convictions and his impressions of blacks based on his own negative experiences. “My Negro Problem – and Ours” is intriguing in the way it expresses a pivotal moment in history and augurs ominously for the future. Podhoretz begins by describing his tough Brooklyn childhood in the 1930s:
Two ideas puzzled me deeply as a child growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930s in what today would…
In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Israeli diplomat Ephraim Evron was troubled by the support shown by many American blacks for the Egyptians. Evron’s friend, the radical journalist Paul Jacobs, obliged the Israeli’s curiosity by arranging a meeting for him with “the most militant Negroes in Los Angeles” – men “trying, somehow, to build a separate black community” – in “a back room at Operation Bootstrap, a storefront, self-financed vocational training school and business enterprise, located on Central Avenue in the heart of the Los Angeles Negro ghetto.” Some of the blacks, writes Jacobs, “were eager for a session of verbal bloodletting.” Among them was Tommy Jacquette, “a young bearded Negro leader” who “always wears a sweatshirt with a picture of Malcolm X stenciled on it”1. “Jacquette led off with his brief but impassioned denunciation of the role played by Jewish businessmen in the ghetto, who paid…
Klaus Maria Brandauer and Adrian Pasdar in Streets of Gold (1986)
The decline and collapse of the Soviet Union and the relaxation of emigration restrictions in the Second World would witness an exodus of Jews from formerly socialist republics to the United States and a rising cultural awareness of the “Russian” mafia in America as depicted (or distorted) in movies like Little Odessa (1994), Training Day (2001), and Eastern Promises (2007). A film that is interesting for its comparatively early depiction of a “Russian” gangster émigré from the Soviet Union – predating even Ed O’Ross’s portrayal of Georgian drug smuggler Viktor Rostavili in Walter Hill’s action classic Red Heat (1988) – is Elya Baskin’s minor turn as Jewish gangster Klebanov in director Joe Roth’s underappreciated boxing drama Streets of Gold (1986). Klebanov, who has succeeded in business as the owner of a New York nightclub, reflects with satisfaction how he…
By sheer happenstance, I watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s arguable magnum opus Il conformista (1970) aka The Conformist for the very first time only a couple days before the Italian auteur died. As a longtime cinephile, it might seem inexplicable that I would wait so long to watch a purported great masterpiece of cinema history, but I have always had very strong mixed feelings about Bertolucci and surely regard him as among my least favorite of the great post-WWII guido filmmakers, namely due to his idiotically expressed political views and rather ‘cosmopolitan’ international career. Indeed, it is no coincidence that, out of all the Italian filmmakers, Bertolucci made the most successful transition to Hollywood and the international English-language market, as if his own nation and culture meant very little to him aside from as a tiresome tool to express his insipid political views, thereupon making it all the more ironic that Pier Paolo Pasolini—a fellow poet that, despite being a gay Marxist, basked in his guidoness, whether it be high or lowbrow—was more or less responsible for jump-starting his career by hiring him to work as first assistant on his debut feature Accattone (1961) and then co-penning (with help from his protégé Sergio Citti) his directorial debut La commare secca (1962) aka The Grim Reaper. Quite aesthetically different from anything else that he would later direct and indubitably Pasolinian in terms of theme and gritty realist location and mostly lewd lumpenproletariat characters, The Grim Reaper is like a guido ghetto reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashômon (1950) that reveals very little about the auteur’s political persuasion aside from a general interest in street people. It was not until I had the grand displeasure of watching his beyond bloated five-hour neo-bolshevik epic 1900 (1976) aka Novecento—a film so sinisterly stupid in its mundane Marxist agitprop and smugly contrived displays of the grotesque that it depicts a blackshirt fascist portrayed by Donald Sutherland not only gleefully killing a kitty cat by headbutting, but also bashing in the brains of a fascistic little boy that he and his overweight bitch lover just molested—that I had to write-off Bertolucci as nothing more than a petty propagandist that hypocritically utilized Hollywood cash and stars to make unintentionally cheesy commie cinematic crap, hence why it took me so long to finally take the plunge and watch The Conformist. After all, I have no problem appreciating the work of commie artists as I regard both Pasolini and Visconti as being among my favorite filmmakers, but I cannot stomach someone that is so dishonestly dehumanizing and one-dimensional in their preposterously insincere pro-prole propaganda. Somewhat surprisingly, Bertolucci’s fascist era flick is great and everything that 1900 isn’t in terms of being rather nuanced, ambiguous, thoughtful, and even sometimes strikingly idiosyncratic (indeed, it is probably the only film will you find that features a surreal fascist dance party comprised of blind people).
[Read the rest of Ty’s non-conformist Conformist review at Soiled Sinema]
On one level, 1978’s Piranha, released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the wake of the popularity of Jaws and waves of other nature-themed horror movies of the period, is just an entertaining exploitation venture and a bloody but fun nostalgia trip. Scrutinized more closely, however, the film may be read – I intend to contend – as esoteric Jewish civilizational discourse.
Piranha’s screenplay was written by the non-Jewish John Sayles and based on a story idea by the obscure Richard Robinson, whose only other credits are Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) and High-Ballin’ (1978). Piranha was directed by Joe Dante, whose next major feature would be another collaboration with Sayles, The Howling (1981) – which, several years ago, I rather brutishly and probably not very convincingly argued was also an allegory about hostile Jewry. While notorious penny-pincher Roger Corman hardly has a reputation as a Judeo-chauvinist…
This was one of only a small handful of newly published books that I read in 2018, so a best-of-the-year list is hardly in order. What were the best books you read this year? Any recommendations?
Details of the CIA’s covert warfare in the Congo during the mid-1960s were revealed for the first time earlier this year when James M. Hawes published his memoir Cold War Navy SEAL: My Story of Che Guevara, War in the Congo, and the Communist Threat in Africa. The book is non-essential reading for all but African Cold War completists and is noteworthy primarily for its memorable portrait of an erratic mercenary, Samuel “Jock” Cassidy, who served under the infamous “Mad” Mike Hoare. One passage from Cold War Navy SEAL, however, struck me as having a probably unintentional poetic resonance. I submit it without further comment for readers’ enjoyment:
While I was learning covert ops on the job in Vietnam, the Cold War was heating up in Africa. What preceded my arrival in the Congo was an extraordinary effort that included the talents of an American operator, Jordy McKay…
Those in search of Christmas viewing off the beaten path this year might want to look up Agency, a 1980 Canadian thriller about media weaponization that a reader recently brought to my attention. Written for the screen by the nobody Noel Hynd and adapted from a novel by the equally obscure Paul Gottlieb, Agency was directed by Hungarian expatriate George Kaczender, who would spend most of the eighties making TV movies and directing episodes of forgotten shows like Night Heat and Freddy’s Nightmares. As its undistinguished pedigree would tend to predict, Agency is a fairly cheesy and artistically unremarkable piece of filmmaking – at least at the first glance – but does reward the close attention of those willing to sit through it.
Saul Rubinek as Sam Goldstein in Agency (1980)
Uncharismatically masculine Lee Majors stars as Philip Morgan, a copywriter for a major advertising agency who learns…
“when you leave a cookie in the oven too long” – @idiot_ teen
Politics is retarded. Only powerful crystals can save us. The attempt at persuasion of people is mostly pointless. You can articulate your position expertly, easily refuting the same flimsy arguments and pathetic clichés you’ve heard a thousand times. Meanwhile, transracial pop star Ariana Grande tweets nothing but “goo goo gaga” baby talk all day long and has 59 million loyal followers. Perhaps you believe that by mastering the language of “goo goo gaga” baby talk, you can enlist and mobilize 60 million empty vessels toward the project of securing your fleeting geopolitical ends. Wouldn’t it be just as fruitful to purchase a packet of sea monkeys and appoint yourself their supreme overlord? Before you start thinking about how you’re going to “save” Western civilization with your based dwarven fash army, have a look around. Half your office…
Jesus-believing U.S. Constitutionalist EXPOSING Satanic globalist SCAMS & TRAITORS in Kansas, America, and the World at-large. Jesus and BIBLE Truth SHALL PREVAIL!
Klaus Maria Brandauer and Adrian Pasdar in Streets of Gold (1986) 
Saul Rubinek as Sam Goldstein in Agency (1980) 
