"Youth, Change the World!"

Liberal/Fascist/Elitist Race-baiter Spike Lee

[Cross-posted at Camera Lucida]

I posted recently on Spike Lee's and his wife's foray into children's books with their newly released Giant Steps to Change the World. "Youth" figure high in liberal and fascists ideology, and Lee is no exception. But Lee, like all black elites, is rife with hypocrisy. Liberal elites, like Lee, don't really want for themselves what they pitch to the masses. Their talk about equality is a blatant lie.

Here is what I wrote about liberal elites at Our Changing Landscape:

[Jim] Kalb writes:

[Facism]'s a nice clear system, and it's got some logic behind it, but it doesn't work very well. It was tried and it lost. For that reason, the liberal solution won out.

That solution is a bit more complicated. It starts by noting that all our purposes are equally purposes, and infers that everybody's purposes equally confer value. Each of us is equally able to make things good or bad just by thinking of them as good or bad. That makes each of us in a sense divine. Our will creates moral reality. Instead of the wonder-working leader of fascism you get the divine me of liberalism. It's every man his own Jesus.

So how do liberal leaders get all these equally stationed demi-gods to follow them? It is still sheer will, I would think, of maintaining a semblance of liberal equality, but working with (and secretly ruling with) brute fascistic superiority, through a lot of lying and deceiving.

My post on Lee's children's books discusses his very white-looking "black" wife, yet all of his career and politics is about the evils done to blacks by whites. The book Giant Steps to Change the World is reviewed by its (liberal) publisher as "an inspirational picture book about activism and taking the big steps to set things right." Setting things right really means getting back at whites who've oppressed blacks for so long. And Lee starts the indoctrination of his brigade at pre-school age.

Lee doesn't seem to have done too badly under white oppression, racking in millions from his white oppressors for books (and films) like this, and marrying what really is his (and blacks') epitome of success - a white woman (or the less painfully hypocritical substitute, a white-looking black woman).

From my previous post on Spike Lee:

[J]ust like Hitler's youth brigade, "youth" is a recurring and important category that liberals love to use, as though they are benign, protective adults. Instead, what they are doing is systematically, through schools and various media including children's books, building their army of fascist children, who are trained to be foaming at the mouth, and to destroy then rebuild society according to the gospel of their liberal/fascist parents.

The Return of the Antichrist

Jim Kalb's most recent article on his web page is a transcript of his speech from the annual H.L. Mencken Club conference. It is titled: "PC, the Cultural Antichrist."

As I was reading through the material, I came across this paragraph, for which I should have been prepared:

If you try to get rid of religion, you aren't going to get rid of religion. Instead, you'll get some scheme of attitude and belief that functions like a religion but pretends to be something else and will probably go off in strange directions because nobody's allowed to think about what it really is. In short, you'll get something rather like the Antichrist.

I lazily read ahead of the very last sentence, substituting liberalism for "the Antichrist." I laughed out loud as I finished reading the sentence. Yes, we have to call things by their name. Kalb is making a case for the evil, or perhaps to be less fanatic, the inhuman nature of liberalism.

It gets better. I've been trying to get fascists and liberals together in my mind for a while now. Kalb writes this, as though in answer to my (silent) quest.

There are two basic solutions to those problems within modernity, the fascist one and the liberal one. The fascist solution is to say that purposes are objectively binding and therefore provide a standard of what's right if you get beaten up when you don't go along with them. On that view the purposes that count are the purposes of whoever's in a position to do the beating--that is, whoever is the top guy on the top team. So the basic principles of government are "we're number one" and "the will of the leader is the highest law."

It sounds like Triumph of the Will, the film produced by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's visual and artistic spokesman/handmaiden. The film, which every film student watches because it really is a feat in cinematography, begins with Hitler descending the heavens down to Nurenmberg, a divine creature (god himself) come to save the decadent Germans. Little did these common folk know that his project was their annihilation, and to raise something better from their ashes. The great Götterdämmerung. It almost worked, the annihilation part, anyway.

But as Kalb writes, fascism, whether in governments or in day-to-day interactions, loses because how much beating (metaphoric or literal) are people going to take? It seems that liberals are the high I.Q.ers of fascists, and are careful where and how they land their punches.

Kalb writes:

[Facism]'s a nice clear system, and it's got some logic behind it, but it doesn't work very well. It was tried and it lost. For that reason, the liberal solution won out.

That solution is a bit more complicated. It starts by noting that all our purposes are equally purposes, and infers that everybody's purposes equally confer value. Each of us is equally able to make things good or bad just by thinking of them as good or bad. That makes each of us in a sense divine. Our will creates moral reality. Instead of the wonder-working leader of fascism you get the divine me of liberalism. It's every man his own Jesus.

So how do liberal leaders get all these equally stationed demi-gods to follow them? It is still sheer will, I would think, of maintaining a semblance of liberal equality, but working with (and secretly ruling with) brute fascistic superiority, through a lot of lying and deceiving.

Below is a video of the opening scenes of Triumph of the Will, with a synopsis.

Day 1: The film opens with shots of the clouds above the city, and then moves through the clouds to float above the assembling masses below, with the intention of portraying beauty and majesty of the scene. The cruciform shadow of Hitler's plane is visible as it passes over the tiny figures marching below, accompanied by music from Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which slowly turns into the Horst-Wessel-Lied. Upon arriving at the Nuremberg airport, Hitler emerges from his plane to thunderous applause and a cheering crowd. He is then driven into Nuremberg, through equally enthusiastic people, to his hotel where a night rally is later held.

Will the Real Jihadist Please Stand Up?

"Conservative" independent filmmaker Jason Apsoto has recently released a film on Islam called Kalifornistan. The website promoting Kalifornistan has this to say about the film:

KALIFORNISTAN follows the deranged leader of a terror cell called 'Glorious Jihad of Kalifornistan' as he plots to destroy Los Angeles with his 'mighty plutonium superbomb' - while being distracted by an exotic dancer.

KALIFORNISTAN takes viewers on a twisted journey of the post-9/11 world from Gitmo to Iran, from the dark corners of LA harbor into the mind of a terrorist too deranged even for Al Qaeda.

There are enthusiastic reviews for this film at its website, but I will be more critical. Apsoto has made his jihadist a lone, lunatic sex maniac, whose mission to destroy Los Angeles is due more to his deranged personality than his religious convictions.

Many writers give all kinds of reasons for jihadists' uncontrollable quest to bomb apostates: They are sexually frustrated maniacs; they are poor, oppressed Arabs; they are psychologically impaired; they have unresolved issues with their distant fathers; they are too close to their clingy mothers. And so on.

Apsoto seems to have fallen for the "they are deranged sex maniacs" variety, and that is where I cannot take his film seriously. I understand that artistic license is due, but even artists have to research their material and know something about their subject, rather than make up whatever they feel would suit the tone of their film.

One critic writes, "the film clicks as strong, effective satire." The jihadist's prescription is to follow the clear commands from the Koran, which is to turn the
whole world into Islam, whether by force or by stealth. Apsoto, rather than find a unique and artistic way (if possible) to write a fictitious account of a real Koran-following jihadist, prefers to make his jihadist a socio/psychopath so that his film becomes a "satire."

Political Controversy at the Toronto International Film Festival

TIFF is starting with a big bang this year. An international roster of stars, including Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, is boycotting the festival due to a program titled City to City. City to City is a

new Festival programme that will explore the evolving urban experience while presenting the best documentary and fiction films from and about a selected city.

The selected city this year happens to be Tel Aviv, in conjunction with celebrations of its 100th year.

The acerbic, hard-core leftist, Naomi Klein, of the No Logo fame,  even weighs in on the issue in her usual convoluted manner. Her Globe and Mail article starts with a Palestinian sob story. Writes Ms. Klein (actually, under normal conditions she would be Mrs. Lewis - of the famous Jewish family here in Toronto - but she opts for feminist nomenclature instead):

When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival was holding a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv I felt ashamed of my city. I thought immediately of Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women's-rights activist I met on a recent trip to Gaza. "We had more hope during the attacks," she told me, "at least then we believed things would change."

The Hope And Change of Obama has infiltrated the globe. I wonder when we'll be rid of it.

The amusing thing is that Cameron Bailey, the co-director of TIFF, has no inclination to celebrate Israel. His (and TIFF's) decision to hold Tel Aviv as the premier city in TIFF's new City to City program seems to have been based on clever marketing and publicity strategies by Israeli consul-general in Toronto who started a "Brand Israel" campaign a year ago to include Israeli films in TIFF. The idea is to clean up Israel's image to the world through artistic presentations, including theatre, film and literature.

Cameron Bailey writes in the festival program that:

The ten films in this year's City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today's Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.

There's that favorite Toronto word which has crept in - diversity. And apparently Tel Aviv is just like Toronto in that regard.

So, there is no need for Naomi Klein and the usual suspect of leftist movie stars to get so worked up. Bailey and the "Brand Israel" group agree with her more than not. And I'm 99.9% sure (leaving out a margin for error) that the films selected will not displease any Palestinians (or Torontonians).

Here is a sample of the films:

* Bena: a Tel Aviv man brings in a Thai migrant worker for help with his schizophrenic son.

- Big Eyes: the main actor - and the director - of this film is Uri Zohar, described as an "an actor and comedian in the fifties, [who] headed up an ad hoc troupe of performers and rock-'n'-roll-styled pacifists." The surprising ending to Zohar's real life is that he "left bohemian Tel Aviv behind and became an ultra-Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem."

Maybe Jerusalem should have been the choice for City to City.

* The Bubble: A story of a homosexual tryst between an Israeli and a Palestinian.

* Kirot: a Ukrainian "sex worker" and an Israeli "abused wife" bond over language lessons.

* Jaffa: how the supposed peace between Arabs and Jews is broken in the port town of Jaffa when two teenagers a Jewish girl and Arab boy, fall in love. But, as the program informs, this is not about Arab/Jewish conflict, but "the pain of...all-too-human broken hearts."

* Life According to Agfa: a film set in a fictional Tel Aviv bar named "Barbie", but in the real Tel Aviv, Barbie stands for Abarbanel Mental Health Center.

* Phobidilia: yet another film (the third in the series) about a mentally challenged character.

The only one I might watch is the take on the great French comedy director Jacques Tati's film Play Time. Ephraim Kishon's Big Dig is about "an enterprising madman [who] comes across an unattended jackhammer, as though it had been waiting for him all his life. Lugging the tool into downtown Tel Aviv, he sets up on Allenby Street and starts digging...all the way to the Mediterranean."

There's that madman again. At least Tati's character was idiosyncratic - never mad. Perhaps that is the ultimate message of these Tel Aviv films - that the city is trying to come to grips with its schizophrenic (call it diverse) self. Sounds like Toronto to me.

Strange Allies in the War on Terror

Cropped image from Michelle Malkin's book cover In Defense of Interment.
[Click on image to see full cover.]

The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto started a new documentary series on March 2009 called Nikkei Flix. I had to look up Nikkei (these days, we are just expected to know obscure words from alien cultures, and if not, shame on us for not being global enough). Nikkei, according to Wikipedia are, "Emigrants of Japanese ancestry or their descendants."

The first film to kick off this series is Caught In Between, which the film's schedule proudly announced was, "Part of the programming for International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which is March 21." Better late than never.

The documentary film's official web page describes Caught in Between as a film that:

[T]races how in the wake of 9/11, two communities that had rarely crossed paths have come together in solidarity to speak out against the U.S. government’s attacks on civil rights and civil liberties. Speaking at San Francisco’s Japan Town Peace Plaza, Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Japanese Americans, and others ... make passionate pleas to uphold our constitution and protect innocent people who are targeted as the "enemy."

The film's site further discusses Japanese American internments during World War II, and associates them with the current "War on Terrorism":

As the Arab, Muslim, South Asian communities face post-911 repression, this documentary captures Muslim and Japanese American communities revisiting the dark days of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Interviews with former internees, their children, religious leaders, citizens and immigrants from Japanese and Muslim American communities are woven together to make crucial connections between then and the current “War on Terrorism.”

Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Interment made similar associations. But, Malkin was supporting those internments, whereas Caught In Between refers to that episode in American history as "the U.S. government’s attacks on civil rights and civil liberties."

So far, there have been no official plans (or talks) that Muslims be interred, unless one takes Malkin's attempt to suggest otherwise in her book. Malkin's book was highly criticized, and I don't think she ever brought up, or developed, that idea further.

At a crucial time in America's history, when all her citizens should be banding together to eliminate her enemies and protect her from internal threats, we have yet another ethnic group with a chip on its shoulder and full of grievances, which is actually hampering national security and siding with what is clearly the enemy. 9/11 was not an isolated event, as proceeding events have shown us, but one in a series of tactics to have Islam reign supreme.