Illustration used byTablet
The May 10, 2013 issue of Tablet magazine featured a review of a forthcoming book published by Harvard University Press, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, that is said to reveal a “creepy love affair” with Hitler. See http://tinyurl.com/lnbengk. I had a negative response to this article nailing Hollywood executives such as Carl Laemmle Sr., Jack Warner, and (by implication) MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. For many decades, I have studied the U.S. appropriation of Nazi methods in controlling the” little people” that prominent German refugees held responsible for the rise of Hitler. Indeed, the Frankfurt School critical theorists, elitists that they were, blamed mass media for Hitler’s appeal. I have detailed analysis of the populist and progressive support for Nazi methods of mind control on my website, and have shared them here.
But what I find particularly ironic is that David Mikics, the author of the Tablet piece is a postmodernist exponent of Jacques Derrida (the hero whose dubious alliances have been questioned by other postmodernists), while the author of the forthcoming book Ben Urwand, is a Harvard Junior Fellow. How ironic? Harvard was the site of many ardent proposals that Nazi and German methods of managing the masses be taken up by progressives and populists in America. See for example this series of essays posted on my website: https://clarespark.com/2011/03/27/progressive-mind-managers-ca-1941-42/, https://clarespark.com/2009/12/13/klara-hitlers-son-and-jewish-blood/, and https://clarespark.com/2010/04/18/links-to-nazi-sykewar-american-style/.
One of the principal disseminators of protofascist social psychological methods, Henry A. Murray, former director of the Harvard Clinic, has sealed papers at Harvard University Archives, controlled by his widow Caroline Fish Murray (I tried to get into them in 1995 and was rebuffed unless I provided Mrs. Murray with an outline of the book I planned to write!) Murray’s role in these propaganda offensives has been effectively covered up by the professoriate. Other figures associated with Murray, such as Gordon Allport and Walter Langer, have been similarly protected from academic scrutiny.
All the facts unearthed in Urwand’s dissertation research are disturbing. But to neglect the widespread fascination with Hitler and Mussolini among American populists (Father Coughlin comes to mind), as well as the admiration of Mussolini’s corporate state by FDR, suggests to me that Urwand’s forthcoming tome on Hollywood may serve as revenge for the Hollywood blacklist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist), as if leftists and liberals were holding up Hitler signs in protests against the Tea Party and Republicans in general. It should never be forgotten that the Hollywood left and its sympathizers today nailed Republicans and big business in general for supporting the Third Reich. (For a recent interview with Urwand see http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/video/author-ben-urwand-talks-hollywoods-597114.) UPDATE: I have read the book once and will write something brief set of impressions and reservations for Friday the thirteenth and Yom Kippur. It is a bad book, but I never dreamed that Harvard would publish anything this outrageous. [Update 12-21-13: the documentation of “fact” in the Urwand book is highly suspect and even unpersuasive to a professional historian or to any careful reader who checks footnotes. Mark Horowitz did a good job taking the book apart in a recent TABLET, probably in response to widespread academic skepticism on the social democratic Left, the political position that Urwand seems to represent.]
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Pingback by Ben Hecht v. Ben Urwand, the un-Jewish Left, and ‘assimilated’ Jews | YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — December 9, 2013 @ 10:27 pm |
[…] to be released in October. I was initially appalled when I saw a puff-piece in TABLET. (See https://clarespark.com/2013/06/13/hollywoods-pact-with-hitler/. I had not yet read the book and expected some archival research that would establish the veracity […]
Pingback by Urwand’s COLLABORATION: HOLLYWOOD’S PACT WITH HITLER | YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — September 13, 2013 @ 8:47 pm |
I’m not very impressed with the Tablet article myself. If Hollywood compromised with German censors in the early 1930s, it’s tone was anti-Nazi in the early 1940s (before the US had entered WWII). The argument seems to make the naive assumption that there is only ever one edit for a film.
On a trivial but fairly topical note The Three Comrades (mentioned in the article) was the only film on which F.Scott Fitzgerald had a writer’s credit.
Comment by Caedmon — June 13, 2013 @ 10:48 am |
Since the inception of modernity, there were always popular forces that hated finance capital. The Great Gatsby, for instance, was no exception. The main point of my brief remarks was that populism ruled popular taste. There is some kind of taboo against mentioning the rampant antisemitism since the French Revolution. America was not inoculated against it, and when Alexander Hamilton’s name came up, he was frequently targeted as a “Jew” by his Jeffersonian opponents.
Comment by clarelspark — June 13, 2013 @ 1:42 pm |
Reblogged this on USA VICTIM OF LETHAL PSYOPs COINTELPRO MIND WARS & SPACE PRESERVATION & PATRIOT ACTS.
Comment by Lissakrhumanelife — June 13, 2013 @ 1:11 am |