Long Live Propaganda

I just watched this dvd I ordered off of netflix and it shocked me. "Triumph of the Will," a Nazi propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl in 1935. What shocked me, however, was not what I thought. The film was made by a woman, whose career, one might guess, was ruined (although if 'the reich' had won, that would have been different), and is a documentary about Hitler and his triumphant tour leading up to the World Olympics. It is truly well-made, and beautifully photographed, and stands as an important part not only of world history, but of film history.
Beauty is such a whore. The iconic language of film and tv, used so adeptly by the FOX network among many others, wraps deeply resonating symbols: a flag blowing in the wind, a child held in it's mother's arms, a soldier standing with sad, stern eyes, and gives them an agenda, tears them from their original context: life, in all its complexity.
The first thing that struck me was this: the ordinaryness of it. If the film substituted American or British flags for everywhere there was a swastika, it wouldn't be so alien at all. This film is exactly the opposite of subversive since the intent was to make the viewer actually believe in the symbols shown, but since us 21st century inhabitants have had those symbols so thoroughly discredited and know the ghastly crimes they concealed, the effect today is thoroughly subversive, in that it shoots straight to your gut and makes you realize the cold truth of what you've been viewing. By seeing it in its most extreme form, 'Triumph of the Will' lets us see propoganda clearly and recognize where we know it from. The visual language of Nationalism is familiar to us all (Einstein called it 'the measles of mankind' but since measles no longer gives us much of a problem, in the spirit of giving the past relevance we should probably alter Einstein's quote to 'Nationalism is the AIDS of mankind').
The second jolter was this:
Hitler was Left!

As a self-proclaimed 'leftist' for years, this made me squirm. Of course, I did know that 'Nazi' meant 'National Socialist' but I ignored it. I knew that fascism, in its original, Italian sense, meant the corporate state. But Germany was not Italy. And yes, State power is what allowed the Nazis to commit their well-known crimes; the same State power that allows us to give welfare moms welfare. Now, here is where I remind myself that Socialism and Nationalism are two different things: combining them is what's lethal. But the haunting fact remains:
Hitler gave more lip-service to the working class than Bush does.
Thats right. Watching 'Triumph of the Will' I found myself hating Hitler, not as an abstraction of absolute evil, but as another deceptive politician. The same way, in fact, that I hate George W. Bush. Hitler, in this film, gives a moving speech in front of thousands of war-traumatized (by World War I) German youth, whose faces are shown in stark relief, filled with emotion, by Riefenstahl's camera. What moved these German faces, who wouldn't look out of place at your nearest bar or disco? Hitler urged them to put aside their classism. He said that a new age was dawning, one where no German aristocracy would exist, and only German Workers and common people would have power. He urged the crowd not to be ashamed of their working-class roots. He exhorted them that 'physical labor... would no longer be a source of shame' for Germans, and that 'all Germans' would soon have to attend 'your school,' that is, the school of physical labor and manual toil, the world of shame and sweat that no doubt the members of the SS and the German Workers Party were eager to quit their Nation-building activities to rejoin.
Our modern-day leaders don't need to spout such rhetoric, even in falsehood. Leni Riefenstahl, to the looks of online accounts of her life, was a misguided fool taken in by Hitlerian propaganda. On her own website, we see pictures of her fondling black African children (see- I like black babies! aren't they cute? I didn't mean anything!) and if one is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, she is probably as innocent in her own way as the FOX executives are of every casualty in the Iraq war. I don't feel sorry for her, but I do feel empathy for the crowds of soldiers, many of them no doubt farmer's sons, fueled by poverty and loss into a blind belief in a society that soon would be the world's shame. They believed, oh yes they did, that they were RIGHT. Hitler's appeals to the Left were a big part of it, and much of his word choice and pleas to 'the workers' and for a 'classless society' wouldn't be out of place today in San Francisco. Those boys went to die, went to kill, as 'our boys' do today. And while we take history for granted, viewing the often-referenced past in the full light of what was once the present is very revealing. Bush has recently taken to monkeying right-wing pundit Michael Savage in his use of the extremely dubious expression 'Islamo-fascism', an expression sure to cause any historian to twitch their indignation muscles into injury. Hitler and Nazism and Fascism have become such a national obsession that it seems no other analogy can fully express the evil that whereabouts lurks stalking the globe within and without our Homeland. (Seig Hiccup! Another Pilsner please. Pass the 'Man Show' and some lube for bikini handcuffs on my hypothalamus, Frat Boys want 'schadenfreude' too?)
The Nazis are gone but global propoganda is alive and well.
California Uber Alles!