It?s Sweepstime For Hitler, But Winter for Truth (The CBS Hitler Miniseries IS a Bush-Hate Lie)

It's springtime, I mean sweepstime, for Hitler in Hollywood. I'm sure you've all

heard of the forthcoming two-night, four-hour, prime-time CBS "Miniseries Event" called Hitler: The Rise of Evil (airing May 18 and 20). Well I've finally seen a review copy of the controversial "docudrama," and there's a lot I could say - and may say in the future - about the soap opera-fication of the Hitler story.

But there's a drama behind the docudrama that hasn't received the attention it deserves. A story about the political uses of Hitler and history, and about the consequences of someone revealing the truth about the misguided political agenda of the docudrama.

I'm speaking about the fate of the very man who shaped and then boasted of that misguided agenda. I'm speaking about the fate of Ed Gernon, the executive producer of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, who proclaimed to TV Guide that his Hitler movie was really an admonitory allegory that showed parallels between Germany's support of Adolf Hitler and America's support of George W. Bush. Ed Gernon was summarily fired by the Canadian production company, Alliance Atlantis, that made the Hitler movie for CBS, just three days after the New York Post's Page Six previewed his inflammatory TV Guide quotes.

There are three scandals here. First, there's the foolishness of Mr. Gernon's Bush-Hitler thesis, which I've written about previously (see The Observer, April 14, 2003). "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole world into war," Mr. Gernon told Mark Lasswell in the April 12 issue of TV Guide. "Gernon stated his belief that fear fueled both the Bush administration's adoption of a preemptive-strike policy and the public's acceptance of it," Mr. Lasswell reported. "Gernon said a similar fearfulness in a devastated post-World War I Germany was 'absolutely' behind that nation's acceptance of Hitler's extremism." So we Americans are cowards like the Germans who heiled Hitler.

The director of the miniseries seconded Mr. Gernon's parallel by telling Mr. Lasswell, "The resonance of Hitler's rise with current events is 'primarily what I wanted to show.'"

I've already commented on the staggering lack of historical and moral discrimination such statements represent. But at the time I hadn't seen the film - sorry, the "Miniseries Event" - itself, and didn't wish to comment on it until I could gauge whether it actually embodied the Ed Gernon vision, or whether Mr. Gernon was just retrospectively putting his own dim spin on the rise of Hitler. Still, the director had said the parallel between the rise of Hitler and the age of Bush "is primarily what I wanted to show." And after watching the review copy CBS sent me of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, it's clear (as I'll show in a moment) that in one crucial respect, it does embody the Ed Gernon parallel - and seems to alter history to do so.

So that's one scandal. The second scandal is what happened to Mr. Gernon after his remarks became public: the firing, which punished him for his political beliefs and made him a scapegoat, thus allowing others to escape responsibility. This was something I didn't learn about until after my column expressing amazement at the obtuseness of Mr. Gernon's TV Guide remarks came out (although it turned out his firing took place before my column appeared). I first read it in the April 10 edition of The Hollywood Reporter, three days after the Page Six preview of the TV Guide story: "Ed Gernon, the longtime head of Alliance Atlantis' longform division, has been fired from the company because of remarks made in a TV Guide interview regarding Alliance's upcoming CBS miniseries chronicling the early years of Adolf Hitler, sources said. Alliance Atlantis declined comment ... as did Gernon .... " Both Alliance and CBS dissociated themselves from Mr. Gernon's comments and maintained that "the tone or the content" of the miniseries did not reflect those views.

This is the second scandal - one I'm surprised more attention has not been paid to. I've heard no outcry from the bold Hollywood defenders of free speech against the "chill wind" of repression. Were they too busy trying to shut down Web sites that made fun of anti-war celebrities such as boycott-hollywood.us to care about Ed Gernon's case? Is it because it involves the mighty CBS? Or is it because, in his clumsy way, Mr. Gernon was expressing the embarrassingly simplistic and reductive nature of the politics you saw in the signs in the anti-war marches reading "Bush = Hitler"?

It's true that The Progressive magazine noted the Gernon firing in its "McCarthyism Watch" (and Los Angeles Times TV writer Howard Rosenberg criticized the move), but The Progressive isn't going to be pitching any sitcoms to CBS in the near future. Where are Tim and Susan, Moore and Gore (Vidal)? It really seems to me to be a scandal if Ed Gernon was fired for his politics: Much as I disagree with his simple-minded views, it's hard to imagine any other explanation than that Mr. Gernon was fired for telling the truth about them, about the vision he evidently felt was expressed in the film that he was in charge of. It seems so blatant you almost wonder if the "firing" was a temporary device to keep his views out of the picture in the p.r. run-up to the broadcast and he'll be back at his desk after it airs. But it's still the wrong message to send.

Here's the third scandal: Alliance Atlantis fired the messenger; both they and CBS have strenuously dissociated themselves and their film from the Gernon message. But they're either deceiving themselves (that's the kindest interpretation) or they fell asleep during a crucial sequence in the second segment of their "miniseries event" (not utterly improbable). The place where Mr. Gernon and his director's "message" is powerfully embodied, embedded - at least in the review copy sent out to the nation's TV writers. If Alliance was going to fire Ed Gernon for that message, and CBS is still going to complacently broadcast it anyway, then shouldn't they all have fired themselves instead?

Before I get to that crucial sequence - the one I've come to think of as "the Ed Gernon moment" - let's review the somewhat benighted history of this prime-time Hitler soap, which was originally titled Hitler: The Early Years.

It started out promisingly, proclaiming that it would be based on the first volume of Ian Kershaw's excellent Hitler biography, the one that covered the years 1889-1936. But Mr. Kershaw and the producers (ironic term now) parted ways for not-well-specified reasons, although CBS chief Les Moonves was quoted as calling Mr. Kershaw's approach "dry" and "academic." (Alas, serious history often is. Maybe a Survivor: Third Reich! approach would be less "dry.") It's not clear whether the historian left before or after the first script (not by Mr. Kershaw) got into circulation last year, and prompted protests from some Jewish groups, who argued that by focusing on Hitler's childhood and youth, it encouraged viewers to empathize with poor little sensitive and abused Adolf. And that, by concluding in 1934 - before the great slaughters began - it would be misleading, giving us a Hitler without (most of) his victims. The first script was described in The Times by someone who had read it as having an ending reminiscent of the triumphalism of the ending of Rocky.

So it was back to the drawing board for the CBS Hitler project, with a new scriptwriter and a new title. No longer Hitler: The Early Years, it was now Hitler: Origins of Evil. CBS president Les Moonves pledged that only about five percent of the film would deal with Hitler's childhood. (In that, he's correct: It's probably even less in the version I saw, but it still manages to intimate an "abuse excuse" for Hitler's later inhumanity.) As I've written here previously, I found the "Origins of Evil" subtitle disturbing, since before the script and title change Alliance Atlantis had approached me, asking me to be a consultant on a subplot based on a figure I'd written about in my book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. This was the anti-Hitler journalist Fritz Gerlich, one of the few conservative journalists to speak up against Hitler during his rise to power in Munich. Fortunately, as it turns out, I had a conflicting commitment. (As I've also written here, the director Jim Sheridan has been trying, without much success, to develop a script based on my chapters on the heroic and largely unrecognized anti-Hitler journalists in Munich, including Gerlich and the reporters and editors of the socialist Munich Post.) And so when Alliance Atlantis found me unavailable, they had two German books about Gerlich translated to base their new subplot on - which, as we'll see, led them into a dicey interpretation of Gerlich's fall.

But to my great relief, CBS made a second title change at the last minute (about the time I wrote about my concern that Hitler: The Origins of Evil not be associated in any way with the book I'd subtitled "The Search for the Origins of His Evil"). Now and forever, the CBS "miniseries event" will be known as Hitler: The Rise of Evil. (I'm surprised they didn't give it a Springsteen touch: Hitler: Come On Up for the Rising.)

But enough about me. I recount all this both for the sake of full disclosure and for emphasizing the irony of my coming to the defense of Ed Gernon (his job, not his views). What is fascinating is that CBS and Alliance Atlantis still maintain that the film has nothing to do with Ed Gernon's view of it, his belief that American support for the Bush administration should be looked at through the lens of Adolf Hitler's rise. That Mr. Gernon's vision is not reflected in either "the tone or the content" of the "miniseries event." After all, Mr. Gernon was merely the creative executive in charge.

As I said, I guess it's possible they weren't paying attention all the way through, or they just didn't get what was going on in the segment I call "the Ed Gernon moment" - although it could hardly have been hammered home with a heavier hand.

But in case anyone misses it, let me spell it out the way I saw it in the tape that was sent out (with a glossy press kit) to TV reviewers across the land. It will be interesting to see if there are some last-minute changes after I point out the alteration of history in the Ed Gernon moment.

The objectionable moment comes in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. It's Feb. 27, 1933; Hitler has been appointed chancellor by Reichs president Hindenburg, but he still doesn't enjoy dictatorial powers.

Hitler surveys the flames of the burning legislative chamber in Berlin. The movie has chosen to imply - ambiguously - a version of the origin of the Reichstag fire that has largely been discarded by contemporary historians, including Mr. Kershaw. Most (not all) historians now believe that Hitler or the Nazis themselves did not set the fire, or cause it to be set, but took advantage of the act of a disordered Dutch ex-communist to create a "state of emergency." One that allowed Hitler to suspend constitutional rights, ban the Communist party from the coming election and eventually make himself sole Führer.

The issue is what the docudrama has Hitler say as he surveys the flaming ruins of the Berlin legislative chamber. In the docudrama, we hear Hitler declare: "This is a signal from God. We're under siege. The terrorists have opened fire, and we will fire back" (my italics).

Beginning to get the Ed Gernon analogy? In case there's any doubt how we're supposed to read it, check out the way Hitler's words on the scene at the Reichstag fire are altered by the CBS "docudrama." In Mr. Kershaw's Hitler biography (the book upon which this miniseries was initially to be based), the historian gives us the standard version of what Hitler told his vice chancellor, Papen: "This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist!"

But the change from "we'll get the Communists" to "we'll get the terrorists" is hard to understand as anything but a labored attempt at a contemporary analogy. It's altering a key sentence in history to make a polemical point about today.

In case you miss the point, we then cut to Hitler previewing the proposed emergency "Enabling Acts" - which paved the way for Hitler crushing all opposition and assuming dictatorial powers - for Hindenburg, the German president. A grim Peter O'Toole, playing Hindenburg, gives the corrupt and senile buffoon far too much credit: He expresses reservations in words I don't recall reading coming from Hindenburg in my research for Explaining Hitler, but maybe they've come up with a source I'm unfamiliar with.

"Why, this completely overrides the constitution!" an outraged Hindenburg supposedly tells Hitler.

"These are troubled times, sir," Hitler supposedly replies. "The constitution cannot anticipate them. A national monument has been destroyed." (Gee, what analogous "national monument" destroyed by today's "terrorists" could they be seeking to conjure up?) "Our democracy is under attack, and if we're to wage war on these foreign infiltrators, certain civil rights must be suspended."

Again, Hitler predicated the assumption of dictatorial power on the alleged threat of an internal communist uprising. It was the specter of domestic Marxists, not "foreign infiltrators," that he invoked to obtain emergency powers. The phrase, one speculates, was inserted to help the slow of wit or hard of hearing to make the implicit analogy to today's War on Terror, also directed against "foreign infiltrators."

Nonetheless, just to hammer things home again, Hitler is shown in the temporary Reichstag, again using "terrorism" to justify gutting the German constitution: "In order for the government to carry out necessary procedures against terrorism, the Reichstag must support an enabling act. This act is your opportunity to hand power to act over to those who can wield it most effectively. From now on, all legislation will be handled by the administration." (Did Hitler use the term "administration," or is this a tendentious translation of "Reich" or "government" - an attempt to link Hitler to a certain other "administration" the CBS audience will relate to?) "Freedoms of speech, association and the press are temporarily suspended. Privacy rights ... are revoked." (See, it's Ashcroft and the Patriot Act!)

Yes, it's the Ed Gernon moment: The war on "terrorists" by the "administration" uses a Reichstag fire-type pretext (9/11 is implied) to achieve its evil goal of suspending constitutional rights. It's the Noam Chomsky - no, worse, the Gore Vidal - vision of 9/11, Iraq and the "Bush junta." (Mr. Vidal believes the "Bush junta" was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks.) It's the "Bush = Hitler" signs at the anti-war marches. But where are Chomsky, Vidal and the anti-war movement to defend their artistic spokesperson, Mr. Gernon, fired for telling the truth about the point of view of his work of art?

Think I'm exaggerating the Ed Gernon analogy? He even works in a confusing sort of "oil" explanation for the climactic events of the Hitler "miniseries event." It appears in the subplot involving the anti-Hitler journalist Fritz Gerlich. Gerlich was arrested as he was about to go to press with what associates believed was a crucial anti-Hitler scoop (whose nature is not known for sure), and eventually he was murdered by the Nazis during the "Night of the Long Knives." The June 1934 "Blood Purge," as it's also known, was mainly directed against Hitler's rival for power in the Nazi Party, Ernst Roehm, head of the SA (Stormtrooper) brownshirts. Hitler's excuse for the murders was that Roehm was plotting a coup against his leadership.

One of the German books about Fritz Gerlich that Mr. Gernon's people used in place of my chapter offers an elaborate conspiracy theory about Gerlich, Roehm and Hitler based largely on the word of a suspect intriguer named Georg Bell, who had worked for Roehm but had also served as a secret agent of some sort, and who may have been playing some self-serving, devious game. Bell apparently convinced Gerlich that he had defected from Roehm, bringing with him information of a foreign-based conspiracy to manipulate the Nazi Party in order to gain control of German oil contracts. A conspiracy supposedly initiated by a shadowy "man from London," as he's called in the "miniseries event" (actually Sir Henri Deterding, I believe, in Bell's conspiracy theory). According to the CBS "docudrama," this conspiracy theory had Roehm's SA receiving financing from "the man from London" in hopes Roehm would depose Hitler and come through with the favorable oil contracts for his clandestine foreign supporter.

I've always been troubled by this theory, skeptical of anything that emanates from the shadowy intriguer Bell. Bell has always rung false to me, you might say. But Gerlich may have bought into it; in the CBS version, he definitely does. It's too bad the movie portrays Gerlich's courageous final scoop as the product of Bell's conspiracy theory - a theory that tends, in effect, to legitimize Hitler's trumped-up "Roehm coup" excuse for the Blood Purge, in which Gerlich and other Hitler opponents were murdered as well. I have a feeling the miniseries producers haven't thought this through. And it pains me to see Gerlich's genuine heroism - and newsman savvy - come down to this in the film.

The one thing that pleased me most was the use they made of the detail about Gerlich's bloody spectacles. It was a detail that I had gotten in a personal communication from one of Gerlich's last surviving colleagues, who was in his 90's when I tracked him down in 1995, Dr. Johannes Steiner. Dr. Steiner recalled Gerlich's death in Dachau and added the chilling detail that, after the Gestapo had murdered Gerlich, they "sent to his widow, Sophie, Gerlich's spectacles, all spattered with blood."

I had highlighted Gerlich's bloody spectacles in my book as an emblem of a special sort of Nazi cruelty, the "gratuitous cruelty," that some have identified as the signature of their evil. And I'd seen those spectacles as a metaphor for a neglected way of looking at Hitler's rise - through the lens of his first explainers - through Gerlich's bloody spectacles. Did they get that detail from me or from another source? Never mind: I feel that if I have somehow contributed something to restoring the heroism of the long-marginalized Gerlich to the honorable place it deserves, even in this soap opera, I should feel I've accomplished something. It's certainly the most powerful moment in the film.

But the irony, of course, is that Gerlich deserves this recognition because he was a truth-teller, and lost his life for it. In the film, among Gerlich's last words in a letter to his wife, written on the way to Dachau, are these: "Urge others to speak out, even when what they have to say is not popular" (italics mine).

Gerlich was a smarter guy than Ed Gernon seems to be, on the evidence of Mr. Gernon's public statements. But Ed Gernon spoke out about his point of view, told the truth about the contemporary allegory embedded in his film, and he was fired for it, and this is wrong. Wrong especially for a film which ringingly urges people "to speak out, even when what they have to say is not popular." Maybe they should cut that line from the film, since they've rendered it so laughably hypocritical.

The Poisoned Stream "Gay" Influence in Human History. Volume One. Germany 1890-1945. View as HTML

Igra's primary value to us today is that he was an eyewitness to the changes that occurred in Germany; an eyewitness with a uniquely prophetic sense of the danger of "gay" influence in society. I consider it a great privilege to be able to review his work for the modern reader.
Igra's Thesis: Homosexuality Was at the Root of Nazi Evil

"I had finished the writing of [Germany's National Vice]," writes Samuel Igra, "when my attention was called to a British White Paper, 'Concerning the treatment of German Nationals (including the Jews) in Germany,' in which the following statement is made: 'The explanation for this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, and, in particular, homosexuality, are very prevalent in Germany. It seems to me that mass sexual perversion may offer an explanation of this otherwise inexplicable outbreak.' [Page 20. His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1939].
"The author of that statement is Mr. R. T. Smallbones, who was British Consul-General at Frankfort-on-Main from 1932 until the outbreak of the war in 1939. Previous to 1932 he had been stationed in other German cities. His opinion therefore rests on firsthand experience of the German people for a long period of years. I am convinced that his explanation is the correct one. For, as a matter of fact, the widespread existence of sexual perversion in Germany, not only at the time the Hitler movement rose to power but also under the Kaiser's regime, is notorious... And authorities on criminal sociology are agreed that there is a causal connection between mass sexual perversion and the kind of mass atrocities committed by the Germans (ibid:7).

The Roehm Purge, then, was not a "moral cleansing" of the Nazi ranks, but a re-alignment of power behind the German government which was primarily forced upon Hitler by powerful political elements whose support he needed to maintain control. Igra goes on to point out that not only did the majority of the SA homosexuals survive the purge, but that the massacre was largely implemented by homosexuals.

There is no question that homosexuality figures prominently in the history of the Holocaust. As we have noted, the ideas for disposing of the Jews originated with Lanz von Leibenfels. The first years of terrorism against the Jews were carried out by the homosexuals of the SA. The first concentration camp, as well as the system for training its brutal guards, was the work of Ernst Roehm. The first pogrom, Kristallnacht, was orchestrated in 1938 by the homosexual Reinhard Heydrich. And it was the transvestite Goering who started the "evolution of the Final Solution...[with an] order to Heydrich (Jan. 24, 1939) concerning the solution of the Jewish question by 'emigration' and 'evacuation'" (Robinson:25).

Homosexuality and the Nazi PartyOne of the keys to understanding both the rise of Nazism and the later persecution of some homosexuals by the Nazis is found in this early history of the German "gay rights" movement. For it was the CS which created and shaped what would become the Nazi persona, and it was the loathing which these "Butches" held for effeminate homosexuals ("Femmes") which led to the internment of some of the latter in slave labor camps in the Third Reich.

More significantly, many of the guards and administrators responsible for the infamous concentration camp atrocities were homosexuals themselves, which negates the proposition that homosexuals in general were being persecuted and interned.

The enduring "Butch/Femme" conflict among German homosexuals clearly had a substantial bearing on the treatment of pink-triangle prisoners.

...While the neo-pagans were busy attacking from without, liberal theologians undermined Biblical authority from within the Christian church. The school of so-called "higher criticism," which began in Germany in the late 1800s, portrayed the miracles of God as myths; by implication making true believers (Jew and Christian alike) into fools. And since the Bible was no longer accepted as God's divine and inerrant guide, it could be ignored or reinterpreted. By the time the Nazis came to power, "Bible-believing" Christians, (the Confessing Church) were a small minority. As Grunberger asserts, Nazism itself was a "pseudo-religion" (ibid.:79) that competed, in a sense, with Christianity and Judaism.

From the early years, leading Nazis openly attacked Christianity. Joseph Goebbels declared that "Christianity has infused our erotic attitudes with dishonesty" (Taylor:20). It is in this campaign against Judeo- Christian morality that we find the reason for the German people's acceptance of Nazism's most extreme atrocities. Their religious foundations had been systematically eroded over a period of decades by powerful social forces. By the time the Nazis came to power, German culture was spiritually bankrupt. Too often, historians have largely ignored the spiritual element of Nazi history; but if we look closely at Hitler's campaign of extermination of the Jews, it becomes clear that his ostensive racial motive obscures a deeper and more primal hatred of the Jews as the "People of God."

The probable reason for Hitler's attack on Christianity was his perception that it alone had the moral authority to stop the Nazi movement. But Christians stumbled before the flood of evil. As Poliakov notes, "[W]hen moral barriers collapsed under the impact of Nazi preaching...the same anti-Semitic movement that led to the slaughter of the Jews gave scope and license to an obscene revolt against God and the moral law. An open and implacable war was declared on the Christian tradition...[which unleashed] a frenzied and unavowed hatred of Christ and the Ten Commandments" (Poliakov:300).

"The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution Of The Christian Churches"

The Donovan Nuremberg Trials collection

Gay Nazis: the Role of Homosexuality in Nazism & Hitler's Rise to ... Thus butch hypermasculinity, visibility for homosexuals, and organization were the three necessary ingredients in the mix which allowed the SA leaders to make their unique and essential contribution to the rise of Nazism. Another important consideration is that visibility is enabled when homosexuality assumes a political voice. In this way, the politicization of homosexuality, which supported gays in the process of socially identifying themselves as such, was a necessary condition for Hitler's success.

Was Hitler's Homosexuality Nazism's Best-Kept Secret?

Sadomasochism That sadomasochism and homoeroticism often occur together with Nazism in the Holocaust film is a fact that has long been recognized and is frequently observed. Ilan Avisar, in Screening the Holocaust, traces what he calls the connection of Nazism and "sexual deviance" to Rossellini's Open City.[1] Gerd Gemünden suggests that in 1942, "the association of male homosexuality with sadism and perversion [as in the effeminate portrayal of Heydrich in Hangmen Also Die] ... anticipates postwar films such as The Damned (Visconti 1969) and Night Porter (Cavani 1974)."[2]

[1] Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 134-48

[2] Gerd Gemünden, "Brecht in Hollywood: Hangmen Also Die and the Anti-Nazi Film," TDR 43 (4) (Winter 1999): 65-7; The earliest book in English to conflate Nazism with sexual perversion was Samuel Igra's Germany's National Vice (London: Quality Press, Ltd., 1945).

Hermeneutical Issues In The Use Of The Bible To Justify The ... sin of the two groups of men in Sodom and Gibeah is, in both instances, the desire to engage in homosexual rape. This practice occurred in the Ancient Middle East when armies were defeated, and it occurs today in certain all-male settings, such as prisons.[11] The conclusion, more clearly for Sodom than for Gibeah[12], is that the goal of homosexual rape is the male inhabitants' desire to express their dominance over the strangers.

Violence and Homosexuality

The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror ALL SERIAL KILLERS, almost without exception, are severely sexually abused as children.

In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.

...It is also the silence that forces victimized Arab boys into invisibility. Even though the society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humiliation is a given. Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back.

Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him. In the recent terrorist strikes, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists' bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate and pathological testament of the re-masculinization of their emasculated selves.

Conclusion to the Psychological Effects of Combat - Dave Grossman, Author It is often said that "All's fair in love and war," and this expression provides a valuable insight into the human psyche, since these twin, taboo fields of sexuality and aggression represent the two realms in which most individuals will consistently deceive both themselves and others.

In the field of developmental psychology, a mature adult is sometimes defined as someone who has attained a degree of insight and self-control in the two areas of sexuality and aggression. This is also a useful definition of maturity in civilizations.

Texas TV stations pull CBS 'Hitler' TV miniseries
By JEREMY BROWN
May 15, 2003

The CBS affiliate in Corpus Christi, Texas, has opted not to air a two-part miniseries dramatizing the young life of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Dale Remy, general manager of KZTV Channel 10, said he was concerned that the film could give harmful ideas to white supremacists and disturbed young people.

"The Nazi concept, if you will, is still very real, and I think anything we do to give that particular thinking a venue, a format, is a mistake," Remy said. "More people that are already on the fence on this and have issues might find something in this character to identify with, and that bothers me tremendously."

The company that owns KZTV has a second CBS affiliate in Laredo, Texas, that has also chosen not to air "Hitler: the Rise of Evil." CBS spokesman Chris Ender said that of the more than 200 CBS affiliates in the country, he knew of no others that have declined to show the film.

"It is a story that everybody knows how it ended, but very few know how it began," Ender said. "We think the story is compelling, and we think the producers have done an excellent job of presenting it in a compelling and thoughtful manner."

The network considers "Hitler: the Rise of Evil" - scheduled to run Sunday and Tuesday - its event mini-series for the May sweeps, Ender said. Locally, KZTV plans to run "Superman II" and "Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear" in those slots.

"If Nazism had risen, fallen and gone away, I would not have the issue with it that I do," Remy said. "My issue is that Nazism is real in our society. I think that we as the media have to take some responsibility and I just felt like the Hitler life story was a line I wasn't willing to cross."

The mini-series will air, however, on the Corpus Christi UPN affiliate, KTOV Channel 7, which sometimes picks up network programming that other local affiliates have passed on.

"We believe it's a very good program," said Fred Hoffmann, owner and general manager at KTOV. "We see absolutely nothing wrong with it. I find it very difficult to believe that CBS would put on something that would be offensive to any part of our country."

Robert Carlyle, a Scottish actor who has appeared in movies such as "Angela's Ashes," "The Full Monty" and "Trainspotting," plays Hitler. Other stars include Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole and Matthew Modine. Channing plays the dictator's mother, Clara.

O'Toole takes up the part of Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who appointed Hitler chancellor in 1934. Modine portrays Fritz Gerlich, a German journalist who opposed Hitler and was ultimately murdered.

According to CBS, the company that developed the mini-series, Alliance Atlas, drew on biographies, periodicals, documentaries, archival information, journalistic accounts and consultations with prominent academics for research.

The miniseries has inspired other controversies. Early on, the Anti-Defamation League, the New York-based group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, came out against the mini-series. But the league has since publicly endorsed it, saying the film shows how fragile democracy is and how potent evil is.

"You can't look at films like 'The Pianist' or 'Schindler's List' or a TV series like 'Shoah' without being repelled by what Hitler and his followers did," said Rabbi Kenneth Roseman of Temple Beth El in Corpus Christi. "I generally tend to think that it is more worthwhile to tell the truth and that people are smart enough and ethical and moral enough to draw the proper conclusion. I trust people."

If the presentation doesn't identify him as such a socialist, then it is not accurate.

This is an oversimplification. In Germany's political structure, Nazism was on the right, and while it was indeed socialist (national socialist by their own party title), they were diametrically opposed to the "communist struggle" on the left.

It's a basic tenet of political science that the likeness of political forces within a given society at the extreme right and extreme left will come to resemble one another. To identify them as "being the same" is naive.

A quick examination of ideology reveals that communism and fascism are quite different animals. Fascism identifies the nation itself as having unique and spiritual qualities that demand it to exert totalitarian control; communism teaches that the whole world should follow a set of practices that transcend borders in and of themselves, and are not connected to particular countries.

The net result of these beliefs is often the same. In fact, communism has caused more death and destruction in the last 100 years than fascism by far.

The true irony of the left's assertion that Bush is a fascist is that he and his father have stood against Nazis and Baathists alike, two clearly fascist political movements. Bush senior was also a pilot in WW2. That America offers the world something unique and essential is something neoconservatives hold to be true. In fact, if we weren't communists, we'd be slave labor to Japanese and German overlords if it weren't for American nationalism.

But to suggest that communism (or leftist socialism) are equivalent to fascism (national socialism), is a simplification that is dangerous. Just because the right in this country today has the moral high ground does not mean that it will always be that way. Tyranny can appear from either side of the political spectrum. Knowing the difference and being prepared to answer criticisms from the left is the best way to handle the risks of fascism that exist in any society, and defend a political movement that has both the best interests of America and the world in mind.

Neoconservatives need to be able to explain why the Japanese Co-prosperity sphere (national socialism again) was a hideous carricature of American hegemony and our battle against totalitarianism all across the world. Believe it or not, there are those who now question our use of strategic bombing and so forth to fight this scourge. But an older objection was of a more recent historic nature: our interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Laos, and Iran. There is no question that Maoism and Stalinism were worse than our tactics, and that always has to be the answer. It's possible that the State Department made those situations far worse than they needed to be, and that is merely an exhortation to avoid making the same mistake again in the future, not a worthy criticism of American defense of capitalist democracy. Freedom to form capital is just as essential as freedom of speech, and anyone who questions that is on the left, is a communist, and is not likely to be a fascist.

Evil comes in all flavors!

"There are no paralells between Hitler and Bush. The situation in Germany between the wars (or if you like, between the battles of the "80 Year War") was truly dire, with spectacular hyper-inflation and social unrest."

If anything, the closest President to Hitler has to have been Bill Clinton.

Hitler siezed power through lies, murder, extortion, and massive media propoganda. Clearly the style of Bill Clinton.

One must remember the REAL SOURCE OF HITLER'S POWER - - the DISARMING OF THE CITIZENRY!

Follow Me! Turn In Your Guns!

Emperor Ambiguous Speaks To His Clones

In 1928, five years before the rise of Hitler, Germany's freely elected government enacted a "Law on Firearms and Ammunition." This law required anyone who owned a firearm, or who wanted to own a firearm, to make themselves known to the authorities. Anyone who wanted to purchase a firearm had to get a "Firearms Acquisition Permit." If you needed ammunition, you had to get an "Ammunition Acquisition Permit." When you wanted to go hunting, you had to get an "Annual Hunting Permit." Every firearm that changed hands professionally had to have a serial number and the maker's or dealers name stamped into the metal. "Proof of need" was made a condition for issuance of all licenses, not just the carry permit. Mandatory prison sentences were imposed on anyone who professionally sold or transferred a firearm or ammunition without a license. Truncheons and stabbing weapons were subject to the same licensing requirements as firearms, in terms of their manufacture and sale.

As a result of the 1928 Law, all firearms and firearms owners were registered! To take firearms from anyone they distrusted, the Nazis simply did not renew permits. Under the law, their privately created law, the Nazis could now easily confiscate all firearms and ammunition from any, or all, selected groups. The gun law of 1928 had served the Nazis well. It made almost all law abiding firearms owners known to the authorities. The 1928 law on firearms and ammunition helped the Nazis to destroy democracy in Germany, by disarming the law abiding majority, whom they feared.

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"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration!Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow us into the future" - Adolph Hitler, 1935

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Adolph Hitler's Nazi Weapons Law of 1938 ,specifically outlawed firearms ownership, by Jews and Gypsies and anti-Nazi opposition successfully eliminating 13,000,000 of his foes.

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It's Sweepstime For Hitler, But Winter for Truth