Free Republic

In the history of the cinema, the German director Veit Harlan occupies an especially ignominious position. It is his name that is attached to “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made, a box office success in Nazi Germany in 1940 that was so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS. But what motivated Harlan to write and direct such a film? Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or just a filmmaker too fearful of retribution to say no to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief? Those are some...

Dan Rather immortalized the phrase "fake but accurate". Now a Marine-turned-actor tells the media that Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is "not true-true but the basics are there". The actor is Montreal-born Eric Mehalacopoulos who stars in Broomfield's slanderous film about Haditha. Broomfield brings to life Congressman Murtha's account of enraged Marines, extracting vengence for an IED, by indiscriminately slaughtering innocent Iraqis. "Not true-true" is at odds with director Broomfield who bills his latest film (which received its world premiere in Toronto this past week) as "the unflinching true story". But after five hearings regarding the incident in Haditha, Murtha's...

Rewriting Germany's Nazi Past - A Society in Moral DeclineManfred Gerstenfeld The German postwar governments have made great efforts to reeducate the population. In recent years, however, there are increasing signs of shifts in German attitudes toward rewriting its past. Some of these involve the sanitizing of history, while others are reflected in an increasing lack of sensitivity among society's elites as well as the mainstream toward the use of concepts and semantics from the Hitler period. Franz Muentefering, chairman of the German Socialist party, compared certain foreign investors to damaging insects. The weekly Stern listed seven "locust firms";...

Michael Moore insists he will arrange a television programme for the night before the US election, after a planned showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 was cancelled. Meanwhile an anti-Moore documentary has come under fire for allegedly misrepresenting one of its interviewees. In Demand, a US cable channel, had been planning a Michael Moore Election Eve Special, including a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 and interviews with anti-Bush celebrities. Citing "legitimate legal and business concerns", In Demand has now cancelled the show. Characteristically, Moore told the AP news agencies that In Demand had bowed to pressure from "top Republicans". "Apparently people have put...

Michael Moore's much-disparaged film could actually change the course of civilisation, writes John Berger. Fahrenheit 9/11 is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event. Most commentators try to dismiss the event and disparage the film. Let's explore why. The artists on the Cannes film festival jury apparently voted unanimously to award Michael Moore's film the Palme d'Or. Since then it has touched many millions across the world. In the United States, its box-office takings for the first six weeks amounted to more than $US100 million ($A142 million), which...

<p>She didn't twist my arm, but Mom convinced me to see Michael Moore's new movie.</p> <p>I'd told her there was no way I'd spend my hard-earned money on his propaganda!</p> <p>Mom – a dyed-in-the-wool FDR Democrat – knows my politics. When she learned I'd not seen the movie, she had a cause: get me to attend with her and a crowd of her Democrat club buddies. In fact, her local theatre booked the movie because Mom touted it to them.</p>

Scenes in Fahrenheit 911 of U.S. soldiers taunting and sexually humiliating Iraqi civilians following the successful invasion were shot by Urban Hamid, an embedded Swedish-Iraqi journalist who is presently a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, the university's student newspaper Camera disclosed today (Tuesday). Moore has declined to respond to questions from interviewers about whether he resorted to subterfuge in order to embed photographers among U.S. forces and has been criticized for not showing footage of the abuses to U.S. military authorities earlier. But Camera reported that the controversial footage by Hamid was actually shown at a theater in...

I am only 15 years old, but I saw ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' I came out of the movie and thought about it. Wow, this man (President Bush) is leading our country -- how depressing! I do believe that everyone should be required to see this movie. Another thing: Michael Moore said that if anyone did not like this movie it did not matter, because it was all fact. So I challenge you people that hated this movie, what was not true? Sarah Mayer, Oak Forest

Der ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew") is the most famous Nazi propaganda film. It was produced at the insistence of Joseph Goebbels, under such active supervision that it is effectively his work. It depicts the Jews of Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they are an alien people which have taken over the world through their control of banking and commerce, yet which still live like animals. Though unquestionably vicious, many would say that, by today's standards, it is also crude and transparent. The narrator explains the Jews' ratlike behavior, while showing footage of rats squirming from sewers...

Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 propaganda film style reminds of Joseph Goebbels' Der ewige Jude {The Eternal Jew}. The parallels are unmistakable. Crude and full of half truths, some segemts are absurdly laughable. They both play fast and loose with the truth to create support for a lie. For example, notice the footage of a kosher slaughter {still row 22} where a jewish rabbi is falsely shown to be gleeful because a cow is bleeding to death. They both rely on a heap of innuendo and conspiracy theories, that if to be belived, one must take a leap of faith: -Goebbels...

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious...