• Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    if someone made a multi-part series that sought to “proportionately” display death and destruction done to Palestinians and Israelis (based only on numbers of dead) they could produce a 10 part, one hour per episode series and spend only 30 mins on Israeli deaths and the other 9.5/10 hrs on Palestinian deaths. and that’s just as of right now. And also only based on deaths not accounting for missing, injured, total destruction of Gaza making it unliveable, etc. That ratio is only going to worsen and perhaps in the end the “balance of suffering” will make it only 15 mins of a 10 hour series on just the events of Oct 7 and going forward. ignoring the 75 years which would keep pushing that ratio down to being generous to even give Israelis a 1 minute fast-mention of violence done to them and basically a solid 10 hours explaining what the Israelis did to the Palestinians.

    I know that’s a somewhat silly way to look at it, but this project, when framed in context, is beyond silly. It’s grotesque. He plans to make a documentary to explain and forgive the crimes of Israel and condemn the population which has been completely victimized for basically a century.

    I’m not exaggerating when I say it would be like someone making a film about the Nazis and how the mean Soviets and western allies beat them up for the small crime of wanting an Aryan homeland. Or something like that. Of course films like this exist (Birth of a Nation?) and most people (rightfully) view them as gross and for what they are… apologia for horrific behavior. They’re seen now days, separated by time, that way anyway.

    It’s probably too much of a stretch, but, fuck it. Spielberg is known for a ton of good movies including Schindler’s List. That movie has always sat a tad bit uneasy with me because although it depicts (as far as I’m aware) a pretty much accurate story, he also throws in a dash of Zionism that even when I was younger, and didn’t know what Israel even was, I was like “wait why the fuck is this random country honoring this guy?” Spielberg fucking tied the story back into “and Schindler saved all those Jews and some went to Israel so you should support Israel (implied) just like Oskar would have wanted. Don’t they deserve a “homeland?””

    That shit has been stewing in my brain on a low simmer for like 20 years now. I think I finally found the words to express how I felt when I first watched that movie. I remember it being extremely heart wrenching, he definitely displays the absolute disregard that Nazis had for humanity. You can’t help but leave the film thinking or wondering what you’d do, why it happened, etc. A great film as far as storytelling goes. I mean, it’s Spielberg, come on. But he just had to add that fucking Zionist shit at the end (maybe it’s at the beginning too, been a while).

  • LesbianLiberty [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    This fucking guy, he funded a Holocaust museum in one of the few Synagogues left in Cuba, which is a good thing, right? The Holocaust is literally one of the world’s greatest tragedies.

    EXCEPT when I went to see it recently, it talked about the Holocaust, si, but it was also chock full of plaques about the beauty of Israel’s project and there were a ton of those “bring them home” posters everywhere. There were even posterboards talking about antisemitism still existing in the imperial core, which, yeah! But half of it was just about Jeremy fucking Corbyn.

    Anyway I hate anything this dickhead touches now.

  • blashork [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    God I hate that shitstain. Let me dump another shitty thing he did in this thread. Did you know that he actively prevents people from making movies that feature any of MLK’s speech’s. He owns the film rights to them and sits on them to make sure they are in no way preserved or depicted in film.

    Fuck his zionist ass. It would be so funny if he visited isntreal and got 🔻

    • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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      11 months ago

      lmao owning the rights to depicting history, this country is fucked. intellectual property violation is the fakest form of “theft” right behind “organized retail shoplifters”

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Did you know that he actively prevents people from making movies that feature any of MLK’s speech’s. He owns the film rights to them and sits on them to make sure they are in no way preserved or depicted in film

      uhhhhh what? i don’t understand what you mean, and like copyright law is weird and stupid so i’m willing to believe some kind of fuckery–but i’ve definitely seen MLK speeches in documentary films

      • blashork [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        He and dreamworks got the rights to the speech from king’s estate and sat on them for a long ass time. Apparently a lot of movies with mlk in them rewrite a lot of the lines because of copyright stuff. Here’s the old vice article I found about it. link

        Apparently they’re finally making something with the rights. recent forbes article So yeah they’ve had the rights for a while and this has caused a lot of issues for anyone else who ever wanted to make mlk related works.

  • LaughingLion [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    if we are talking about insurgent operations across the history of just modern warfare, the october 7th one is not even particularly brutal or barbaric and is only notable in its scale

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Oh cool a thread where I get to point out a disturbing thing in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

    You ever noticed how the GIs bleed and the German soldiers don’t, really? I’m not saying you should feel a whole lot of sympathy for the wehrmacht jabronis but it is striking once you notice it. Aside from a few shots most of the time they just explode with powdery dust and slump over like so many storm troopers. The GIs bleed out, call for their mothers, moan scream, but not their enemies.

    Aside from more nuanced takes this was the thing I noticed that started me down the path of becoming very critical of the film. It’s fuckin weird, y’all.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      That scene early in the movie when the GIs execute those two surrendering germans feels like a perfunctory stab at a “war is hell” moment, but now that I think about it it never comes up again, the characters just quip about it and then the movie forgets to do anything with it.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        If you look it up they’re actually saying something like “we’re Czech not German” right before they get popped which makes it even more awkward.

        • Vncredleader@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          Yeah iirc that’s meant to be a dark reference to conscripted German Czechs. That’s the closest Spielberg can get to empathizing with someone in eastern Europe

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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          11 months ago

          “we’re Czech not German”

          Considering the usual anglo opinions and their history with Slavs and Germans, admitting to being Czech worsened their situation a lot.

    • Walk_On [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      What the fuck? What’s this fascist apologia nonsense? I’ve seen reactionary right wingers make very similar claims as a way to push some kind of clean wehrmacht theory. Shocking it’s getting upvoted so much.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        I don’t support or push clean Wehrmacht theory bullshit. I’d argue that the way the film selectively applies bloody war violence is a dangerous game to play. Fascists are human beings. They breathe, they shit, they die like human beings. Pretending or portraying people as not-human is a thing fascists do. Again, allow me to reiterate. I’m not saying we should have sympathy for the German soldiers getting blown away by Tom Hanks and Co. I’m saying it is a little disturbing how the filmmakers went about showing it.

        • Walk_On [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          I reject that hypothesis. If it was an oppressed people being othered than it would make sense and the criticism would work, but we’re talking about fascists. Again right wing movie “analysts” like Rob Ager pushes this stuff. Ager has a video called “Killing Private Kraut” that is solely dedicated to pushing this “theory”.

          • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            This turned into an effortpost, so

            Affording humanity to every human is yet another good thing that good people truly believe, but that fascists insincerely hide behind. They don’t hide behind it because it’s nonsense, they hide behind it because it’s right, which makes it good for hiding behind. Of course, we know that their only problem with dehumaization is when it’s applied to them. Their ideology venerates mass murder, which necessitates the adoption of a nonsensical heuristic that was built backwards from the genocide it exists to justify. They can dehumanize all they want because it does no damage to their play-dough like worldview.

            Our heuristic is materialism, the pursuit of understanding, from the ground up, the factors that make something what it is. Fascists can simply say that members of X race are ontologically inferior because they belong to X race, and that doesn’t clash with their worldview at all, because it’s not a worldview actually concerned with truth, it only exists to justify power. We on the other hand understand that fascists are made, not born. There is no gene or skull shape that makes a person ontologically fascist, only an intersection of conditions and experiences. This isn’t to say they deserve no blame, or shouldn’t be removed from society: they still made the choice, and they absolutely must be removed from society. But I dont think we should get in the habit of putting aside our understanding of all the things that motivate people to become fascists when the prospect of having to get rid of them makes understanding them uncomfortable. Fascists kill on easy mode, because killing is their only true value, and they can easily embrace whatever post-hoc justifications. We are blursed with understanding the real causes of these conflicts, the real nature of capital and propaganda, and to embrace an understanding of the enemy as comorehensive automatons feels like a big step back in our understanding, even if it doesn’t change what has to be done.

            On the other hand…I also don’t think youre wrong. I think self-identified fascists really have made themselves less human in a real way by hatefully cutting themselves off in their own minds from the rest of humanity, and defining themselves against it. I dodnt know if I’m communicating this part clearly, bit it’s like the ultimate “If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes”. But instead of smelling shit everywhere, they see evil scheming troglodytes everywhere, becoming evil scheming troglodytes themselves in the process of obsessively “rooting out” the hidden enemy they’ve been told is to blame for their conditions.

            I guess the root of my disagreement is that there are different ways of dehumanizing, and that the way fascists rhetorically dehumanize others isn’t the same as the way they actually dehumanize themselves. The way the wermacht are portrayed in Saving Private Ryan (stone-faced goons with little self-preservation instinct who run into the protagonist’s bullets, whereupon they emit a puff of torso dust and fall dead immediately, usually not even screaming) is pretty close to the way the americans are portrayed in Nations’s Pride, the nazi propaganda movie in Inglorious Basterds. Then contrast that with the SS officer character from the same movie. Hans Landa is no unthinking ghoul, but that’s not the movie whitewashing nazis: it’s an even stronger condemnation. He’s a human being, with desire and fears, who also just happens to love his job of slaughtering families. Fascism hasn’t reformatted his brain and overwritten the person he used to be; it’s been readily normalized and assimilated into the rest of his personality, and thats fucking horrifying. When he’s triumphant, he takes joy. When his flesh is carved, he screams in pain. Naziism hasn’t scooped out those human feelings, it’s infected and twisted them to it’s own ends. That’s how fascists dehumanize themselves, not by becoming unfeeling automatons but by becoming gleeful sadists. I actually feel that to talk about them as if they’re just robots is letting them off the hook. It’s everyone else who they see as just robots, or who they really really wish were just robots. It’s a mental crutch that they need and we don’t. We don’t need to treat them like zombies or murder robots, because what they actually are is so much worse.

    • voight [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      this made me realize we need a Booru for Fuknslammer posts. it’s a crime I can’t reply to this with unlimited genocide on the dinosaurs with jungle plant-swathed qin shi huangdi

  • Salmarez [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Even as a kid, I wondered why the main villain in the Young Sherlock Holmes was an Egyptian. Better yet, that Egyptian was actually Moriarty! Spielberg was probably still butthurt from the Yom Kippur War.

      • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        Not really, since every Nazi is depicted as an unrepentant, vicious, brutal, self-interested monster except for Schindler, who gives up everything at great personal risk to save lives, and believes that when the liberators arrive he’ll be shot regardless. The movie even goes to some lengths to show how after the war ends a bunch of the Nazis we saw throughout are executed.

  • WIIHAPPYFEW [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Sure, the biker gang from down the highway just burned down an entire small town, but the fact that one guy from there shot one of their little cousins is much more important (and it’s the townspeople’s fault for not voting that shooter out when they had the chance anyway (and the gang had a right to burn down their old apartments and force them to move to the town too, and they can use the Main Street as a firing range as much as they want)) smuglord