Mission to Moscow: A Very Short History of PropArt

Barack Obama's intimate relations and conference calls with aspiring artists at National Endowment for the Arts may come as a shock to purists, it is anything but a novelty!

New York Post: "To Russia with love", by Lou Lumenick

The lost film that shows how Hollywood — and Washington — embraced the Soviets

On Christmas Eve, 1942, screenwriter Howard Koch was packing for a trip to New York when he received an urgent summons to meet with his bosses, Warner Bros. founders Harry and Jack Warner.

After thanking Koch for his contributions to “Casablanca,” which had opened a month earlier, the moguls ordered a reluctant Koch, as his patriotic duty, to whip out a script for an unusual pro-Soviet propaganda epic to be directed by “Casablanca” helmer Michael Curtiz.

“Mission to Moscow,” which arrives on DVD Tuesday (at warnerarchive.com) after decades in obscurity, turned out to be Warner Bros.’ most notorious production, an eye-catching jaw-dropper labeled by a critic as a “$2 million love letter” to dictator Joseph Stalin, now best remembered as the No. 2 mass murderer of the 20th century.

Most remarkably, the film Jack Warner would call the only one he ever regretted making — after a grilling before the House Un-American Activities Committee that sent Koch into blacklisted exile — was personally commissioned by the President of the United States, who asked Warner Bros. to make it as part of Hollywood’s efforts to whip Americans into a patriotic frenzy during World War II.

“President Roosevelt himself asked Harry and Jack Warner to assist in educating, entertaining and enlightening the American people,” says Harry’s granddaughter, film historian Cass Warner. “Little was known about the Soviet Union, who were our allies at the time, [but] this never came to the forefront even when the film was used as evidence of the Bros. making subversive films during the McCarthy Era.” (...) >>>

Mission To Moscow
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"Triumph of the Will", or Defeat of Delusion

On display tonight is a full length National Socialist gem, a propaganda film directed by German artist and photographer, Leni Riefenstahl featuring the 1934 Nazi rally at Nurnberg.

Like Hitler's blueprint for war "Mein Kampf" the classic may well be on the index of some countries in Europe, but it proves that censoring and suppression is a mistake: "Triumph des Willens" - or "Triumph of the Will" - is a revelation as well as an education.

We need to keep in mind that Corporal Hitler was elected into power just a year earlier, in 1933 on a narrative of restoring to its former glory the Fatherland, home of the victims, the German People.

They saw themselves as victims on a number of counts. First of all, of the greedy, selfish, materialistic Anglo-Saxon liberal Capitalism; then from the perspective of the Marxist dialectic, which views the world entirely from a oppressor versus oppressed agonistic.

Furthermore the defeat in World War I for which the Jewry, Communists and other subversives were blamed in a Sorelian myth (the Dolchstoß Legend), was a third contribution to the self image as an underdog. The harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty did the rest for the narrative of victimhood.

World War I had been wholesale slaughter and the Versailles Treaty was no joke. Can you blame a people, a leader or a party for fostering and furthering the ideal to right such a wrong? Many righteous Germans, other Europeans and Americans thought not.

Sir Winston Churchill wrote in his Nobel Prize winning "Memoirs of the Second World War": ""I had no national prejudices against Hitler at the time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character. I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side. He had a perfect right to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England, Germany and France to be friends."

On the ideological level we find in the title of the movie a somewhat curious statement: the triumph of will, but whose will? Corporal Hitler's? No, its a notion that can be traced back to the collectivist philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideal society can best be summed up as a theofascist tribe, having replaced the role of the sovereign ruler with the community's under the State. That entity was thought of as having an animus of its own - the 'common will' -  the infallible standard of morality to whose sovereignty all drones have a duty to answer and submit.

Corporal Hitler, the National Socialist Party and all that happened as a result, suddenly doesn't seem that enigmatic anymore!

For whatever reason, today we don't speak of the will so much anymore. In Postmodern times it's all about subjectivity, personal taste and "if it pleases us". So, ways are found to pleasantly manipulate us. And when that's the case we may suddenly find it in our hearts that, "Yes, we can". The pragmatism is the same though: we do whatever we want because, hey ... it's Us!

Finally, we can now witness for ourselves the curious observation made frequently by historians: the pounding rhetoric - not just of victimhood - but also of peace and concord from the man we now know to have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the last century.

Here's one of Riefenstahl's master pieces, "Triumph of the Will". More on her formidable legacy on this site.



- Filed on Articles in "History Compiled" -

Of Eco Melodrama, Sentiment and Agit Prop: a Review

Pajamas: "The BBC Presents: Sex and Global Warming Propaganda," by Mike McNally

Not so long ago you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV news without seeing pictures of ‘stranded’ polar bears (who weren’t stranded), ‘collapsing’ ice sheets (ice sheets have collapsed for as long as there have been ice sheets), or Manhattan under water to illustrate some new claim about how runaway global warming was going to lead to imminent catastrophe.

Alongside the propaganda masquerading as news, Hollywood and TV companies have been churning out fictional disinformation in the shape of films such as The Day After Tomorrow and Happy Feet (any self-respecting propaganda machine knows the importance of catching ‘em young), and various small-screen dramas and ‘drama-documentaries’.

- Caption: The People's Cube: "Al Gore's Carbon Footprint Discovered" -

But with no significant increase in global temperatures for the past ten years or so, and atmospheric monitoring failing to find any evidence of the much-vaunted ‘greenhouse signature,’ what used to be a steady stream of apocalyptic stories emanating from the newsrooms has all but dried up, and the job of trying to persuade us that the threat from global warming is real is increasingly being left to the entertainment divisions of the mass media.

The BBC has long been one of the worst offenders in terms of biased reporting on the issue, and now the Beeb has stepped up to the plate to address the propaganda deficit with its two-part drama Burn Up. [Note: Burn Up is a joint BBC-Canadian production, which just aired in Great Britain. It will also air in Canada, and it’ll likely find its way on to US television at some point. There are no outright spoilers in what follows, but a couple of minor ones.]

The plot of Burn Up revolves around the newly appointed boss of Arrow Oil, Tom McConnell, who’s drawn into all manner of intrigue surrounding attempts to get the United States to sign a ‘Kyoto 2′ treaty at a climate change summit in Canada. Tom begins to question his company’s commitment to fossil fuels when he falls under the spell of Holly (Neve Campbell), Arrow’s hot new appointee to the supposedly token position of head of renewables.

Battling Holly for Tom’s soul is oil lobbyist Mack, played by The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford. Mack is essentially JR Ewing without the good points, and in case the viewer should be in any doubt as to the extent of his moral bankruptcy, in one of Burn Up’s many gratuitously America-bashing scenes Mack is shown watching a faith healer at work on cable TV, and exclaiming, with tears in his eyes, “Praise the Lord!” It’s not bad enough that he’s a shill for the oil industry - he’s a Bible-bashing shill for the oil industry.

Tom’s conversion from oilman to eco-warrior is helped along by an encounter with another pretty woman, an Inuit scientist and environmental campaigner called Mika. Mika serves Tom with a writ (...) >>>

- Filed on Articles in "The Science of Global Warming" -