Why Did Hollywood Cover Up For Hitler?
By John Spritzler
29 June, 2013
Newdemocracyworld.org
As reported in this Guardian article, Hollywood and Hitler: did the studio bosses bow to Nazi wishes?, a book by a Harvard scholar argues that US producers in the 1930s 'collaborated' with the Nazis with cuts to films and self-censorship.
Buried in this interesting article is the following:
Three studios – MGM, Paramount and 20th-Century Fox – did not pull out of Germany until mid-1940. But even after Hollywood started making anti-Nazi films, Urwand says, it continued to erase reference to the Jews because studio chiefs (with the support of Jewish groups) wanted to "avoid special pleading on their behalf".
The reason that "Jewish groups" (led by middle class professionals, not rank and file working class Jews, whether they were Zionist or not) wanted to "avoid special pleading" on behalf of Jews being made victims of genocide by the Nazis is worth thinking about. FDR also deliberately ignored the Nazi killing of Jews even though he was not particularly anti-semitic personally. So why did FDR and "Jewish groups" avoid "special pleading" on behalf of Jewish victims of the Nazis?
I wrote about this in my book on WWII, The People as Enemy, in which I argue that the leaders of the U.S., Germany and Japan launched WWII in order to control their own increasingly revolutionary working classes, by using the classic "rally around the flag in times of war" method to make them obey their ruling class leaders. In the section of the book titled, "Why FDR Didn't Tell Americans That Nazis Were Killing The Jews?" it reads as follows:
Even though Roosevelt obviously wanted to convince Americans to go to war, his anti-working class goals prevented him from using the most effective means of doing it, which would have been to appeal to their desire to act in solidarity with German, Japanese, and other workers being oppressed by the Fascists. Thus FDR refused to talk to Americans about working class reasons for fighting the Fascists--such as the fact that Fascists were attacking their own as well as other workers and using anti-Semitism and racism to do it....The explanation [for FDR's hiding the facts about the Nazi holocaust] was given by Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who wrote in his diary at the time, "One danger is...their [American Jews pressing for action against the Holocaust] activities may lend color to the charges of Hitler that we are fighting this war on account of and at the instigation of and direction of our Jewish citizens." The obvious solution to this problem, of course, would have been to make the purpose of the war crystal clear, and it it had been to fight in solidarity with the working class of the world against their Fascist enemies, everybody would have understood perfectly and nobody except pro-Nazis would have listened to Hitler's nonsense about it being a "Jews war." But FDR would not avail himself of this obvious solution. Instead he wanted Americans to see the conflict purely as nation versus nation. He only had lies to offer as the reason for the war, and how did he know that Hitler's lie wouldn't be as persuasive as his own lies? So he covered up the Holocaust.
The "Jewish groups" and "Hollywood" that, along with FDR, also covered up the Holocaust were no doubt led by people who supported FDR and who did not want to embarrass him or go against his wishes, which were not just "wishes" but ruling class strategy. Similarly, it is now a fundamental strategy of social control by the American ruling class to promote the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by "Israel: the only democracy in the Middle East, a homeland for victims of the Holocaust, surrounded by evil anti-semitic terrorists." The strategy is to make of Palestinians, and Arabs and Muslims who support them, a bogeyman "enemy" that is portrayed by the mass media as "terrorism" and thereby give credibility to the "War on Terror," which has replaced the "War against Fascism" and the "War against Communism" as the current Orwellian war of social control.
And so, today, everybody who wishes to stay in the good graces of the plutocracy that controls the United States supports Israel and remains quiet about its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Just like Hollywood and Jewish groups remained quiet about the Nazi killing of Jews more than six decades ago.
John Spritzler is editor of www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
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