RE: The Last Movie You Watched
June 9, 2019 at 9:18 pm
(This post was last modified: June 9, 2019 at 10:38 pm by Rev. Rye.)
This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Dinesh D'Souza's Death of a Nation, one of only five films to reach a 1 on Metacritic. And of the three that are actually in the Skokie Library, this is the last one I've actually covered (Biodome and United Passion are the other two.)
Like my previous entry into the world of Dinesh D'Souza, I've decided to divide this into separate lists, debunkings, and miscellaneous bullshit. I'm going to see if I can remove all the overlap with Hilary's America (and there's a lot of them):
Bullshit:
The third iteration of the Deep Hurting Awards coming soon...
Like my previous entry into the world of Dinesh D'Souza, I've decided to divide this into separate lists, debunkings, and miscellaneous bullshit. I'm going to see if I can remove all the overlap with Hilary's America (and there's a lot of them):
Bullshit:
- D'Souza is talking about when he was a child in India and how he was fascinated by how countries got destroyed, and included the USSR in his list of destroyed nations he looked up as a kid... even though it was dissolved when he was THIRTY. He could be adding the Soviet Union retroactively, of course, but the phrasing is kind of ambiguous. Still, it took five minutes for D'Souza to do something totally stupid.
- There is some tactical overlap between brownshirts and Antifa. That's kind of the nature of militant political groups. Doesn't necessarily mean that Antifa are the real fascists. It's honestly kind of depressing to see D'Souza railroading Robert Paxton into his own bullshit agenda and you can see him taking a nuanced view of the situation and trying to convey it through some clearly loaded questions.
- Yes, there were actually some leftists who sympathised with fascism (at least in the 1930s.) It really helped that, at that point, Mussolini, and to a lesser extent Hitler, actually had some control over the narratives. And his talking about how Mussolini's fascists claimed FDR was one of theirs really reminds me of this.
- You know what, the whole Nazis and Communists had a lot in common canard is so annoying I'll just leave you with this:
This should cover it all. D'Souza is largely accurate when he's talking about the basic facts of the Nazi regime (even if he does mispronounce "Beobachter") but is hopelessly idiotic when he goes anywhere near analysis. - Notably, he talks about the destruction of the Native Americans like it's just a Democratic thing. It really wasn't. To be fair, the Republicans were only around to see about 32 of the last years of the conflict, but they weren't all that ready to stop the madness.
- Anti-homosexuality is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to evidence that Hitler's point of view was antithetical to progressive values, like the fact that he was willing to destroy anything that threatened their hegemony. Also, he talks about how willing Hitler was to tolerate the gay people in the SA like a minute after he talks about the Night of the Long Knives.
- Also, being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean someone's not going to attack other Christian denominations he doesn't like.
- Technically, as much as we might have liked, theories of racial superiority weren't totally discredited by the unveiling of Dachau and Auschwitz. Further scientific research that did a whole lot to make sure that we knew eugenics didn't work that way. And, of course, the rabble didn't give a shit.
- What do you know, he points out that, during the founding of America, the founders' view of slavery was a lot more nuanced than we tend to give them credit for. Still flawed, but they still seemed to not buy into the idea that it was a positive good the way successors like John Calhoun did. That said, they didn't really do much to stop it unless enough people made a stink of it. We know this because France actually did abolish slavery around the time of the founding of America, with Robespierre, he of the Reign of Terror, even saying of attempts to defend slavery in the colonies: “perish the colonies rather than our principles;”
- Apparently, the Democratic support for immigration is a Tammany-style scheme and not just a natural result of the Republicans treating them as an existential threat.
- Also, D'Souza treats the Democratic support for segregation (and the Klan) in very similar terms to Howard Zinn's description of the post-slavery systems that kept the black man down. Horseshoe theory in action?
- For all his talk about trying to look at the secret meanings behind the things Democratic politicians say, he's really shit at trying to decode the racism in the Southern Strategy. Or even reading the election results; he points out that George Wallace took most of the South (read: five states), but in three of those, Nixon still got more votes than Humphrey. And in 1972, he got everything but Massachusetts and Washington DC.
- Also telling how he cherry-picks the response to the left to see how far they go. Something tells me he won't do anything about the Unite the Right rally, that Trump took four times to condemn. And sure enough, when he covers Charlottesville, he talks about Jason Kessler's past as a Democrat and his concerns about bankers. And somehow, despite his indignant response to being exposed as a past left-winger, that means he's still left-wing.
- He spends several minutes interviewing Richard Spencer, and it's a massive clusterfuck and it fails to explain any point, just that D'Souza takes the sort of racial lip service that the right has used since Reagan seriously (as does Trump, to a much lesser extent). And Spencer doesn't. And that's pretty much the main difference.
- So, Sophie Scholl is good for speaking out against Hitler. Hey, Dinesh, what's your stance on racists dogpiling on journalists who talk out against Trump?
- D'Souza goes into the story of how Trump became president, and somehow managed to completely lose sight of not only the more jackasstic shit he said in the intervening 17 months, but also the other dozen or so candidates.
- Sadly, the docudrama bullshit that covered Hilary's America is a lot less, and there's not much to make fun of. Just some barely competent and largely silent (or German-language) re-enactments of history.
- Like Hilary's America, the film just kind of stops for some patriotic song, but this time, it does so about 25 minutes before it's supposed to end instead of just 15. This time, it's just Dinesh and his wife covering a song by Celtic Woman. And the film just goes back to talking about Sophie Scholl.
- For all the hype about this film, and the fact that he's on the cover with his face merged into Nixon, and the fact that some reviewers believe he made this film as a condition of his pardon by Trump, he actually says very little about Trump. He does bugger-all to explain just what Trump will do to make America great again. Granted, he's painted himself into a corner by apparently taking a hard line against racism (but not enough to keep from retweeting messages with lines like #gasthejews or #bringbackslavery), and he's trying to lionise a Republican who, when racism is removed from his policy, has bugger-all in the way of coherent ideology.
- What the fuck is Angela Primm even doing when she's singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic?"
She's making a lot of weird faces, and what's weirder is it looks like, a lot of the time, she's doing something normal with the right side of her face, but she's doing all these wild shapes with the left side of her mouth.
The third iteration of the Deep Hurting Awards coming soon...
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.