Latest news with #Goebbels
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
With Manifest Destiny art, DHS goes hard on ‘white makes right'
Since the start of President Trump's second term, the Department of Homeland Security's social media team has published a stream of content worthy of a meme-slinging basement dweller on 4chan. Grainy, distorted mug shots of immigrants. Links to butt-kissing Fox News stories about MAGA anything. Whiny slams against politicians who call out la migra for treating the Constitution like a pee pad. Paeans to 'heritage' and 'homeland' worthy of Goebbels. A Thomas Kinkade painting of 1950s-era white picket fence suburbia straight out of 'Leave It to Beaver,' with the caption 'Protect the Homeland.' All of this is gag-inducing, but it has a purpose — it's revealing the racist id of this administration in real time, in case anyone was still doubtful. In June, DHS shared a poster, originally created by the white-power scene, of a grim-faced Uncle Sam urging Americans to 'report all foreign invaders' by calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On July 14, the DHS X account featured a painting of a young white couple cradling a baby in a covered wagon on the Great Plains with the caption, 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage.' When my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts asked about the pioneer painting and the Trump administration's trollish social media strategy, a White House spokesperson asked her to 'explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist,' adding that haters should 'stay mad.' Now, behold the latest DHS salvo: a July 23 X post of a 19th century painting by John Gast titled 'American Progress.' A blond white woman robed in — yep — white, with a gold star just above her forehead, floats in the center. She holds a book in her right hand and a loop of telegraph wire that her left hand trails across poles. Below her on the right side are miners, hunters, farmers, loggers, a stagecoach and trains. They rush westward, illuminated by puffy clouds and the soft glow of dawn. The angelic woman is Columbia, the historic female personification of the United States. She seems to be guiding everyone forward, toward Native Americans — bare breasted women, headdress-bedecked warriors — who are fleeing in terror along with a herd of bison and a bear with its mouth agape. It's too late, though: Covered wagon trains and a teamster wielding a whip have already encroached on their land. The white settlers are literally in the light-bathed side of the painting, while the Native Americans are shrouded in the dusky, murky side. It ain't subtle, folks! 'A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,' DHS wrote as a caption for 'American Progress' — a mantra you may soon find printed on the $20 bill, the way this administration is going. Gast finished his painting in 1872, when the U.S. was in the last stages of conquest. The Civil War was done. White Americans were moving into the Southwest in large numbers, dispossessing the Mexican Americans who had been there for generations through the courts, squatting or outright murder. The Army was ramping up to defeat Native Americans once and for all. In the eyes of politicians, a new menace was emerging from the Pacific: mass Asian migration, especially Chinese. Scholars have long interpreted Gast's infamous work as an allegory about Manifest Destiny — that the U.S. had a God-given right to seize as much of the American continent as it could. John L. O'Sullivan, the newspaperman who coined the term in 1845, openly tied this country's expansion to white supremacy, expressing the hope that pushing Black people into Latin America, a region 'already of mixed and confused blood,' would lead to 'the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders.' O'Sullivan also salivated at the idea of California leaving 'imbecile and distracted' Mexico and joining the U.S., adding, 'The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle.' This is the heritage the Trump administration thinks is worth promoting. Administration officials act shocked and offended when critics accuse them of racism, but the Trump base knows exactly what's going on. 'This is our country, and we can't let the radical left make us ashamed of our heritage,' one X user commented on the 'American Progress' post. 'Manifest Destiny was an amazing thing!' 'It's time to re-conquer the land,' another wrote. DHS seems to be vibing with the Heritage American movement, now bleeding into the conservative mainstream from its far-right beginnings. Its adherents maintain that Americans whose ancestors have been here for generations are more deserving of this nation's riches than those whose families came over within living memory. Our values, proponents say, shouldn't be based on antiquated concepts like liberty and equality but rather, the customs and traditions established by Anglo Protestants before mass immigration forever changed this country's demographics. In other words, if you're white, you're all right. If you're brown or anything else, you're probably not down. Our own vice president, JD Vance, is espousing this pendejada. In a speech to the Claremont Institute earlier this month, Vance outlined his vision of what an American is. 'America is not just an idea,' Vance told the crowd. 'We're a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.' Weird — I learned in high school that people come here not because of how Americans live, but because they have the freedom to live however they want. 'If you stop importing millions of foreigners,' the vice president continued, 'you allow social cohesion to form naturally.' All those Southern and Eastern Europeans who came at the turn of the 20th century seem to have assimilated just fine, even as Appalachia's Scots-Irish — Vance's claimed ethnic affiliation — are, by his own admission, still a tribe apart after centuries of living here. Trump, Vance added, is 'ensur[ing] that the people we serve have a better life in the country their grandparents built.' I guess that excludes me, since my Mexican grandparents settled here in the autumn of their lives. The irony of elevating so-called Heritage Americans is that many in Trumpworld would seem to be excluded. First Lady Melania Trump was born in what's now Slovenia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the child of Cuban immigrants. Vance's wife's parents came here from India. The Jewish immigrant ancestor of Trump's deportation mastermind, Stephen Miller, wouldn't be allowed in these days, after arriving at Ellis Island from czarist Russia with $8 to his name. Even Gast and O'Sullivan wouldn't count as Heritage Americans by the strictest definition, since the former was Prussian and the latter was the son of Irish and English immigrants. But that's the evil genius of MAGA. Trump has proclaimed that he welcomes anyone, regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation (except for trans people), into his movement, as long as they're committed to owning the libs. Americans are so myopic about their own history, if not downright ignorant, that some minorities think they're being welcomed into the Heritage Americans fold by Vance and his ilk. No wonder a record number of voters of color, especially Latinos, jumped on the Trump train in 2024. 'American Progress' might as well replace red hats as the ultimate MAGA symbol. To them, it's not a shameful artifact; it's a road map for Americans hell-bent on turning back the clock to the era of eradication. Like I said, not a subtle message at all — if your eyes aren't shut.
Time of India
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
‘If You Don't Stop, Russia Will…': Lavrov's Chilling Warning Over Ukraine War Rattles Europe
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Europe of embracing militarization and ideological warfare in its posture toward Russia. He claimed the EU was displaying 'global arrogance' and using propaganda reminiscent of Goebbels to incite fear and hostility. Lavrov warned that continued provocations by Kyiv would be met with firm responses, asserting Russia's commitment to achieving its stated objectives despite Western opposition. In contrast, he praised the Trump administration's willingness to engage in dialogue.
The Guardian
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Goebbels and the Führer review – austere satire shows fears of Nazi high command
In an appropriate spirit of cynicism and bleakness, German director Joachim Lang has made a film about the private life of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the Hexenmeister or chief sorcerer of lies, and his always strained relationship with Hitler. Robert Stadlober plays the preening and self-pitying Goebbels and Fritz Karl is a careworn Hitler. Franziska Weisz plays Goebbels's wife Magda, who at first resented his infidelities with showbusiness starlets but for the sake of the Fatherland submitted to the public image of a good Nazi wife and mother of six adorable children – whom Joseph and Magda finally murdered in the bunker before killing themselves. In its subversive, austerely satirical way, the film feels almost like a B-side to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall from 2004, and Lang has perhaps even inhaled, just a little, the numberless internet parody memes that Downfall inspired, with English subtitles reinterpreting Hitler's impotent rage. Lang's film shows us the fears and misgivings that quite senior Nazis had until late in the war, and is perhaps also in the spirit of The Zone of Interest; that is, the Martin Amis novel, whose knowing, ironised dialogue and drama was mostly excised by Jonathan Glazer for his film version. Goebbels and the Führer is a project which has apparently arisen from two of Lang's previous films. The first, on which he is credited as a writer, was a documentary-drama about the hideous antisemitic propaganda film Jud Süss. The second, which he directed, was about the German screen actor Heinrich George, who acted in the preposterous and delusional propaganda film Kolberg, released in 1945, about German forces' heroic defence against Napoleonic soldiers (Goebbels, incredibly, assigned legions of soldiers as extras to the latter). Both films are mentioned here, and Lang's script sharply reminds us that Jud Süss was embarrassingly praised by the young Michelangelo Antonioni at the time. Lang's new drama is a movie showing Goebbels's work as a propagandist was never done. In addition, behind the theatrical display of ecstatic loyalty, the German public, and many of the high command, were in fact just as nervous about war before Munich as the British and French. The same people were very glad to hear of appeasement, very glad to hear of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and aghast to hear of the Soviet invasion and the unwinnable two-front war that Hitler had embraced. It was Goebbels's job to soothe their fears, to create a subhuman identity for Germany's enemies with repeated lies and provide a comforting illusion of imminent victory in which he, Hitler and everyone came to believe. The film shrewdly mixes real archive footage with dramatic dialogue scenes, in which Lang has added genuine language from historical documents. Lang also cleverly shows us what looked like a slip of the tongue in a Goebbels speech, in which he stumbled over a single crucial word, promising Germany the '… exter – exclusion … ' of Jews. The film suggests that this was a deliberate feint on Goebbels's part, preparing Germany to accept, subconsciously, the idea that extermination must follow the milder idea of exclusion. Perhaps there can be nothing totally new to say on film about Hitler and nazism, but Lang is interesting on the hidden disbelief and fear that existed among the leaders. Yet the film cannot quite bring itself to show us that grotesque inversion of Goebbels's Aryan-family sentimentality: the murder of his children. Goebbels and the Führer is in UK cinemas from 6 June.
Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Marie Najer obituary: Black German child actress in Nazi films
When Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, needed a black child to act in Nazi films, he personally excused 12-year-old Marie Najer from her Hamburg school for 14 days. 'Now I'll be a real movie star,' she thought. She arrived alone in Berlin to play a servant girl in Josef von Báky's Münchhausen (1943). 'We had very nice costumes with a huge duster, like a fan, and we had to fan the ladies with fresh air. So we were basically the idiots,' she told Jermain Raffington in a video interview. At that age she did not consider herself part of Nazi propaganda. 'I just thought, 'How nice, that we're being integrated into the films',' she said. 'I did not realise what this was actually about.
Irish Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite film-maker: ‘After the first page of Mein Kampf she became an enthusiastic Nazi'
When she was 100, a year before her death , Leni Riefenstahl , who was perhaps second only to Joseph Goebbels as Nazi Germany 's leading propagandist, faced legal action over her continual misrepresentation of the fate of the Roma and Sinti people who had appeared in her film Lowlands, which she began to make in 1940. Riefenstahl had used Romas as extras, many of them 'borrowed' and subsequently returned to the regime's concentration camps. 'I regret that Sinti and Roma had to suffer during the period of National Socialism,' she said. But she also remarked about the claims against her, 'I'm not saying Gypsies need to lie, but, really, who's more likely to commit perjury, me or the Gypsies?' Riefenstahl, an authoritative new documentary by the Swiss film-maker Andres Veiel , exposes decades of contradictory statements and obfuscation from the director who played a huge part in shaping Adolf Hitler 's public image. 'For example, there was an interview by the Daily Express from 1934,' Veiel says. Official documents referred to the interview, 'but the interview itself was missing. We found it in the archive of the Daily Express. In 1934 she said she bought Mein Kampf and read it. And after the first page she became an enthusiastic National Socialist. READ MORE 'It was obvious why this was missing, because she was just telling the interviewer not only how close she was to Hitler but how she was deeply involved in Nazi ideology. The interesting point for us was not just to show 'This is a lie' and 'That is a lie' but to look at how she was constantly shifting and editing her story.' Working alongside a German journalist and TV host, Sandra Maischberger, Veiel gained unprecedented access to the Riefenstahl archives, a vast collection of material related to the film-maker's life and work, including photographs, correspondence and recordings of telephone calls. For decades she kept the material at her home in Bavaria, carefully curating it to amplify her artistry while downplaying her role in the Third Reich. Veiel says he watched hundreds of interviews in which Riefenstahl used exactly the same phrases, as if she were reading from a script: 'I was never interested in politics. I was just an artist,' she would say; 'I had nothing to do with the regime.' [ Riefenstahl review: Unrepentant propagandist will make you want to yell at the screen ] Many parts of the archive remain difficult to access because of ongoing legal and ethical debates, but Veiel was able to sift through some 700 boxes of material while researching his damning documentary. The rolls of film alone fill 140 chests. His sleuthing yields several chilling revelations, including Riefenstahl's part in a massacre in Konskie in 1939. The film-maker was in the Polish town on her way to record the Nazis' defeat of the country, and wanted to shoot a street scene. According to a letter written by a Nazi officer, she demanded that 'the Jews' be 'removed'. When relayed by a lance corporal, her directive prompted some Jewish locals to run. German soldiers responded by opening fire. 'This is a good example of her storytelling,' Veiel says. 'Before 1952 she claimed, 'I was a witness of a massacre'. She didn't always say it was a Jewish massacre but that Polish people were killed. Then, in 1952, she changed the narrative and said, 'No, I was far away. I heard about the episode. But I never saw corpses. I never saw any atrocities.' 'We had TV footage from the middle of the 1950s, and you realise she is learning this new story by heart. It's still a lie, but she's working on it, like a bad actress. Then, five years later, the lie became the truth for her. She was straightforward about attacking people with another opinion or view.' Riefenstahl was initially a dancer and actor; she rose to prominence as Hitler's favourite director, most notably for Triumph of the Will, a glorification of the Nuremberg Rally of 1934. In 1993 Riefenstahl claimed she was merely a film-maker for hire and was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used to promote Nazism. But Veiel's documentary quotes from a letter she wrote to Hitler: 'The film's impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined, and your image, my Führer, is always applauded.' Hitler then chose Riefenstahl to make a documentary about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Despite her later claims of political naivety, Riefenstahl used all her artistic talents to fill the film, Olympia, with images of athletic prowess designed to both legitimise and romanticise the Nazi regime. A prologue depicting the return of the Greek gods echoes Hitler's idea of Sparta as the 'clearest racial state' and his projection of a future 'Völkisch state'. (Behind the scenes of the film, Willy Zielke, its cinematographer, was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he was experimented on and forcibly sterilised, after a dispute with Riefenstahl.) 'Olympia projected this image of being strong, healthy, and victorious,' Veiel says. 'The aesthetics of her films are an interesting point for me. It's never just the question of self-optimising. There's always a contempt for weakness. The contempt for people who are 'not healthy', who don't fit into that pattern. They jeopardise the Reich because, according to her ideology, they are lunatics and criminals. They are dirty. They spoil the national blood.' Leni Riefenstahl with Adolph Hitler at a party in Nuremberg in the 1930s. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty In a notorious appearance on a late-night German chatshow in 1976, Riefenstahl was confronted by Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist during the war. Kretschmer calmly asked the rattled film-maker how someone so close to the inner workings of the Third Reich could know so little about life under the Nazis. Riefenstahl received sacks of fan mail in the days after the broadcast, praising her composure and denouncing Kretschmer. The letters were hard for Veiel to read. 'It was horrifying,' he says. 'It was not just the issue of Leni Riefenstahl. It was a mirror image of West Germany. A lot of German authorities in postwar Germany worked for the Reich. [Kurt Georg] Kiesinger worked for Goebbels in a high-ranking position, but he became chancellor of West Germany in the 1960s. A lot of the messages sent about Leni Riefenstahl said, 'Stop stirring up the guilt of the past and leave this great artist alone.' Or, 'We are the silent majority, and we stick to the ideology.' After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and supposedly de-Nazified, but she was never convicted of any crimes. Several high-profile film-makers have attempted to bring Riefenstahl's life to the screen, including Steven Soderbergh and Jodie Foster . Quentin Tarantino has called her the best director who ever lived. For them to respect Riefenstahl's technical achievements, and want to chart them in a biopic, is very different from respecting her as a person, of course, but Veiel still finds any kind of admiration for the film-maker extremely disturbing. [ Fionola Meredith: The terrible wonder of Leni Riefenstahl's life took hold of my imagination Opens in new window ] 'I don't know if it's just naive,' he says. 'I always say you can't separate the ideology from the aesthetics. You can't just celebrate the aesthetics not seeing the contempt behind it. It's not just an attitude. People were incarcerated. People were sterilised. And many people were killed because of this ideology. How can you omit this fact?' Riefenstahl is in cinemas from Friday, May 9th
