(A timely repeat of some film from the 40s and first shown in Apr, 2017)
“After Hitler” is a 2-part video documentary series about Europe in the five years immediately following World War II, 1945-1949. Each episode is roughly 43 minutes and was produced in 2016 but has the unmistakable feel of a 1940s news reel, although theatres rarely showed newsreels in color.
This is a MUST-SEE, for every generation since it will show you things no book you could read could convey
And especially, for everyone of any age who is watching Europe unravel today, for this offers some context as to why history always seems to repeat itself there.
I have a few words of commentary, below, but watch this first.
Part 1: 1945-47
https://youtu.be/lzZDABz5w_E
Part 2: 1947-49
Take note, this is NOT an American production, and much of the film also is not American. It was originally produced in French language and pre-sold for distribution in several languages to Germany’s N24, Italy’s Rai, Norway’s NRK, Spain’s RTVE, Discovery Networks Europe, Quebec’s TV5, Blue Ant Television in English-speaking Canada and Al Arabiya in the Middle East. I saw it the other night through the Discovery Channel, but the above presentations here are without commercial interruption.
Having seen these videos I’m guessing they show a side of the Europeans most people can’t imagine. But with the “erection” of the Iron Curtain it came home to many first-and-second generation immigrants in America that the folks back in the old country were being sold a bill of goods by the new communist overlords and men in communist-controlled Italian, French and Spanish union halls. The peoples of the eastern bloc, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Balkans, were especially susceptible to propaganda about how bad things were for working people in Amerika.
So, in 1952 a short 10-minute film was put together called “The Million Dollar Nickle” and run in America’s theaters as a short subject. It was urging people to write to the folks back home (the letter cost a nickel) and tell them about the fact that in America men bring bottles of milk, leave them at the back door…and no one steals them. tell them factory workers here who build cars also owned cars, tell them how many packaged food items are available at a grocery store within walking distance. Tell them about our schools. And, as ZsaZsa Gabor asked, (in her native Hungarian) “Don’t brag.”
Sorry, I can’t find a video link to this film, but it came from the last days of the Truman Administration, was possibly government produced, but would be effective even today if shown in public schools. Strange, you may say, that it came from the Democrats and Hollywood, but Hollywood had become disillusioned with Stalin by 1948, after his power grab and brutality in East Europe, (as shown in Part II, above) so it would take another twenty-years and a new generation in Hollywood to relight the flame of entitlement, which, if the truth be known, is native to any place where immense wealth can be created simply by fooling people. Hollywood is what it is.
Everyone who sees these films will have a different takeaway, but in light of the upcoming election in France, where, depending on which media you read, we’re seeing two different kinds of fascism pitted against one another, the xenophobic, nativist grass roots version, and corporate globalist variety, it’s reasonable to wonder if Europe isn’t descending right back into the same circular firing squad quagmire it arranged for itself from 1919-1950.
Back in the Clinton era, I referred to European socialism as “hot-tub socialism”, in honor of its Number One admirer, Bill Clinton, who much preferred the trappings of power afforded his European counterparts compared to plebeian America.(Obama was even more taken with the glitter of Europe’s ideal of power.) But it was not until I was able to sink myself into the Soviet Bloc in that same period, and meet the ethnic underbelly there up close, that I was able to see a lot more “fascism” in European socialism, at both ends of the economic spectrum, but especially among the giant West European industrial concerns, who had staked out large swaths of territory in the Soviet eastern bloc, simply because the communists were so inept at so many things even after forty years of occupation.
And at the other end of the social spectrum, “Balkanization” didn’t get its name for nothing, a tribal European version of Waziristan, where throat slitting, honor killings and Hatfield-McCoy family feuds were as common as roast lamb at Easter, only according to their own ethnic “codes of the west” instead of sharia law. A post-WWI term (pejorative) was applied to the Balkans, but history has proved similar conditions existed all over Europe, only, like really poor folk living up some hollow in Harlan County, as long as you knew they were there, you could walk a little taller just because you weren’t them. In Europe it was a status symbol not to be “Balkan”.
Hitler rose to power on the backs of popular approval of a hatred not only Germans, but every European nation carried for Jews. They were all burning Jews in the 13th century, blaming the Black Plague on them. Hitler turned this hatred into national policy, and once racism becomes legal policy, you have fascism. By that token, Jim Crow was a form of fascism, an agency of some American state legislatures. But, I argue, LBJ’s Great Society claimed a kind of federal preemption of the states’ 10th amendment power to be fascist, only destroying a minority in the name of protecting it, not excluding it.
What Americans know, and have proven, when allowed, is that racism, like ethnocentrism, even income-based elitism, dies a natural death…unless the state intervenes to keep it alive. So, after a 50-year experiment with state-managed racism, the American people have finally undertaken to throw off that sort of fascism all by themselves. That is a work in progress. Racism simply is not natural to free men and women who all share a common thread of mutual interest, the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
But only America has proved this.
Europe is not the same, only not because of the persistence of entrenched grass-roots, xenophobic “fascists”, since they haven’t existed since Hitler needed the approval of the “volk” to scapegoat the Jews in order to build his new Reich, turning that racism into fascism. Today, what’s left of them, they’re just ordinary racists. That kind of fascism has been vanquished, only, as in France and Germany today, we see that every kind of populism or nationalism today that has any ethno-racial component is branded by their media and EU alike as fascist in order to protect the far larger and more sinister form of fascism, corporate fascism, which they wholeheartedly support.
Hitler’s purpose in seducing the “volk” into handing him the government in 1933-35 was not to salve their hatred but to popularly legitimize the political foundation of a special relationship between his new Reich and the industrial corporate and banking sectors; the other fascists. Crony capitalism. Obama also liked the idea, and since the capitalists are very good at what they do, making money, why not create a special partnership with them instead of sending them to the Gulag and trying to make razor blades on their own. Marx and Lenin wanted to take over the means of production, then run the companies themselves, and the USSR showed how well that experiment worked out.
As I said, European social-democracies have been driven by that corporatist model ever since they were back up and running in the 1950s. They were always “fascist by aspect”, just not going around with thugs in the backs of trucks breaking windows and beating people on public streets, but still feeling that entitlement to control the masses, just as the aristocracies before them had done for a thousand years. European cartelist and bureaucrats considered themselves their natural heirs. As long as fascism wasn’t mean on the surface, Euros have always believed things would work out fine.
What they didn’t know in 1950 was that their corporate partners would take on a global vision, which first caught Bill Clinton’s eye in the 90s, and left Barack Obama’s absolutely smitten in his time, just considering the possibilities of a world government
Well, after 60 years, that dream has gone up in smoke, thanks largely to the American voters, but still, right on cue.
Everything is changing, and very quickly.. By the throwing down of Hitler, not by the French, nor the Swedes and Danes, nor Finns, but you know who, America, the political and economic beneficiaries of European were able to come out of the closet about their grander global intentions. But with the throwing down of their Democratic Party colleagues in America, that dream, may be dashed. Europe may not even be able to continue to skimp on their own national security because of the American nuclear umbrella, simply because Putin is not an ideological enemy, just a thug making such treaties at NATO less emphatic. They may have to pay their own share. Many of those countries still owe us for their 1945-50 reconstruction. (I’d like to ask Buckley, now that the commies aren’t “the Reds” any longer, should we continue to pay x percent of our national budget to keep the Needle Park in Platzspitz open?)
The bitter truth for the people of Europe is that the people’s fascism vs global fascism race in France is really a false flag, for there does not appear to any way for the people to better their lives as the American have. Even if the globalists win in the May election, the EU will likely implode rather than explode. A good thing? I think so. But if the people’s “fascist wing” win in May, is there anything positive the people of France can do with the win? I doubt ii. It could be the 1930s chaos all over again….all because, through it all, the people at the top never believed the people at the bottom could be trusted with their own freedom. That is the single current that has run through European history for 2000 years..
Putin is not Stalin. He does not offer a new ideology, just the current European cartelist ideology, only wearing Slavic brass knuckles. Bulgaria knows this. Hungary knows this. But France does not. Russia won’t need to invade and march all the way to Paris. The only heavy resistance they will meet be will be in crossing the Polish and Hungarian frontier.
So, we already know how it ends… just watch those films.
Maybe Rand Paul is right.
It would not be worth another American life to rescue this pack of unfits from the next cauldron they build for themselves. It will not be worth another American Tomahawk, on Hamburg, Warsaw or Budapest that could not find more deserving targets at Berkeley.
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