[Leica] Re:Leica Sighting

[leicachris at worldnet.att.net (Christopher Williams)]

How I love the delete key.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marc James Small" Subject: Re: [Leica] Leica Sighting


> I suspect that this posting will cause BD to again accuse me of 
> anti-semitism.
> 
> Riefenstahl was a political lightweight and was 
> always viewed as an opportunist with great 
> abilities by Goebbels, who used her when he could 
> and who then tossed her aside around 1937.  She 
> had no ties with the Nazi Party or the Nazi ethos 
> other than as a hired gun, and early on before 
> its true nature was revealed.  (Reread your 
> Tolkien to understand the subtle play this 
> is:  evil does not appear openly as evil until it 
> is dominant and, by the time the Nazi evil had 
> become evident, Riefenstahl had been tossed into 
> the wastebasket of history by the Nazis other 
> than her long-standing affair with Speer:  I do 
> not believe that Albrecht and Leni discussed 
> Death Camps during their apres-ski assignations in, say, 1943.)
> 
> The Allies were really hot to nail her as a war 
> criminal of some sort but could not do so as the 
> evidence available then and available today 
> simply showed her to be a political 
> flibertigibbet who was a brilliant director and 
> who had a great eye for the proper frame.  The 
> same can be said of the Soviet movie director, 
> Eisenstein:  he was loved by the Soviets early on 
> and then, also, was cast aside.  (There is an odd 
> bit of trivia:  Eisenstein spoke fluent Japanese 
> and modeled his films on the Haiku, though I do 
> not see this in POTEMKIN.)  Eisenstein's work 
> ought to be condemned as evil work for an evil 
> regime if a similar standard is applied to Riefenstahl.
> 
> I shook the hand of Willy Ley.  Ley shook the 
> hand of Wehrner von Braun.  von Braun shook the 
> hand of Hitler.  I am thus three generations of 
> hand-shakes removed from Adolph Hitler.  Does 
> this make me a Nazi?  Judging from an exchange on 
> this topic in the late 1990's, BD would perhaps 
> say, "yeah!  the guy's a Nazi!"  However, to 
> restore my stature within this group, I am three 
> handshakes away from Lenin and only two away from 
> Stalin and also three away from Mao.  I might 
> well be a bigot, but I am, i the end, an equal-opportunity bigot.  <he 
> grins>
> 
> The Nazis and  Communists are both, of course, 
> artifacts of the belief that the State ought to 
> control everything and this is a product of the 
> Left.  These are brother ideologies and there's 
> really not a dime's bit of difference between 
> them even in their side elements such as 
> anti-semitism.  The true political line runs from 
> the Right ("let do as thy wilt be the whole of 
> thy law") to the Left ("that which is not 
> forbidden is compulsory").  Note well that the US 
> Christian fundamentalists are now shifting to 
> support for the US leftish political parties.
> 
> Responses off-line, please.  And leave Leni 
> alone:  she was a political putz and a 
> photographic genius.  She and Eisenstein fit into 
> identical categories with the only difference 
> being that Leni spent five years in Allied 
> confinement while Eisenstein was under house 
> arrest for the final fifteen years of his life.
> 
> It's your turn at bat, BD, but please let us do this off-List.
> 
> Marc
>> 
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