RUTHFULLY YOURS

Son of Saul, the first film (to be released next week on DVD) of László Nemes — he both directed and co-wrote it, and it won both the grand prize at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film — is the latest in a seemingly endless string of Holocaust films. However, both in its peculiar plot — which focuses exclusively on the story of one man, Saul, brilliantly performed by Géza Röhrig — and in its cinematography — a hand-held, mobile camera that remains persistently and tightly focused on Saul — it marks out its own territory. The film is simultaneously an immersive, physically taxing experience of life in a camp and a self-conscious reflection on the conditions of, and motives for, Holocaust movies.

Saul is distinctive in a number of ways. Consider, for example, its focus on one man. As Nemes observes in a brief scene analysis of the film’s opening segment, this is the “story of one man,” Saul, who has “become almost like a robot.” Saul is a Sonderkommando, whom Nemes describes thus:

The Sonderkommandos were a group of prisoners who were actually separated from the rest of the other prisoners — male prisoners who were forced to assist the Nazis in the extermination process. These were the prisoners who had to accompany the deported people to the gas chamber and then take out their corpses and burn the corpses in the ovens at the crematorium and then scatter the ashes. So these were the people who were at the heart of the extermination machine. They were, in exchange, better fed and better clothed, but they knew that they would be liquidated in a few months [NPR interview, “Fresh Air”].​

In preparation for the film, Nemes worked his way through volumes of testimonies, known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, from members of this group.

Because the Sonderkommandos had intermediate status between the Nazis and their fellow Jews, and because their jobs afforded them greater liberty of movement than the other prisoners, the film’s concentration on Saul offers a compressed and highly particularized access to the entire camp. Early in the film, Saul observes a Nazi doctor standing over the body of a young boy who has inexplicably survived the gas chamber. As the doctor calmly smothers the boy to death, he orders an autopsy. It is a mark of the morally topsy-turvy world of the camp that an autopsy is necessary to determine, not the cause of death, but the cause of survival. His attention riveted on the boy’s body, Saul asks another worker in the camp to hide the body so that he can find a rabbi to say Kaddish and provide a proper burial. Saul’s motives are mysterious. He repeatedly claims the boy is his son, even as others counter: “You don’t have a son.” Saul is as mechanical in his burial quest as he is in his assigned duties in the camp, and that raises a basic question about his mission — whether it marks a kind of transcendence of, or at least an ennobling rebellion against, the dehumanization of the camp, or whether it is merely a mechanized obsession rendered absurd and even futile by the very existence of the camps. Revolt pervades the conversations of the Sonderkommandos, who hatch plots to try to undermine the Nazis. (There was in fact a Sonderkommando rebellion at Auschwitz in 1944.)

Because it never leaves him, the camera forces viewers to come to terms with Saul’s pursuit. The film’s director of photography, Mátyás Erdély, employs two techniques: Besides the hand-held camera, he uses shallow focus, which leaves everything beyond the center of the frame blurry. The jittery, mobile camera is unsettling. That the camera remains fixed on Saul creates a nervous uncertainty in the viewer, who longs not just for the camera to be still but also for it to show us what Saul sees, or at least to provide a wider context for Saul’s movements and facial expressions. Nemes himself notes that the film deliberately excludes location images. There are no long train tracks leading into the concentration camp or signs indicating arrival at Auschwitz.

The result is that the film is continuously disorienting and physically exhausting, almost sickening. We hear screams, moans, and screeches; we see indistinctly the piles of mutilated bodies; and we feel the encroachment, on one side, of the lurking guards and, on the other, of the mounting piles of ashes. What we see and hear most is the non-stop work of the Sonderkommandos: the scrubbing of the crematoria, the shoveling of ashes, and the transporting of carts full of what the Nazis call “pieces.”

Years ago, looking out at the Pacific surf from a beach in Chile, a friend — alert to the ways of tsunamis — gave me some advice about what to do if suddenly the water all went away. “Run. Run for your life. Because it’s all coming back.”

That advice has come to mind all too often since President Obama made his 2012 reelection campaign proclamations about the receding tide of war. Not that the tide of war has receded anywhere except perhaps in the fantasies of Obama and his followers. But after more than seven years of U.S. policy predicated on such propaganda, it’s getting ever harder to read the daily headlines without the sense that there’s a deluge coming our way.

Just a modest sampling of some of the latest warning signs:

— Russian warplanes have been demonstrating that they can with impunity buzz our military aircraft and ships. Which is by now no surprise, because Russian President Vladimir Putin has already learned — in the flexible era of the Obama “reset” — that the U.S. is no serious obstacle to such stunts as Russia swiping the entire territory of Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and offering fugitive Edward Snowden a home after the grand hack of the National Security Agency.

— China, while brushing off U.S. protests, keeps pushing its power plays and territorial grabs in East Asia — and has just landed a military jet on an island it has built, complete with runway, in the South China Sea.

— Iran, having pocketed the Obama-legacy rotten nuclear deal, has continued testing ballistic missiles, with Iran’s Fars News Agency advertising that two of the missiles launched just last month were emblazoned in Hebrew with the phrase “Israel must be wiped out.” Presumably these missiles are being developed just in case Iran feels a need to propel toward a target some highly unpeaceful products of its “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program? Meantime, Iran is wielding the nuclear agreement itself as a threat. Just this past week, we had the head of Iran’s Central Bank in Washington threatening that Iran will walk away from Obama’s cherished nuclear deal unless the Obama administration provides yet more concessions — in this instance, a U.S. welcome mat for Iran’s banking transactions, so Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, can avail itself of easy access to dollars.

— Saudi authorities have been threatening that if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for any part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they will dump hundreds of billions worth of U.S. assets. (What’s most arresting here is less the prospect of a self-defeating Saudi fire sale on U.S. assets than the reality that the Saudis — beset by everything from relatively low oil prices to regional tumult, including an aggressively expansionist Iran — feel free to try to bully the U.S.).

At a London press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron today, President Obama said the death of Prince is a “remarkable loss.”

The White House put out a statement Thursday after the music legend’s body was found at his studio compound outside of Minneapolis.

“Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince,” the statement from Obama said. “Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer.”
Today, Obama was asked what made him a fan.

“I love Prince because he put out great music and he was a great performer. I didn’t not know him well. He came to perform at the White House last year and was extraordinary and creative and original and full of energy,” Obama replied.

“And so, it is a remarkable loss. And I’m staying at Wyndfield House, the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. It so happens our ambassador has a turntable and so this morning we played ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Delirious,’ just to get warmed up before we left the house for important bilateral meetings like this,” the president quipped.

Obama paid tribute not only to Prince but the Queen, saying his London visit was in part to wish a happy 90th birthday to Elizabeth II.

President Obama defended his decision to evict a bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office during his first term, telling Britons today that he loves the legendary prime minister but wanted to keep tables from “looking a little cluttered.”

After Obama took office, he returned a Churchill bust that the White House said had been lent to President Bush by Prime Minister Tony Blair. That replaced a Churchill bust that had been in the White House since the 1960s, which the administration said was being “worked on at the time and was later returned to the residence.”

In 2010, the original Churchill bust was moved from the Oval Office to outside the Treaty Room.

“I don’t know if people are aware of this, but in the residence, on the second floor, my office, my private office, is called the Treaty Room. And right outside the door of the Treaty Room, so that I see it every day, including on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill. It is there voluntarily ’cause I can do anything on the second floor,” Obama said today at a press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron at which he was asked about the U.S.-UK special relationship. “I love Winston Churchill. Love the guy.”

A friend sent me a library discard chiefly because she thought I would be interested in its cover of Clark Gable, for Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, and the Birth of the Modern Man, by Mick LasSalle. The book was published in 2002, and is available now only on Kindle, although there are probably numerous scores of hard copies and paperbacks of it that can be had for a song from various Amazon associated vendors.

The cover is definitely interesting. The non-mustachioed Gable could very well be cast as Cyrus Skeen, the hero of my private detective series set in San Francisco between 1928 and 1930. The only thing missing from Gable’s arresting and commanding gaze is the lock of hair that often falls over Skeen’s brow and which his wife, Dilys, is forever flicking away. Skeen’s ears, however, would be a mite smaller.

One of the most memorable contrasts LaSalle marks is the on-screen rivalry between Gable and Leslie Howard, who both appeared in “Gone With the Wind” and “A Free Soul” (1931). Howard is steamrolled by Gable over a woman. But Gable “had a way of making any man in the vicinity look like he should be wearing a dress.” (p.65) One look at Gable, and you know he’s not “transgender” material. He’d more likely clean your clock if you ever questioned his virility or his identity as a man.

LaSalle’s book is also interesting in that it paints a picture of the changing status and character of male characters in Hollywood between 1929 and 1934, the Pre-Code era, after which the Hays Office of “voluntary” censorship put the kibosh on “immorality.” Will Hays and his mostly Catholic and Presbyterian allies put visual and vocal fig leaves on men and woman. There is a political stance in LaSalle’s book but it is difficult to nail down; he implicitly endorses from the right, from the left, and from the middle, and he applauds every position imaginable, as well as the stances taken by the stars he discusses.

Earth day 2016 TURN LIGHTS OFF
Earth Hour 2016 will be held on Saturday 19 March between 8.30PM and … The first thing anyone can do to get involved is to turn off their lights on Saturday. … the lights are turned off at the end of the business day the Friday before Earth Hour …
My Earth Day Message:
Keep the home lights burning…..RSK

After President Obama moved on his own to normalize relations with Cuba, White House officials told reporters they were confident that the thaw between the countries would result in positive change in Cuba. How’s that working out?

Not well. Political dissidents were rounded up before and after Obama’s visit last month. The Columbia Journalism Review noted that last week’s Communist Party Congress was “a particularly opaque affair, even by Cuban standards. Raúl Castro emphatically rejected new reforms during the opening speech.” “Julie Martinez,” a Havana secretary who asked that her real name not be used, told the Financial Times: “The same [80-year old] leaders and the same [lack of] reforms. . . . Am I supposed to wait till I’m their age to see some real change?”

Castro supporters are crowing that the Cuban regime has gained new credibility and legitimacy without having to make more than surface concessions to openness. Indeed, the evidence is that the U.S. policy on Cuban dissidents has, if anything, gotten worse since Obama’s opening. “Obama said his policies would help change Cuba, but instead the evidence is that Cuba is changing America more,” concludes Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Human Rights Foundation, an internationally respected organization fighting authoritarian and totalitarian rule of both the Right and the Left.

Consider the following three examples of U.S. interests’ kowtowing to the Cuban regime, and discriminating against Cuban Americans, in just the last month.

Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban-American jazz musician who has won 14 Grammys, had already played at White House events. He was invited to perform there again, on April 29, by the renowned Thelonious Monk Institute — but was then told by the White House that he wouldn’t be attending, because he was “not passing the vetting process.”

D’Rivera quickly smelled a Castro rat, and expressed his belief that Cuban officials had intervened and tried to have him banned. In February, he had told the Miami New Times that Obama’s openness to Cuba would result only in “cosmetic” changes, mostly improvements in the Cuban elite’s access to the West: “Maybe now, some people, some elites, have the chance to go play with American musicians, like Wynton Marsalis going and playing there . . . but that doesn’t change much.”

President Obama came into office in 2009 promising “transformation” and he has delivered on that promise. Over the past 7 1/2 years we’ve witnessed billion dollar deficits and the establishment of a highly politicized and inexorably failing health care system (“Obamacare”); the “weaponization” of government agencies (think, IRS, EPA, DOJ) to intimidate and attack his political opponents; the calculated and feckless decline of American power and influence throughout the world; relentless redistributionist policies; and the president’s support (often with a wink and a nod) of thuggish (and sometimes violent) radical groups like “Occupy Wall Street” and “Black Lives Matter.” As a result, America is “on edge” — socially, racially, economically — as it hasn’t been for decades. Indeed, many have reached the sobering insight that America’s best days may now be behind her.

Overlooked by most in Obama’s relentless efforts to “remake” America has been his ongoing and dangerous transformation of our military. Here I am not going address the dozens of weapon systems cut, or the tens of thousands of troops given their “pink slips.” What I want to speak to is his administration’s systematic destruction of the 200+ year-old culture of the U.S. military. This “multicultural makeover,” happening right before our eyes, threatens to undermine the very fabric of our armed forces. The forced acceptance of open homosexuality and the burgeoning hostility toward Christianity; the gratuitous degradation of our troops (e.g., forcing ROTC cadets to march in red high heels to experience what it’s like to be a woman; making male soldiers wear simulated lactation devices, or lecturing them on “white privilege,” dare I go on?); the “full-court press” to make our forces more diverse, most alarmingly by opening up combat positions (even special forces) to female soldiers; and the relentless purging from the ranks of dozens of fine general officers whose only “offense” was their failure to “get with the program” — all of this, like some nightmarish “progressive” Blitzkrieg, is now wreaking havoc with our reluctant service members, the objective being that of a complete and irreversible cultural transformation. What’s next, I wonder — weaponized hair and nail salons on wheels?

The 28 pages of a Congressional report detailing where the 9/11 hijackers got their financing have been classified for years, but what they contain is an open secret. Former Senator Bob Graham explained: “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.” So why keep this information secret? Because the Saudis wield undue influence in Washington, among both parties – an influence that has deformed our response to the global jihad threat, and continues to do so.

Responding to a bill that would allow 9/11 victims’ families to sue governments linked to terror attacks inside the U.S., the Saudis have acted like neither an ally nor an innocent party: they’ve threatened to sell $750 billion in U.S. asserts, vividly demonstrating why their influence in Washington is so detrimental.

Nonetheless, they still have a friend in Barack Obama, a man who has never hesitated to reach out in friendship to those who threaten the United States. Obama is trying to get Congress to reject the bill, and his solicitude for the Saudis is drawing criticism even from members of his own party. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) called on him to release the 28 pages: “If the president is going to meet with the Saudi Arabian leadership and the royal family, they think it would be appropriate that this document be released before the president makes that trip, so that they can talk about whatever issues are in that document.”

The New York Daily News, normally a reliable Democratic Party organ, fumed: “If the President allows himself to get pushed around this way in front of the world, then he earns every bit of the anger being directed at him by the extended family of September 11.”

Of course, all too many Republicans are just as much in the tank for the Saudis as the Democrats. CBS News reported on September 30, 2001, on George W. Bush’s watch, that “two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington.” If Hitler had had twenty-four relatives on U.S. soil on December 8, 1941, would FDR have urgently evacuated them to Berlin?

In February 2015, President Obama hosted a three-day summit on “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) that featured a roll-out of three local programs in Boston, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. This culminated CVE efforts by the Obama administration going back to 2011.

But just over a year from Obama’s White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, the programs are now admittedly a complete failure — and publicly rejected by elements of the very communities they intend to serve.

Even at the time of the summit, the CVE programs had already been deemed a failure.

These programs are also a practical failure in preventing violent extremism. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported on one Somali youth leader in Minneapolis associated with government-funded CVE programs who later attempted to join the Islamic State.

Remarkably, as the Obama CVE programs are in complete meltdown, Republican leaders such as Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation are openly embracing Obama’s CVE agenda — and even calling for its expansion.

Kicking off their CVE programs in December 2011, the administration issued the “White House Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism,” which articulated its goals:

To support our overarching goal of preventing violent extremists and their supporters from inspiring, radicalizing, financing, or recruiting individuals or groups in the United States to commit acts of violence, the Federal Government is focused on three core areas of activity: (1) enhancing engagement with and support to local communities that may be targeted by violent extremists; (2) building government and law enforcement expertise for preventing violent extremism; and (3) countering violent extremist propaganda while promoting our ideals. (pp. 1-2)

So Obama’s own stated goals fall into three areas: 1) engagement; 2) training; and 3) counter-propaganda. In each of these areas, Obama’s CVE programs have been a complete failure.

1. Engagement

Obama’s CVE policies were developed in 2011 specifically at the demand of U.S. Muslim groups. Now, the very same Islamic groups that demanded CVE are some of its loudest opponents. They claim that the administration is promoting “Islamophobia” through their programs.

Just a few months after the February 2015 White House Summit, Islamic groups in Boston — one of the cities selected for funding local CVE programs — were openly attacking those policies:

Islamic and civil rights groups in Boston and two other cities spoke out Thursday against a federal government initiative to counter violent extremism, saying it unfairly targets the nation’s Muslim communities.

“There’s no evidence programs like this are effective,” said Liza Behrendt, organizing consultant for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-discrimination group. “It’s a federal program that singles out Muslim communities and reinforces false notions of the link between Islam and terrorism.”