On Wednesday, according to news reports, James W. Von Brunn, a longtime belligerent racist and anti-Semite, walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire, murdering a security guard before he himself was shot and neutralized. Good people everywhere recognize the vicious criminality of his attack, and the particular insidiousness of his motivation to lash out where he did.
Concerning the chilling video in this post, several readers emailed last night to write, “Did you stay to the end to see who produced it?” I missed the fact that Harpo Productions – Oprah – produced that video. On that note, I received this email, about the “I Pledge” video, from a teacher:
I showed my caustic remarks on it [the video] to some of my students and they loved it. But then they were the same group who noticed an uncomfortable parallel to what happened during Tuesday’s Obama Inauguration Day festivities and the film we have been viewing in their World History class — Triumph of the Will — Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of cinematic propaganda deifying Adolf Hitler at the 1934 National Socialist German Workers Party Rally in Nuremberg.
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole…that above all, the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual…we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man.” — Adolf Hitler (Thanks to Chris Rhoades.)
I guess we here at blog of bile and CNN aren’t the only one’s seeing the connection.
