It is the weekend and while I rarely get a chance to go to the movies these days, I do enjoy reading movie reviews and planning which movies I will put on my "must see" list for future home DVD viewing. I still occasionally check on the reviews in The New York Times, with the usually vain hope that they will occasionally be able to report on a movie without their particular political, moral, and ethical blindness obscuring my view of the movie and to that end I took a look at the review by Stephen Holden of 'SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS'. The movie sounds like a painful but important one, and the review starts promisingly:
"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated. This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it?
After this good start, Holden speeds up and heads straight off the cliff into "Bizarro World" where everything is its opposite. Note that the following lines are in the same, opening, paragraph as the lines above:
In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?
When I began to read the review, my first thought was that this movie would illustrate better than anything we have seen in the MSM of late, the difference between a truly fascist state, Nazi Germany, and the fantasied fascist state of Amerikkka that only exists in the mind's of the Daily kos, John Kerry, Richard Dreyfus, Alec Baldwin, et al. In Nazi Germany, to hand out leaflets opposing the official government line was to risk real torture and real death. When George Clooney spews his nonsense about not being allowed to spew his nonsense, he risks obtaining an Oscar Award and another $10,000,000; George Clooney is no Sophie Scholl!
[If you get the chance, Mark Steyn's article from National Review, not yet available on-line, is tone perfect on Clooney.]
Thankfully, Holden drops his insistence on raising the "unspoken question" in the rest of the review and the movie does sound like it is a powerful story of decency and integrity coming face to face with the vile nature of fascism (though I might have been more impressed with Sophie Scholl's moral courage if she were caught protesting the genocide of Jews rather than the government of Nazi Germany trying to hide their defeat at Stalingrad.) In any event, one might naively think that when Holden watched the movie and thought to himself, "could it happen here?" he would have had the ability to notice that there are almost no areas of overlap between the fascism of Nazi Germany and the supposed fascism of America. Hollywood may think America is fascist because we are not racing out en masse to see Syriana, Munich, and Brokeback Mountain, but that is hardly evidence of a fascist wave of oppression descending on the land, though it is persuasive evidence that Hollywood is not making movies most Americans want to see. Hollywood and many liberals may see the hands of fascism in the NSA program which apparently does nothing more than the kinds of surveillance of our enemies we have always done but takes the additional step of passing on leads to the FBI for further investigation (something the Jamie Gorelick wall prevented prior to 9/11) but I would see that as fairly limited and fairly reasonable. [See the invaluable AJ Strata for the latest updates on this.]
I would also suggest to those who take the position in our "national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism" that we are sliding into fascism, that they do a simple thought experiment (which readers know I am always fond of doing):
Imagine a situation in which an innocent American citizen's privacy is compromised through the NSA program. Since there have been no such cases, it may be difficult to come up with a plausible scenario, but even so, it raises several questions:
What is the harm to the person? How do we measure that harm versus the harm to others by increasing the possibility of another successful terror attack? And, most importantly, how do we measure that harm to that single person versus the harm to all of our civil liberties if there is another successful attack and the Congress, at the demand of the American people, then institutes real limitations of civil liberties?
Perhaps if those who see fascism in every effort of government to protect us would make such a risk/benefit analysis we would all be better able to take them seriously. Sophie Scholl could actually help in such a case. Might I suggest Stephen Holden could watch it again and give some thought to the difference between real fascism and fantasies of fascism.
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