Fascinating Fascism

I think one of the jobs of a history teacher is to make the "young" aware of the patterns of human behaviour. Obviously this covers a lot of different things, but at the moment we are looking at how, even in a country with an excellent education system and free elections, people who are embodiments of evil can be put in charge.

I'm one of those people who think that most acts in History are really shades of moral grey, but I'm happy to call Nazi Germany pure evil and I don't expect many people to disagree with me. Americans, for example, would quite rightly pride themselves for the part they played in bringing the Nazi regime to an end in 1945. And yet...

I have always loved Classics, and whenever I have a gap in my Social Studies classes I slot in a bit of film and history concerning the ancient Greeks and the Romans. We watch Hollywood's latest version of Troy and Alexander. The students love it. The movie they loved most last year was 300.

300 is a movie that promotes fascism. It is an uncomfortable fact, but the ideals that the Nazis promoted in the 1930s and 40s are still attractive. Especially to the young.

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The Olympic torch relay was reinstated by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Since then it has been a proud Olympic tradition.

At the closing ceremony of the 1936 Olympics Baron Pierre de Coubertin (founder of the modern Olympics) said:

“Keep the holy flame alight… The memories of courage will remain unextinguished, since courage was necessary to face the difficulties that the Fuhrer had countered with the slogan Wir Wollen Baueun (We want to build)… Let the German people and its leader be blessed, for the things that were just realised.”

Another person with something to say was the poor old Fuhrer:

"The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn't separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. It also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That's why the Olympic Flame should never die."

So the Nazis had a thing about the Greeks and in particular the Spartans. They also had a thing about making power look sexy, and keeping the message simple.

Riefenstahl. Olympia. It's a film full of beautiful bodies. You notice only incidentally that it is filmed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The values that Riefenstahl puts in this film are values that most cultures share. Love of one's country, striving for the physical limit, glory.

And yet, it doesn't seem a coincidence that the modern Olympic movement was reborn at the time when European empires were entering the final stages of their international land grab, that tipping point when the land runs out and the greedy begin to stockpile their weapons.

I rather like Leni Riefenstahl.

There's a documentary about her life called The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. It's very good.

I feel that she embraced her opportunities and was excited by the rise of the Nazis without being too bothered by what they really stood for, or caring very much about what they were really doing. She used her creativity to make things she admired look beautiful on film. Unfortunately she admired the Nazis and made them look beautiful and powerful on film. In hindsight she probably wished she hadn't.

When she talks about Triumph of the Will in the documentary the only time she is really animated is when she is in the editing room explaining how the movie was made, showing her clever editing, and the techniques she used to make something quite dull (loads of people standing around) look good.

Still, she did seem to be into the Nazi thing a least a little.

"[Mein Kampf] made a tremendous impression on me. I became a confirmed National Socialist after reading the first page. I felt a man who could write such a book would undoubtedly lead Germany. I felt very happy that such a man had come." - Leni Riefenstahl

What really surprises me when I read this is the idea that anyone could read any part of this book and think it was good.

Whenever I teach about the Nazi's at school there are usually one or two students that want to read Mein Kampf. I think this is normal. I think the best way to cure anyone of the notion that Hitler was cool is to actually give them a copy of Mein Kampf, so I do. Actually, I just give them a photocopy of a chapter. Reading a chapter is enough. No one with a healthy mind wants to read anymore.

I have always preferred Hitler's original title for the book: Four and a Half Years of Fighting Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. The best thing about this title (aside from length) is that I can imagine Don Brash releasing his memoirs with the same title today (or Roger Douglas, or any other "misunderstood" politician. We should keep in mind that being "misunderstood" in a democracy really means that people don't like you very much).

Leni's decisions remain a difficult ethical point, and you can never entirely let her off. Leni was clearly a person interested in documenting power and the body, in that she is not alone as an artist, but somehow it doesn't quite feel comfortable when the artist makes murderous ideas look good.

A smart lady who had Leni on was Susan Sontag.

Sontag died in 2004. I like to make quick, superficial judgements about people and my quick, superficial judgement about Susan is that she was really cool:

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history." Sontag later offered an ironic apology for the remark, saying it was insensitive to cancer victims.

Nice.

In 2001 she had this to say about 9/11:

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

Smart, provoking people like this are needed in droves.

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
- Susan

Was Leni Riefenstahl just copying something human that we don't care to praise? Or is praise of this kind of art actually immoral?

Three things. Firstly, if you google image Sexy Nazi (don't ask), you end up with pictures of Asian women in Nazi uniforms. Secondly, while I was in Japan a restaurant in Korea had to close because it had chosen to go with a Nazi theme for its decor. Thirdly, I went to a restaurant in Osaka a couple of times called Christon (Christ-on).

I'm neither of the people in this photo.

This photo is of two weird men at a restuarant in Osaka called Christon. The man on the right is a waiter. They are not in a church, they are in a restaurant.

I went to this restaurant a few times, once with a friend (M) who enjoyed himself immensely. We ordered a kind of peach champagne that the menu promised would leave a "fizzy reverberation in our behinds", but failed to deliver.

The people who run this chain (they also do Buddha), bought all their authentic Catholic iconography in Spain and shipped it to Japan to be used as decor in restaurants. That's right, it's not even fake, all those Virgin Mary's were once in churches, were once objects of prayer.

It is all peculiarly offensive and laughable at the same time.

Detaching the sacred and associating it with the profane is jarring. Curiously associating evil with the profane is also jarring.

As another blog puts it:

Yet for much of the world, Hitler and the Nazis are no more than an obscure historical reference--a vague association with Germany. So, in far-flung places like Mumbai or South Korea, when you think of beer, you think of Germany, and when you think of Germany, you naturally think of Hitler.

True.

Which leads me back to 300 and my students who also regard the Nazis "as no more than an obscure historical reference".

[The] film... celebrates the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistable leader.

Through Leonidas the 300 become a community, infact the movie title celebrates this.

The... film is an epic of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission.

If the warriors follow Leonidas and his beliefs unquestioningly they will achieve greatness.

[This] portrait evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.

The Persians are consistently portrayed as effeminate, deviant, deformed and untrustworthy in the movie.

[The film] celebrates a society where the exhibition of physical skill and courage and the victory of the stronger man over the weaker are... the unifying symbols of communal courage.
The Spartans are cool because they kill everyone and they are a tight knit group.

All quotes from Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl's book of photography about the Nuba, and they are all quotes that I would apply to the movie 300.

[The] fascist aesthetic... flows from a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort , and the endurance of pain.

Sounds like a bunch of Spartans with a death wish to me.

Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics - that of physical perfection.

Oh, the poor old hunchback. Even though he is devoted to the Nazi regime he must be rejected because he is handicapped and will spoil the perfect functioning of the Aryan machine. Let's not even go into the opening scenes where imperfect babies are tossed off cliffs.

Fascism also stands for ideals that are persistent today under other banners; the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alieanation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of intellect, the family of man. These ideals are vivid and moving to many people.

I have absolutely no hesitation in calling 300 a movie that promotes fascism. This is probably unsurprising; what was surprising for me was that my students all admired the Spartans in 300, and that many of the ideals that the movie expresses are vey close to ideals that we are taught to admire in our own culture.

This leads me to conclude that badges saying NEVER AGAIN are pie in sky fantasy; that fascism will always be with us, and it remains the duty of teachers to combat it's superfical appeal.