Noah Isenberg's Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (2014) review

Professor Strowski:  Now I am here, to bring you home.

Dr. Erich Vornoff:  Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. ...

-Bela Lugosi, from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, 1955

The American films (and even a few that weren't) of Edgar G. Ulmer are deeply rooted in the immigrant experience, that irresolvable tug between assimilation and preserving one's identity and traditions. Author Noah Isenberg has illuminated this and many other key elements that combined to create a unique voice in cinema in his biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) and drawn the best roadmap (with a few detours, pun intended) so far into the many mysteries of that voice. As anyone familiar with biographies knows, things have a way of keeping their secrets. But the author's extraordinary and unprecedented interrogation of Ulmer's vast body of work provides incredible insight and corroboration into his life, and he marshals his information from every conceivable direction in a way that would probably make his subject very proud if not a little bemused.

The essentially itinerant director's professional life began not too many years after becoming a refugee with the internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1916, beginning as it has for many talented emigres fleeing social and political chaos, a process that continues into today. Like so many, Ulmer came to America with great aspirations and a hopefulness that with retrospect now probably seems naive; his first stop was typical for so many immigrants, and where one might think: New York City, during the early 1920s, working on the design of a Max Reinhardt stage production, a first for almost everyone involved. It wasn't long before the young and bright-eyed Austrian had headed to Hollywood, where, like most of America and its many claims to exceptionalism, success is a coldly loaded word. What better, tragic frission could an artist steeped in German Expressionism with its play of light and shadow want? Not a lot of it was going to end on a happy note, and neither do most of films of this underappreciated king of Poverty Row filmmaking who created such classics as the Laemmle era Universal horror The Black Cat (1934), the Poverty row classics such as Blubeard (1944, starring John Carradine), the legendary noir Detour (1945), and the captivating & shimmering noirish moral parable of Ruthless (1948, co-starring the suave and inimitable Ulmer co-conspirator Louis Hayward).

This is all fine and well--but, who was Edgar G. Ulmer, really? It's like asking who Charles Foster Kane, Dr. Mabuse or Jesus of Nazareth was. Luckily, we have more clues on hand, albeit often, as in the rest of life, flawed ones...

 Ulmer's a name which crops up constantly in writing on cinema, especially in cult and noir circles, but how many would know of his design and preparatory work for F.W. Murnau on the classic Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931)? I had only an inkling, if that, and had only read musings that the filmmaker had worked on a few Expressionist movies, but they were only vague allusions to the fact that he was one of the few keeping Murnau's memory and technique alive in the Hollywood system. He had popped back and forth between Hollywood and Europe as early as 1929 when he co-directed the proto-verite classic People on Sunday (or the German title: Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), along with Robert Siodmak, from a treatment that had been co-written by the great Austrian director Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom would go on to direct noir classics in America...or at least that's how some of the stories go. Untangling the legends and myths from the facts took Isenberg over a decade; his subject was often the worst source of information, as it were. There are reasons for this that have a lot to do with filmmaking and the kind of people who become motion picture directors: they're storytellers as well as notorious bullshitters, which is often how they get their vision onto the screen in the first place, they lie to achieve it, they're tricksters. 

Anyone familiar with Fritz Lang's stories about his own life and career will be recognize Ulmer's propensity to lie about himself and to exaggerate his experiences and accomplishments (including participation in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & Metropolis). Lang himself simply made things up to tell a better story; so too did Ulmer, and so many other directors over the years. Not all of this was intentional and shows that for many of them the creative process is never over. This bleed of one's life and work shows so clearly in Ulmer's filmmaking. Additionally, directors are usually intuitive psychologists and master manipulators, again, for aforementioned reasons. It takes a lot of effort to put your signature to a movie effectively and for it to retain your vision and style. Therefore, to do it in less than a week of shooting time, which was typical for Ulmer due to economic restrictions--low budgets--and end up with something somewhat coherent and even memorable is something short of a miracle. Ulmer was able to repeat this miracle many times over. This also means that he produced a lot a bad work out of sheer necessity. Even in those circumstances, he was able to imprint most of his movies with memorable themes and moments that contained not only some of his greatest dreams and aspirations, but those of audiences of his era, and ours.

Long relegated to the margins, Ulmer's body of work has been championed by everyone from the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, the leading theorist-directors of the French New Wave, to contemporary hipster movie buffs, and of course, academia. Isenberg shows us the availability of many of these movies and draws us another path to them, again, with no discernible detours. Thanks in part to the Internet, and like such luminaries in other mediums like H. P. Lovecraft, Ulmer is probably more known and popular today than he was when he was alive. My own Ulmer collection has grown in leaps and bounds as of late and announcements of new restorations of his work have been growing periodically over the last few decades, often to great acclaim.

I first came upon Ulmer's work as the Hollywood cult director of Black Cat (because of its stars Bela Lugois & Boris Karloff and the fact that it was--loosely--"based on Poe"), which is maybe the most unique horror film in the horror canon, never mind Universal's. Isenberg notes ably that the movie went on to inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show for its own high camp value, which is impossible to debate as the movie revels in its perversity, it's simply true--artistic truth. What first strikes the virginal viewer of Black Cat is the familiar use of Expressionist technique; this of course is obvious, but we shouldn't think this was done by someone who had fled a Hitlerean Europe. Ulmer, as stated earlier, was already installed in the American movie system. A fateful decision of running off with the married wife of a cousin of the Laemmles appears to be the deciding factor that relegated him to Poverty Row, he was blacklisted, even after the regime at Universal changed in 1936 to a man named Rogers after its bankruptcy. Not even hits like Black Cat & The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) could save the Laemmle-run studio from cost overruns during the Great Depression.

 Well before the rise of NSDAP & Hitler, talent like Ulmer, Murnau, Joe May (née Mandle, another Austrian), the Hungarian Paul Fejos, Josef von Sternberg (a child of immigrants), even Bela Lugosi, were already working in Hollywood and were "refugees" after Nazi Germany became a reality. They were a different kind of emigre talent, some of whom never quite felt at home in America, or anywhere, and many of them had emerged from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the aftermath of WWI. Movies aren't made in a vacuum.

Again: who was Edgar G. Ulmer? We're never going to know entirely, but thanks to studies like this, we can get an idea. Without excessive sentimentality, Noah Isenberg has advanced our knowledge of this great, dark prince of the cinema through a study of his films that delivers to us many answers and many more questions about an often tortured life at the margins. Ulmer has finally come home.

Jaenelle Antas: The StormFront photos (nifty white hate cheesecake!)

Ed.--I captured these photos from StormFront posting from Jaenelle Antas's account ("Tristania," allegedly taken from a very bad Norwegian metal opera band's name), I doubt they'll stay up for much longer, but who knows? After all, she's pretty shameless about her stupidity as must idiots are. Frequently, when you want to attract foolish young men to hate movements, you use a little honey, countercultural and anti-establishment posturings, and a good dose of deception.

As a matter of obvious fact, deception is what Antas appears to be all about: she was a Libertarian, but not a Libertarian; she wasn't a white hate activist, but she is one, and so on. The real question here is whether the Indiana Libertarian Party knew she was what she in fact was and is: an ally of neo-Nazis internationally, a kind of adjutant of Holocaust denier and Mosleyite-styled figure David Irving, and probably someone the Indiana Libertarians wouldn't notice since they're far right wackos themselves. Not all of them are openly-racist, but many of their social postions could easily lead to inflaming racial tensions, and their connections to the miltia movement through people like Lew Rockwell are telling.

So, if you have a crappy ideology that the public would never buy in a million years unless they were independently wealthy, nuts, or both, you have to sugar-coat it with appeals through the tired iconography of rebellion, wrapped-in various cultural forms like music, flags, empty rhetoric, highly charged-imagery, and sex-appeal.

This all reminds me of the fallacy of an old countercultural conceit that was always wrong: "If so-and-so likes the same music as I do, they must be cool." Utter crap. Her tastes in music are an oxymoron, she has poor taste, if any, and I'm leaving-out Beethoven and Bach, everyone with a working brain-stem likes that shit.

Antas has confirmed that she's "Tristania," so there you have it, corroboration. By the way: it doesn't matter whether she's a fan of Richard Wagner or not, she's still directly or indirectly influenced by him, that's how culture works, often invisibly.

Welcome to public life, kiddo, I sure hope your parents didn't teach to think and act this way.

Bach in Black

Postscript: I showed these photos to my 65-year-old mother who immediately stated, "She looks like a hooker." Indeed, circa 1933...


Postscript, June 29, 2013: You can find a few of the photos that were removed here, from a simple Google search:  https://www.google.com/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=Jaenelle+Antas&oq=Jaenelle+Antas&gs_l=hp.3...13075.18449.0.19120.14.10.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.18.psy-ab.fp3RncHNloI&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.48572450,d.cGE&fp=7281391dcddcbf5d&biw=1366&bih=648

Public Enemies (2009) review

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“That was the attitude at the time; that the authorities were buffoons who couldn’t get Dillinger, and these were same authorities that couldn’t fix the Depression, couldn’t relieve the suffering from the Dust Bowl, and Dillinger was attacking the institutions, i.e., the banks that had made everybody’s life a misery.”--Director Michael Mann to Roger Ebert, June 19, 2009.

For anyone who ever wondered, “What exactly was John Dillinger really like as a person?” Michael Mann’s sad-but-lively love song to the Depression-era gangster is going to be a real treat, and one that was a long-time-coming. Someone finally got the story right. Why did it take so long? There are a number of very simple reasons, but when it comes to crime, American culture tends to go through up-and-down cycles of punishment versus rehabilitation.

We never learn, and the majority of our “big house” prisons have served as criminal-factories, producing hardened men and women who might have never gone down the road to even greater crimes then they would have. In an interview transcript from June, Mann sides with a majority of corrections administrators, wardens, and even corrections officers’ unions that the system didn’t work over eighty years ago. It doesn’t now:

This is off on a sidetrack. I wanted to know about prison because it’s the prison that made him, those prison conditions made him into who he was. Of course, all of this is about finding character, what’s the character, what’s behind it. …We came up with a 1936 Bureau of Prisons investigation because that State Prison was a scandal. They had institutionalized forms of torture, of beatings, suffocation of people in strait jackets--it was horrendous, it was a hellhole. And he survived that at the top tier of that kind of population so this was a tough, tough guy.[i]

Indeed he was, and he was a product of his times as all of us are. Today, we would say that John Dillinger had become “institutionalized” by a brutal criminal justice system, and it all began with a juvenile crime of robbing the town grocer for $50. Dillinger was given ten years by a biased judge, and that was that. The die was cast from a child’s mistake, and just about anyone under the circumstances would have wanted some payback.

This is why Dillinger wanted to be known and why he didn’t wear disguises when he robbed banks.

Now that the national focus on punishment versus rehabilitation has shifted and nearly 80 years have passed, we’re able to look back at the 1933-34 crime wave with better information, more perspective, and a clearer vision. To recount the general plotline created by Mann and his collaborators is to tell the real story of the thirteen months of John Dillinger’s short life (although some would disagree that he was the man shot in the alleyway of the Biograph Theater in the very hot summer of 1934—granted, a long-shot if ever there was one).

“Public Enemies” couldn’t have had a better writer-director. Mann’s oeuvre in the crime genre is practically unassailable with “Thief” (1981), “Manuhunter” (1985), “Heat” (1995), and the more recent “Collateral” (2004), starring Tom Cruise. Few directors are better at depicting crime than Michael Mann.

It’s fun writing this review since I personally know of a few locations here in South Bend that Johnnie robbed back in 1933-34. Michiana was literally his stomping ground and he hid around this area and several nearby locations, some of them controlled by the Chicago Outfit who would hide bank robbers for money up-front. Just down the road from where I’m writing this right now is State Road 6 (built in 1932!) and the town of Walkerton, Indiana, down which the Dillinger gang was chased by Indiana State Patrolman Arthur Keller in 1933.

This jibes with a ruined location at nearby Koontz Lake that my father used to show me and my brother in the 1970s, which as far as I can tell has never been documented. I also know and have known people who were at the Biograph Theater the evening of Dillinger’s assassination by federal agents, a husband and wife who shall remain nameless in this review. As a point-of-fact, I was told by the husband before his recent passing that, “Someone pointed Dillinger out to us in the audience.” [ii] “M” and “K” were kids at the time, and when they saw the commotion in the alley of the Biograph, they fled the scene out of fear. The husband also saw Nelson’s shooting-spree in downtown South Bend and the safe house that the gang hid in, allegedly on Michigan Street, just blocks away from where I viewed this motion picture. How do I know these anecdotes are true? When “M” died earlier this year, I conveyed some of the stories to their children—they had never been told any of it. “M” and “K” weren’t supposed to be in East Chicago that hot summer night in 1934, they were only 12 and 13 years old, respectively, and they never sought any fame over what they claim to have witnessed.

Highway Patrolman Arthur Keller’s (who also appears to have had no reason to lie) oral account, conducted on October 27, 1971 at the Walkerton Police Station by Interstate Trucking historian Harry D. Woods captures the real John Dillinger:

He came from one of the most wonderful families I ever met. I can only say one thing for John Dillinger—he was an organizer. He had a sense of direction like a bird. He proved it to a bunch of us guys one night in Chicago back in November 16, 1933. He was a driver that if he was alive today, I’d still take my hat off to him. As far as John Dillinger was concerned, he got the blame for everything. I remember one particular incident when he was in his heyday. The bank of Modoc [sic], Indiana, a little two-bit bank, was robbed. There was a bank robbery in Pennsylvania that day. Racine, Wisconsin, was robbed that day. John Dillinger was indentified as the gunman at all three of these banks. The fact was, John Dillinger was sitting on his can in an automobile, a Buick, behind the bank at Racine. He was never in the bank.[iii]

This is the very same John Dillinger as portrayed by director Michael Mann and his co-writers and a bevy of researchers hired for the movie production, and they really did their homework. The November 1933 incident Keller refers to is one in which Keller was pressured to execute the bank robber illegally in an ambush by his Indiana State Trooper superiors, probably why he didn’t go into further detail. As usual, Dillinger got the jump on them and got away, but it was very close.

Mann and his collaborators attention to historical detail and accuracy is just staggering, and merely adhering to the facts has given him and the audience for this film a real feast for the eyes, quite a ride. For example: nearly every movie ever made about John Dillinger—until now—has gotten the color of “the Lady in Red’s” (Hungarian East Chicago madam and hooker, Anna Sage) dress wrong. She wore a white-blouse with an orange skirt when she accompanied Dillinger to the Biograph. There are many other examples just like it in Public Enemies, and truth be told, I’ve read nearly everything about the man and his life and was expecting Mann and company to screw-up. They never did once. From the very beginning, to the very end of the film, I was expecting some really ridiculous distortion of history, and it never really came.

There is one scene that appears to be stylistic where Dillinger strolls right into the FBI’s Chicago Field Office, and he definitely had the balls for it as well as the cunning to get away with it. Call it a nod to social banditry and the noble outlaw who restricts his robberies to the rich, the banks. Right now, you couldn’t have a timelier message. The truth is that it actually happened, it’s not fanciful!

Public Enemies is the first motion picture to accurately express the meaning of the life of John Dillinger and his place in the history of America’s criminal underworld and our modern law enforcement apparatus. Mann intercuts between Dillinger’s pursuer, Melvin Purvis, Dillinger and his gang, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Al Capone’s Lieutenant, Frank Nitty, and his associates who harbored the Dillinger gang for money. They sure weren’t doing it for their health, and when Johnny crossed from Indiana to Illinois after his incredible escape from Crown Point Jail with a wooden-gun, Hoover saw his opening and federalized the pursuit of Dillinger that had been on shaky legal ground up to that point. The rest is history.

After that, Dillinger and all the rest of the bank robbing gangs were a liability to the growing, cancerous networks of organized crime that were operating “coast-to-coast.” For decades, Hoover would deny their very existence and wouldn’t mount a national campaign against them until he had no choice. But it was easier to get more congressional appropriations for the FBI through getting John Dillinger and the other bank robbers of that bygone era. After 1934, the FBI would move towards becoming the nation’s police, and her record has been very patchy indeed, including collusion with organized crime and the harassment of political dissidents. Something died at the Biograph Theater that night, and it wasn’t just John Dillinger.

Public Enemies features a very solid ensemble cast and uses it in a way that would make the late Robert Altman proud, and it’s a very kinetic action film while being a great history lesson. You can tell that Michael Mann has wanted to direct this film for at least thirty years, if not more, and according to him, the Kentucky-born-and-raised Depp came to the project with the same passion, if not more. The Chicagoan director truly did his research. Public Enemies is a labor of love and an important movie not to be missed.

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[i] Mann, Michael. “John Dillinger, scholar of crime: The Michael Mann Transcript. The Chicago Sun-Times. June 26, 2009. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090626/PEOPLE/906269998

[ii] “M” and “K” to the author, January 2009.

[iii] Woods, Harry D. “The Story of Mr. Arthur Keller as Told to Harry D. Woods.” Indianapolis: Indiana State Highway oral history project, 1971. 10-11.

Republican Rep. Steve Austria is perhaps the stupidest human being drawing breath on this rock called earth

Ohio--Is there something in the water in the state of Ohio? Is it a bad gene pool? Are human beings really this unimaginably--just wait, it can get worse--stupid? If you're a Republican who holds this utterly bizarre viewpoint that flies-in-the-face of accepted reality, you might be a victim of being an Ohioan and a Midwesterner who breathes through their mouth in public.

Austria doesn't have all of these excuses to hide behind, however, and since I assume that he can eat without stabbing himself in the face with his fork every time, so he must have been lying, the curse of the GOP, its wont.

The problem is, not everyone is as stupid as the GOP's core-base...well, what's left of it, meaning religious lunatics, racists, free market extremists, and others in the ranks of the hopelessly irrational and confused. Don't get me wrong, we have this kind of moron living in Indiana and other parts where completely irrational people live, right here in these here U-nited States.

Austria (not the country) spake:

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history." ("U.S. Rep Austria blames Depression on Roosevelt," Columbus Dispatch, 02.10.2009)

What's astounding is that freshman Rep. Austria told this to the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch. But really: does anyone believe that FDR caused the Great Depression...really? I don't think so, not really. They might say that they do, but they don't, just like the flat-earthers and liars trying to prey on the truly desperate and ignorant poor, the subproletariat. Illiterate rednecks and Oakies. This is odd, since most of them don't vote...

But that's why Austria back-peddled the very same day:

"I did not mean to imply in any way that President Roosevelt was responsible for putting us into the Depression, but rather was trying to make the point that Roosevelt's attempt to use significant spending to get us out of the Depression did not have the desired effect. Roosevelt did not put us into the Depression, but rather his policies could not pull the nation out of the recession." ("Rep. Austria gets right with history: FDR didn't start Depression," Columbus Dispatch, 02.11.2009)

Actually, he's wrong again--we were still in a Depression until we entered WWII. New Deal policies continued during and after the war, even after being under vicious attack from the Republican Party, the national Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, etc., during the immediate postwar era and McCarthyism.

LBJ expanded New Deal programs significantly during his time in office, and the American dream as we know it was able to grow under the Bretton-Woods system. WWII took us out of the Great Depression? Fine, but that's also Keynesianism, military Keynesianism. We know from decades of an already bloated military budget that that route isn't going to work, and that there is no one panacea that's going to fix things.

If we weren't one of the most powerful nations on earth, this would merely be laughable, a real hoot. To some extent it is, but this moron can actually vote on legislation that affects us all, including the authorization for war.

Small wonder that we're still bogged-down in the Middle East in pointless occupation, our economy is collapsing thanks to a lack of proper oversight and regulation of the financial and business sectors, our schools, bridges, roads, and health care system are collapsing, we cannot compete internationally in business like we once did, when ethically challenged morons elect ethically challeneged morons. The mess we're in couldn't have happened without representatives like Steve Austria, the 6 trillion dollar man, a man barely alive.

The good news? These particular morons are becoming isolated demographically and by the objective, real world failure of their most cherished beliefs and ideologies. This is the end of Reaganism, the end of faux conservatism and neoliberalism. The game is over, and even a moral imbecile like Steve Austria understands that not only isn't history on his side, the facts aren't either.

This kind of desperation is symptomatic of a dying party, the Republican Party, a party without any identity, answers, or ideology left. But they all have one thing left from the good old days, after everything has been scraped-away by the events of this historical moment: bunch of hollow, self-serving arguments that a ten-year-old could deconstruct and dismantle in around 30 seconds flat.

If you don't like it in America, then go back to Austria, he'll steer you wrong. That'll learn 'ya.

"U.S. Rep Austria blames Depression on Roosevelt," Columbus Dispatch, 02.10.2009: http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/02/10/copy/caproos.html?adsec=politics&sid=101

"Rep. Austria gets right with history: FDR didn't start Depression," Columbus Dispatch, 02.11.2009: http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/02/11/copy/AUSTRIA_RECANTS.ART_ART_02-11-09_B8_0PCS8TG.html?adsec=politics&sid=101

The Nation reprints eerily prescient March, 1933 article, "Farewell to the Republicans"

WWW--The Nation has reprinted this article when--I know it's hard to imagine--there was an era of unprecedented corruption under Republican rule that led to an economic crisis. If you changed the names, you would think it was written this week.

But we are taking leave not merely of a single Administration. For twelve years the Republican Party has been in power. During ten of those years it controlled the executive and legislative branches of the government. When, a few years hence, an attempt is made to minimize the disaster of this last quadrennium, and to point to a preceding eight year period of material development and growth, let it be noted that in a purely material sense the American people are much worse off today than they were twelve years ago. Far more than was gained has been swept away. Savings have been dissipated, lives have been blasted, families disintegrated. Misery and insecurity exist to a degree unprecedented in our national life. And spiritually the American people have been debauched by the materialism which made dollar-chasing the accepted way of life and accumulation of riches the goal of earthly existence.

Sound familiar? If it doesn't, you might check to see if you have a pulse. Farewell to the Republicans and everyone like them, and may God damn those who still support them and their agenda.

"A Farewell to Republicans," The Nation, March 8, 1933:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/19330308/editors?rel=hp_currently

The Forgotten Genocide: Stalin's Purges

Russia/Central Asia--Why don't we hear about this more often? Why are we constantly inundated about the Shoah/Holocaust, but not the liquidation of tens-of-millions of ethnic and dissident groups and individuals under Stalinism?

The answer should be pretty obvious, and saddening: they don't have advocacy groups with the resources, they are history's losers without any voice because they were powerless then and are today.

In this world, the weak are to be scorned, if remembered at all. During the Cold War, our government used these victims of Stalin as propaganda, a secondary abuse and exploitation of their lives (and deaths). Did we ever care? Of course not, the State Department of the United States of America didn't care at all, and welcomed the rise of a 'strong man' in Russia just as they did in Germany around the very same time.

Historians estimate--though we will never truly know--that somewhere around 20 million human beings were murdered under Stalin's orders by the NKVD/KGB. Today, we're hearing that it was all about "ideology," which is partly true, but what it was really just a human disaster. The West not only didn't care, but was responsible for some of the depredations and couldn't be bothered to intervene (there are no humanitarian invasions), let alone to stop the slaughter indirectly.

Yes, today, we're being told it all began in 1937, but it's not true. The slaughter's beginnings were significantly earlier if one considers Lenin's and Trotsky's use of 'the terror' against all enemies of Bolshevism--even the Soviet councils in the cities, as they were the first to be targeted by Lenin and his gangsters. The terror began during the Russian Civil War in which millions died, and even more would perish during the collectivization programs in the Ukraine during 1932-1933.

Grain was taken from the peasants and sold on the international market to pay for a disastrous process of rapid industrialization. Western nations had no problem accepting the transactions of grain for equipment and other resources. Estimates for this particular period are six-to-seven million dead alone, and it was most certainly "systematic."

The murdering would continue, with entire villages disappearing into the night until the invasion June 1941 by Nazi Germany. Some of these victims are finally being discovered, sometimes in mass graves in public parks, with the numbers in the tens-of-thousands at just one location. By now, any fool should know that this happened, but few care or want to learn from it. FDR's attitude towards the Soviet Union merely echoed that of the rest of political and economic class he was a part of. Rhetoric is meant to be deceiving.

Even after 1933 (the year of Soviet Russia's recognition by the US State Department) there would be a continuation of mass murder during the years of Stalin's reign of terror. Was it all on Stalin and his accomplices? Yes and no. WWI devastated the Russian Empire, and Tsar Nicholas II's decision to command the army during the war--and subsequently losing it--left a power vacuum in the region. The legitimacy of the Tsar was forever tarnished, and what infrastructure there had been in Russia was destroyed and social networks were fragmented. Chaos ruled. This created a very fertile soil indeed for anyone who claimed to have answers and who showed sureness, decisiveness, and who offered order and certainty.

But once you make extreme violence part of your approach, it's almost impossible to end it, it continues-on and spreads like a plague. Weep for the dead, they were like us.

Because of the ubiquitous uncertainty gripping Russia, and the divisiveness of the Civil War, few people trusted each other. A culture of informing on one another began to catch like a wildfire, and one's loyalty to the State under the control of the Bolsheviks became the central contention: did you support order or not? A chain reaction took-hold. History isn't simply about "bad guys" and "good guys," and people do terrible things when they're desperate. If you want a good analogy, imagine a society eating itself from the inside out, just as Germany was also doing at the same time. Both nations were socially and economically devastated thanks to WWI, the war that ruined the 20th century. Our options become radically limited once we have unleashed extreme violence on others. Consider this when reflecting on our current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The Great Purge' of 1937-38 (with the subsequent "show trials") was a purging of the Communist Party's inner circles. Stalin was finishing the job of his consolidation of power, and like Hitler, he enjoyed pitting others against each other. What's unfortunate is that this purge is probably going to be confused as being the overall purge that continued unabated from Lenin and Trotsky, into Stalin's bloody-hands. Stalin was just following in their footsteps, and it's not hard to fathom that many of the millions-of-deaths also occurred simply because he was incompetent and had no idea how to rule a nation at all.

Lenin surely didn't know how to rule either, and as crazy as it sounds, he probably died of stroke brought-on by too much paperwork. We focus too much on these acts of destruction as being a sign of "power," when more often they're a sign that a Stalin's or a Hitler's reign are really bumbling tragedies of those clearly unfit to rule. Strong leaders avoid such calamities, and understand the art of compromise, the give-and-take. Destruction doesn't always mean power, but it can mean the avoidable deaths of millions. At least Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this.