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.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) review

Where in the world does one begin with Mr. Tarantino's new opus? Let me say first, that he's got a winner on his hands here, hands-down, and that Inglourious Basterds is going to woo even the hardest hearted Tarantino hater, it's that good, that funny.

In 1983, I had the pleasure to see the original "Inglorious Bastards" (1978), directed by the great Italian action director, Enzo Castellari on cable television. It became a kind of legendary movie for me and my friends over the years, and like Tarantino and his crew, we used the short-hand of "Inglorious" when were referred to it. The reason it became a kind of legend to us has a lot to do with the availability of movies almost thirty years ago: there was literally no other way to see this film over the years, and occasionally, I would see an article or a blurb about it, even meeting others who had seen it, but no dice, it eluded me on home video for over two decades.

Finally, belatedly, the word was out that Tarantino was directing his "homage" to the movie and many other war films and the original was re-released onto DVD in 2008 by Severin-Films. How times change. Now you can find the most obscure movies ever lensed, and easily, even cheaply. I assume Tarantino somehow saw the original "Inglorious" either the same way (TV), or through his job with Roger Avary (now in deep doo-doo over...you don't even want to know) at that legendary video store he was once a mouthy but knowledgeable clerk at. It must have been one hell of a well-stocked video store, that's all I'm saying. The critics are already weighing-in that this is a tale of revenge, and it is, but that's if you take the surface-level of the film with the utmost seriousness which is losing the entire point with his movies. Yes, Tarantino goes to incredible pains to create a convincing cinematic reality, and yes, this is based on Castellari's original tale in some very basic areas (like the title, and the fact that it takes place in occupied France during WWII), but that's about where it ends; this is about movie reality and the homage once again. You either like the director's writing and directing style, or you don't, and I'm with the former.

Recall that Castellari's original 1970s "rip-off" of The Dirty Dozen (1968) is really more an homage to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), a story about another group of scoundrels that you end up at least respecting by the end of the film because they do something good to redeem themselves. To cut it short, Inglourious Basterds isn't even a revenge film or a revenge fantasy at all as some critics have written. It's more and less than that because it's not really about WWII directly but about the cinema before, during, and after the war, the cinema surrounding the rise of National Socialism and its demise, and the movies made about it after-the-fact. Once again, this is a movie about movies, so just enjoy the ride.

If you really wanted to reduce a good part of the movie itself to its fundamentals, you could equate it with someone talking about WWII cinema and the nature of the movie business in the 20th century, which when referring to Hollywood means that the subject of Jews in the business is inevitably going to come up (and not necessarily in a negative-light). It's not a political film, but it does have some interesting political implications to it; one way of describing it is that it's WWII through the movies, even being "won" by the end through cinema, film itself, quite literally, as part of the plotline. Fortunately, that's not giving away too much. As with most Tarantino movies, we get the famous chaptering. The very first scene is very reminiscent of the style of Sergio Leone and many parts of the film could be compared to a Spaghetti Western with faces serving as landscapes, and landscapes serving as faces; and as you might expect, many of the characters are "stock" ones grabbed from other WWII films. There are even occasional nods to the great war movies of Sam Fuller.

But then, we get a lot of references to the cinema of the 1930s--mostly German and French, a little American--like the references to Leni Riefenstahl, who as a Teutonic heartthrob of their "mountain films" wowed German audiences and had a certain sex appeal among the Nazi cadre. Riefenstahl had other talents that would flourish under National Socialism. She later went on to direct the most well known Nazi propaganda film, "Triumph of the Will" (1935) and "Olympiad" (1937). But then, we also hear about G.W. Pabst ("Pandora's Box" with the sultry Louise Brooks), and even Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Le Corbeau" (1943). This is all going to be over the heads of most moviegoers when they go to see Tarantino's new work, but it adds to the experience and cinematic richness nonetheless.

And then there is the violence: it's not nearly as graphic as many reviewers are painting it, and it's not present in much of the film. I'm sure some Jewish members of any given audience watching this movie might view it as a revenge story of some sort, and to some extent it is, but so is Death Wish with Charles Bronson. Everything is a prop in Inglourious Basterds, used by Tarantino to drape his dialog and vignettes on. I think that's about as deep as Tarantino wanted to get into that aspect of his tale, a story that could be seen as autobiographical in some strange way. There's not much that I can say that's bad here; from the production design that's right out of Tinto Brass's "Salon Kitty" (1976), to the musical-stings by Ennio Morricone copped from several Italian classics of the 1970s, and even to the use of David Bowie's "Putting Out Fire With Gasoline," this is about style, and little else. There's nothing wrong with that.

There is gore (a couple scalping scenes are probably referencing William Lustig's "Maniac," not even a war movie), there is violence, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Tarantino decided to place Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs in the midst of WWII, but it's all very deadpan, very funny material. The comic timing itself is pretty impressive and the dialog is up to the writer's normal standards. Perhaps what's most impressive is that Quentin Tarantino has forced American audiences to sit through a roughly 3 hour motion picture where 3/4's of it is subtitled, no mean feat. I predict a hit here. There is no real political message to Inglourious Basterds anymore than there was in a lot of the WWII genre, and if there was, it was unintentional and purely a product of the times they were made in. With the ousting of an "ugly American" president in George W. Bush, there is at least for this brief moment that one thematic-thread that runs through most of the postwar WWII genre: the mutual-ties between the former allies and their cultures, their people. Even Star Wars reads like a retelling of WWII, but Inglourious Basterds could read like a retelling of the movie industry after it. So far, Europe has been "liberated," conquered at Cannes.

In a telling scene with comedian Michael Myers and a character actor playing Winston Churchill, the British high command wants a briefing on German cinema under the Nazis from one of their officers. The look is right out of the films of Michael Powell and even Lindsay Anderson. The Myers character brings-up the fact that "Goebbels has gotten the Jews under control" in their motion picture industry. Churchill chimes-in: "We need to find-out how they did it." An enigmatic statement if ever there was one, but a funny one; Inglourious Bastereds is a knuckleheaded flick for cineastes, a must see, and almost as funny as 1984's "Top Secret."

The WWII-era mass grave in Malbork could have been a specific historical statement

Malbork, Poland--Polish workers digging in a WWII bomb crater at the base of the Teutonic Knights fortress last October have found what appears to be a mass grave containing the bodies of 1,800 ethnic Germans of the town that was once called "Marienberg" under German rule, now Malbork under the Polish. The discovery is both shocking, and raises more questions so far than it answers.

The original inhabitants of Marienberg from that era have been missing since those murky last days of WWII when Red Army troops shelled the town in their push to Berlin. After the war, the town was repopulated with Poles driven-out of areas of Poland claimed as Russian territory by the Soviet regime. Until recently, nobody has had any idea what happened to them. Millions of civilians went missing in the chaos of WWII and have never been found. The discovery was made on the site of a proposed luxury hotel where there had been some exploratory digging before construction.

It's unknown whether the construction of the proposed hotel will proceed or not, but more official excavations by Polish authorities are planned to continue until there's more certainty that these are the missing inhabitants of Marienberg from over sixty-years-ago. By all accounts, they are. Since the end of WWII, 1,840 German citizens of the town have gone missing, so the numbers are very closely matched at this writing.

There is every reason to believe that the victims were slaughtered by Red Army troops. More than a few of the bodies had been shot in the back of the head in an execution-style that echoes the victims of the 1940 Katyn forest massacre of the Polish officer corps, begging the question of whether Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) or the NKVD also had a hand in the killings. After April 6, 1918, the Red Army was accompanied by "political commissars," generally appointed by the Communist Party's hierarchy, separate from the military's. After 1942, political commissars were referred to as a "politruk"(политру́к).

Until 1991, every military leader in the Red Army's hierarchy had a political counterpart. Both officers would have to agree on an order or action for it to be "legally"expedited by troops on the ground. In other words, the Communist Party had to be part of the decision to execute the surviving citizens of Marienberg after the initial shelling of the town. According to Der Spiegel, one-in-ten of the bodies recovered so far had been shot in the head; all the dead were then buried naked without any belongings, not even shoes or identification papers.

There is the possibility that Stalin was indirectly or directly part of this decision--and many others of its kind--as he was intimately familiar with the political commissar structure. Stalin had been a political commissar during the Russian Civil War. The phantom of Katyn and other massacres of that era haunt the Marienberg event, the vagaries of war aside.

In the final days of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev revealed in 1989 that the NKVD had in fact expedited the slaughter at Katyn under Stalin's orders and that there were three killing-and-disposal sites located in the forest outside of Smolensk. Numbers of the murdered in this one instance hover at around 25,000. While the numbers slaughtered by totalitarian regimes during the 20th century were unprecedented, there is a long history of this kind of activity in the Baltic region, and there are clues in the historical record that point to the possibility that the killings in the then-Marienberg were symbolic and meant to send a message to ethnic Germans.

The location of the mass grave was certainly convenient, but it's placement before a Teutonic Knights fortress could be very telling.

700 years before the slaughter in Marienberg, the Teutonic Knights had invaded Russia at Novgorod, then were defeated by Russian Prince Alexander Nevsky and his troops at the "Battle of the Ice" ( Ледовое побоище) on April 5, 1242 at Lake Peipus. The Teutonic Knights were part of a coalition of Swedish, German Livonian and Teutonic orders, and Danish forces sent under the auspicies of the Vatican (Pope Gregory the IX) to subdue pagans and Eastern Orthodox ruling structures throughout the Baltic region in the "Northern Crusades." Outside of the expected killing incurred during warfare, liquidations occurred in the name of spreading the Catholic faith and monarchial influence, while extinguishing the pagan and Eastern Orthodox ones. The Iron Cross comes from the Teutonic Knights.

Was the Red Army contingent sending a historically-tinged message to Germans? Perhaps. German resistance in Marienberg had been especially vicious, so any vengeance message pointing-out a historical-parallel might have been accidental on the part of the Red Army contingent: Marienberg had been founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1274 when it was part of conquered pagan Prussia, just a little over thirty years after the Battle of the Ice. After its founding the town was the seat of the Teutonic Order, and it controlled access to the Baltic, levying tolls on the merchant shipping of various nationalities. Similar ambitions arose during the 20th century.

It was well known during WWII that Himmler's SS had consciously patterned themselves after the Teutonic Knights, with their own racialist and anti-communist rhetoric of "godless" Slavic enemies being barely distinguishable from their Medieval Catholic counterparts. The parallels between the SS system and the Teutonic Knights' expansionist feudalism, enslavement, their network of castles, and their own purges of civilian populations, are eerily similar.

Stalin and his NKVD (later, the KGB, now the FSB) had similar aims and utilized the same terror tactics, and on a comparable scale. Soviet troops had plenty of reasons to want payback that had nothing to do with crimes committed 700 years earlier, but it might have been a factor in their actions. Soviet archives could answer most of these questions. The Teutonic Knights still exist, with their seat in Vienna since 1809. History has a way of repeating itself, negating the necessity for reincarnation.

"Katyn Forst Massacre-Polish Deaths at Soviet Hands": http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/

"Malbork Massacre: World War II Mass Grave Unearthed in Poland," Der Spiegel, 01.08.2008: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,600216,00.html

Ken Russell at the BBC Box Slated for Sept. 23rd

Film--This is great news for true lovers of cinema everywhere. These were documentaries done by Ken Russell during the 1960s for BBC television. Most are around an hour, some longer, and either focus on some great artist or composer. More than a few of these films were made for significantly less than a million English pounds.

The set is composed of 3 DVDs (NTSC), clocking-in at 477 minutes. As far as I can tell, they're all black & white, and full screen format as they were broadcast. I own the Isadora Duncan film in 16mm print form, and it looks absolutely luminous.

Expect very surprising quality: the television prints are very fine- grain, and on AGFA safety film ("no vinegar)"! "Dance of the Seven Veils" was Russell's final BBC film--he was booted-out after that, not to return until 1992's "Lady Chatterly," and only because it was through BBC-Birmingham. Sometimes, you have to bypass the head office, and the memory at the BBC is a very long one indeed.

The big surprise of the set is that it has a "suppressed" film. Just a few-years-back, "Dance of the Seven Veils" was banned by the Strauss estate from being shown at a Belgian film festival. The reasons were obvious from the film's content: Russell paints the waltz composer Richard Strauss for what he was--an ardent Nazi supporter (though this is arguable), and one of Hitler's most famous admirers outside of Leni Riefenstahl. Russell argues throughout the majority of his biopic documentaries (even his studio ones) that, yes, these were incredibly flawed individuals, but that their artistic works redeem them. This release is sorely overdue.

The tentative film list:

The Debussy Film, Dante's Inferno (w. Oliver Reed!!), Always on Sunday, Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World, A Song of Summer, Dance of the Seven Veils

Does D.C. Have Her Own Salon Kittys? (Revised version, originally written in June of 2007)

Washington D.C./Nazi Germany--It's highly doubtful that Deborah Jeane Palfrey knew anything about the subterranean activities of some of her associates, but could some of them have been agent provocateurs or spies? Or, with the capabilities of current surveillance technology, would it even be necessary? Could elements within the government and the two major political parties run sexual blackmailing operations under the color of legitimate investigations? Could foreign agencies be using escort services for similar ends? There is smoke.

Time and technology have changed the West's social landscape in substantial respects since 1933-1945 , but some things never change. Generally speaking, only the technology changes. This is another age, and some political tactics never die because they're always going to be useful later-on, and sometimes they get results. Instant communication was once the sole domain of the State, but today, we all have cell phones, pagers, laptop computers, GPS locators, unparalleled surveillance capabilities, and toys like the Blackberry and the new iPhone. Things have changed in the "secret world" as well, though the full-extent of these technological developments are unknown.

On Salon Kitty:

Although brothels were officially outlawed by the Third Reich, the elite Nazi SS security police had been authorized by Himmler before the war to engage prostitutes in intelligence gathering. The infamous Salon Kitty in Berlin's Giebachstrasse [11] was the brainchild of the Deputy Reichsfuhrer SS, Reinhard Heydrich. The high-class brothel was set up to increase surveillance of foreign diplomats and visitors as well as to gather dossiers on the sexual indiscretions of Nazi party big-wigs and government guests [Ed.-my emphasis]. ... (pp. 241-242) (heretical.com, "Love, Sex and War," by John Costello From Chapter 12: 'Black Propaganda and Sexpionage')

But Nazi Germany was hardly the precedent of this approach--it's ubiquitous throughout human history in various incarnations. The story of Samson and Delilah comes-to-mind. "Honey traps" or "plots" are nothing new, and the examples are common in the secret world. Interestingly, "Operation Kitty" was an overall failure for the Nazis controlling the enterprise. It didn't provide the huge-swath of intelligence that its creator--Reinhard Heydrich of the SS--had wanted, just a lot of compromising smut on NSDAP party officials and lower-rung functionaries.

This was most useful against other "Gauleiters" in the National Socialist hierarchy. Heydrich likely used some of this information, though the extent is unknown. Heydrich was assassinated by Czech partisans in 1943, and had been an architect of the "final solution." Interestingly, it was an "open secret" amongst NSDAP functionaries who frequented Giebachstrasse 11 that all conversations were being recorded!

The Salon Kitty was a German SD (Gestapo) establishment in which, according to German spy chief Walter Schellenberg, "...important visitors from other countries could be 'entertained' in a discreet atmosphere and...offered seductive feminine companionship. In such an atmosphere the most rigid diplomat might be induced to unbend and reveal useful information." Salon Kitty was set up in a large multi-storied apartment structure in a fashionable district of Berlin. Today, it's another kind of shop. It is described in The Schellenberg Memoirs (1956):

["]Double walls were built for the incorporation of microphones. These were connected by automatic transmission to tape recorders which would record every word spoken throughout the house. Three of our department's technical experts, bound by oath, were put in charge of his apparatus. The ostensible owner of the house [Kitty Schmidt] was provided with the necessary domestic and catering staff for the establishment to be able to offer the best service, food, and drink.["] (Spy Tech Agency.com, 12.02.1999)

The brothel's madam--Kitty Schmidt--had no control over the arrangement, and was a virtual captive of the regime, just like everyone else under the rule of NSDAP. It's entirely possible we have an entire network of this sort in North America today, just with different contours. This leads us to the role of sexual blackmail in politics.

There have been quite few "retirements" at the Pentagon under the Bush administration, and under Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, there was an intense struggle for control of the Pentagon's bureaucracy. Of course, it hasn't been isolated to the DoD under Bush and Cheney. One can safely assume that the officer class of the United States are amply represented in the D.C. Madam's phone records, especially considering the presence of several numbers originating from Annapolis, as well as most of the region surrounding Washington D.C. Hotels adjacent to the Pentagon are also present.

There is a possible analog here from the era of NSDAP. In 1938, Hitler was finalizing his consolidation of power, but there were a few loose ends in the officer corps of the Wehrmacht:

For Hitler, the moment had arrived to clean house, to replace the crusty old generals with younger men eager to serve their Führer and follow orders, regardless of the consequences. The two highest ranking officers in Germany at this time were hold-overs from the days of President Hindenburg; Field Marshal Werner [V]on Blomberg, the Commander in Chief of the German Armed Forces, and General Werner [V]on Fritsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army. These stiff-lipped men with their rigid codes of honor were about to be toppled by that most vile of all things from their point of view, personal scandals involving sex. (historyplace.com, "Hitler Becomes Army Commander," 2001)

For Blomberg, it would involve the fact that the elder Field Marshal married a "former-prostitute," conveniently found in Weimar police records by Herman Goering, the founder of the SD. Himmler also got in on the game. Thanks to this information, on January 25th, Hitler could finally force Blomberg's resignation. Finally, no one would stand in-his-way, and there would be war. For General Werner Von Fritsch, things would be worse than Blomberg's predicament. Much worse.

He would be blackmailed by an obscure account in Gestapo files that he had had an homosexual encounter in an alley in 1935, the same year that Hitler purged the SA (Brown shirts) in the "Night of Long-knives." In short, Fritsch was felled by a "confidential informant." At about that same time, Stalin was using similar methods in purging the Central Committee of the Communist Party, killing his prey outright...because he could.

The irony was, the informant who "outed" Fritsch (the notorious Hans Schmidt--no relation to Kitty) had the wrong man. It was an officer named "Frisch." It didn't matter to the blackmailers and state pimps: Hitler moved swiftly to remove Fritsch anyway. Sixteen other generals would be removed through various methods, but the downing of Blomberg and Fritsch was that crucial beginning of total control over the German Army by NSDAP. Ironically, a number of these generals would be brought back as the war deteriorated...

"Hitler Becomes Army Commander," 2001:
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-army.htm

"Love, Sex and War,":
http://www.heretical.com/costello/12sexspy.html

Spy Tech Agency, December 2nd, 1999:
http://216.87.7.9/Intel%20Bulletin/Intel%20Bulletin%20019991202.htm

"America shoots-down a spy satellite" is a cover-story

The State Department--The mainstream media has done its best to convince us that this was Skylab 2.0, a case of space junk crashing back down into backyards everywhere. That was the misdirection, but the reality is that it was a real world test and use of the missile defense shield system, a deadly new step in the global arms race. A source who witnessed earlier tests in the South Pacific almost ten-years-ago told me at the time how wasteful and faulty the program was.

What a difference ten years makes, but do we really need this stupid thing? Does it really justify the billions that it cost to develop and make? Will the reactions of other nations make us safer, knowing that we possess the capability of a first nuclear strike with a defense shield to "protect" us from the inevitable retaliation?

Assuming that the radar installations being constructed in Poland and the Czech Republic are part of the global infrastructure of this anti-missile system, is it really wise to add to the intimidation of Russia by pushing Kosovo's (as Germany and NATO did with Croatia and Slovenia in the early-1990s--the rest is history) independence from Serbia? Ask most Russians and they'll tell you that "the Serbs are our brothers," a healthy reminder that Pan-Slavism is hardly dead.

Thanks-a-lot Werner Von Braun (and Robert Goddard). The continuing American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan also fuels Russia's justified paranoia, also including NATO's presence in those countries, and within the Balkans. How would Americans react if Chavez stationed peace keepers along the Rio Grande?

We shouldn't be surprised that Serbs are attacking the American Embassy in their Capitol considering how much the Clinton administration and the rest of NATO used them as their genocide scapegoat to bring about the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Not everyone in Western power circles has learned the lessons of why WWI happened. Wesley Clark's comments that the rioters who attacked and set-fire to our embassy were "extremists" could be held-up against those of the Hapsburg governors a century ago. The differences and the denials of reality are striking.

Very little has changed, and the Serbs aren't ever going to stop fighting against what they see as threats to their sovereignty from outside the region. America and NATO are bent on the domination of the Balkans and the encirclement of Russia, this much is certain. This missile test is just part of the plan.

Ken Russell Extravaganza!

"I have two more breakthrough films on the stocks – Porn-Again Christian and A Chink in the Curtains. Each one lasts just one minute, including credits." --Ken Russell, December 14th, 2007.

Russellmania--That wonderful enfant terrible of cinema has been writing an often hilarious and always thoughtful column for The Times. Ken Russell also has a new film entitled 'A Kitten for Hitler,' and it's free, online for all you deadbeats: http://www.comedybox.tv/index.aspx . Ken gives a bit of a synopsis at Comedy Box when he states that:

This story concerns Lenny, a naive little Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who reasons that Hitler wouldn’t be so bad if he were treated like a human being instead of a monster. Accordingly, he risks life and limb to cross war-torn Europe to deliver to "Uncle Adolf" a placatory Christmas present in the shape of a cuddly kitten [Ed.-I think we should try this with the president, don't you?]. Moved to tears, the Führer hands him a swastika-shaped bagel from the Christmas tree, whereupon Lenny pulls up his shirt, revealing an almost identical birthmark. What happens next I leave to your imagination– likewise the moving payoff.

Here's to extremely bad taste done on-the-cheap!And this is just one of a few other films of Ken's that are available, free, and online to all you cheap bastards out there.

Ken's newest article at The Times (UK): http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3074343.ece

Babs Streisand Bullish on Billary Clinton, as Lilli Marlene was for Adolf Hitler

NYC--Ever notice you can take the prose from Poe's 'The Raven,' and put it to the melody of 'Superman'? Try it, it works. Right, not all Jews are Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, David Cronenberg, or Jesus. Some are wrongheaded turds like everyone else, happily helping shovel the bodies into the ovens. Babs is no exception to this kind of insensate human being, and she loves parading her iniquities everywhere she can.

Gay men: stick with Judy Garland, she was the best. But we knew this, or why would you have rioted over her memory at Stonewall? That was a real woman--a mother--with genuine class. She suffered so much in her life. Babs is a far-cry from Judy, more like the groveling, fawning Lilli. But there's a certain kind of woman who claws-her-way to the tyrants, those strongmen who display (b)absolute certainty at every turn.

Let's not forget about Waco in 1993, or the fact that it was Bill Clinton who authorized and pushed for most favored trading status with China. He was just finishing the work that began with Nixon, carrying over from Ford, Reagan, Bush, and finally Bubba. Sure, he's our first 'Black President' alright--black as the eyes of a lion before it sinks it teeth into the flesh of a gazelle. Forget Babs, forget the schnoz, and the ridiculously high tickets prices for the so-so shows of a terminally spoiled psychotic.

Retire Babs, you always sucked. You just hate actually paying your share, you tax cheat. We should also remember that Bill Clinton ordered the destruction of Iraqi-infrastructure during the 1990s during the 'no-fly zone' period, bringing about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.

That's genocide, Babs, that's what you're supporting. You don't care, you spoiled, evil bitch. The Clintons also bombed Kosovo in 1999, causing over 200,000 Eastern Orthodox Serbs to flee. That's ethnic cleansing, but our crimes never happened. Barbara Streisand is our era's Lilli Marlene, a singing whore for neo-Nazis.

Perhaps we can conduct the killing of our victims with Barbara's songs blaring in-the-background. Hey, they played music at Auschwitz, so why not her crappy singing? That would be torture enough.

It would make a lot of sense for those interned at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to have to listen to her drivel all-the-time. Marlene Dietrich knew a fascist when she saw one--what's your excuse you walking parody of humanity? What a moral imbecile, that Babs.

Is Wal-mart selling Nazi paraphernalia?

THE UNITED STATES AGAIN--You gotta love reactionaries on the Left and the right. The blogosphere is going ballistic over a Wal-mart selling t-shirts with a "Nazi-skull emblem" on them. Ferchrissakes, pay attention to Iraq, watch the lame duck Congress so they don't pass any more totalitarian laws.

Just do something useful.

The image is the SS Totenkopf (death's head) symbol, often worn by American bikers. It's pretty obvious this is an overreaction and that the shirts are a mistake by a lazy graphic designer.

But what if they sold the real thing? What if they sold actual Nazi paraphernalia from 1933-1945? I wouldn't be bothered by it at all. Really? Nope. People should have physical artifacts to prove that Nazism and the Holocaust really happened. These are objects with no power other than what we project onto them.

If you think a swastika or an Iron Cross holds some strange power over you, you might consider an analyst. Wal-mart is removing the shirts, so it appears that democracy's safe for another week. But we all know that it was Nazi paraphernalia that started WWII: an entire generation of Germans were hypnotized and obeyed all those medals, posters and uniforms, not Hitler. "But why would you even want that stuff?" I think I just said why.

[Ed., 12.28.2008--Yes, it was medals and Nazi paraphernalia that caused WWII. Not the devastation and reaction to WWI, not Versailles and the absurd reparations leveled on Germany, and not a Great Depression and a compliant conservative aristocratic establishment that allowed Hitler into Bismarck's cabinet--we can prevent another Third Reich by stamping-out any memory or reference to it. Fuck you.]

The Original Irritant:

http://www.bentcorner.com/2006/11/09/wal-mart-is-selling-shirts-with-a-nazi-ss-skull-on-it/