Neo-fascism in Film Part 5

2,751 words

Part 5 of 7 (Part 1 ^[2], Part 2 ^[3], Part 3 ^[4], Part 4 ^[5])

Translated by Ondrej Mann

Czech original ^[6]

The first film in which “neo-fascists” entered the new millennium—The Believer ^[7] (2001, dir. Henry Bean)—actually deals mainly with the crisis of Jewish identity. Rebellious Jew Danny Balint (played by the sufficiently “Aryan-looking” Ryan Gosling) has been protesting against the senselessness of rigid dogmas in the faith of his race since childhood [1], and as a teenager he becomes a skinhead with the aim of killing his fellows, because “the modern world is sick with Judaism”: [2]

“They undermine traditional life and uproot society. They tear it from its roots. Normal people derive their spirit from the earth, the sun, the sea, the soil. That is where they draw their knowledge from. But Jews have no soil. (According to Danny, Israelis are therefore no longer Jews: “It is essentially a secular society. They don’t want Judaism because they have land.”) A true Jew is a vagabond, a nomad. He has no roots or ties, so he generalizes everything (hence universalism and globalism undermining other identities?). He can’t hammer a nail or plow a field, he can only buy and sell and invest and manipulate the market, that’s all. It sucks the life out of people rooted in the soil and transforms it into a cosmopolitan culture based on books, numbers, and ideas; that is its power. Consider the greatest Jewish minds. Marx, Freud, Einstein. What did they give us? Communism, child sexuality, and the atomic bomb. In just three centuries, these people emerged from European ghettos, tore us out of a world of order and law, and plunged us into the chaos of class struggle, irrational desires, and relativity, where the very existence of matter and the meaning of life are questioned. And why? Because the fundamental characteristic of the Jewish soul is to tear life apart until only threads remain. They want nothing but nothingness. Nothingness without end,” Danny explains with growing passion to journalists. [3]

The treatment begins with a group that, in addition to anarchically beating up Jews in the streets and kosher restaurants, also organizes attacks with explosives and sniper rifles. Soon, he joins the “intellectual fascist movement” around Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane plays him a bit like David Duke) and Lina Moebius. Long-haired Zampf, who “teaches leftists” at the university, states in a private circle: “I am for fascism, it is the only form that can satisfy us.” And Lina adds: “We say what no one else has the courage to say.” “Race is fundamental to us. Spiritual life comes from race. From blood. Without it, we are no better than Jews,” Danny emphasizes. However, when he looks again at the Scriptures—the Torah—in the synagogue where he places the bomb, the “moment of truth” arrives for him as well… An epiphany that turns into the certainty that he can never overcome his Jewishness—precisely because of his “blood.” It is a given, irrevocable. And it cannot be escaped even in death, as the final scene suggests!

“For a true Jew, immediate existence, the theory of divine justification, fanfare, the Siegfried motif, the oak tree, the creation of the self, the words ‘I am!’ will always be inaccessible,” wrote the Jew Otto Weininger ^[8] (1880-1903). [4] This “holy damned man ^[9]” shot himself after realizing that his ethnicity, i.e., his “biocultural” identity, was permanently insurmountable. Danny will follow in his footsteps. And, also according to Weininger, he sees the key to understanding the behavior of Jews in their sexuality. [5]

Bean’s film depicts Jews mostly in a “stereotypical” way: either as cowardly, fearful, traumatized “victims of the Holocaust” (Frankel’s circle), or as powerful (and arrogant) rulers of the media and investment banks (Manzetti, Roger Brand). Either as devout believers who almost bang their heads against the wall (characters with kippahs), or as cold-hearted (“cool”) pragmatists (Danny’s father). However, it also reflects what is clearly a very real Jewish belief when Danny explains at Zampf’s gathering:

People hate Jews. Deep down, beneath all the tolerance they’ve learned from television, they hate them. The word ‘Jew’ gives them goose bumps. It’s like when a rat runs across the floor (…) You want to kill it without even knowing why, it’s a physical reaction: Jew! And everyone feels it: Jew!

Note: Danny works as a warehouse worker (= typical job for rank-and-file skins); Curtis and Lina want to build a position in the mainstream political arena, promote works such as “Sociobiology,” “Earth First,” “The Genome Project,” invite blacks, Jews, liberals, get Chomsky, etc. [6]

You will also see: direct action by a “lone hunter” (stalking, bullying, and kicking a Jewish student); a blow to the throat that can effectively incapacitate a much stronger opponent; and a fearless approach to “niggas” on the streets.

Quote to remember: “It’s a romantic movement, and it always has been.” (Lina Moebius on fascism).

Let’s move to the other side of the globe. Sasha (21), known as Blade, found his life’s mission here in the fight against “black occupation.” Eduard, aka Abraham, persistently films him. Both are members of a “military-patriotic sports club,” or a group of “Nazi skinheads,” which meets in a basement gym and is led by “The Master,” a veteran of Chechnya. A series of amateur promotional and instructional videos and a pile of other material will one day become “Eddie’s big movie.”

Russia 88 ^[10] (Россия 88 ^[11] 2009, dir. Pavel Bardin) is an acknowledged, Blair Witch Project ^[12]-inspired Moscow response to Romper Stomper ^[13] (including the appearance of the main protagonist). Only much more sociological: it asks why young people in today’s Russia are becoming “fascists” (“Sold-out power, corruption, lies. That’s what’s happening in our country. And it all affects young people. We’re drowning in a mountain of shit”) and captures their “confessions.” [7] The film shows parts of the city that are already in the hands of colorful colonizers from the south, but under the criminal “protection” of state authorities (“The lokal market is a city within a city. Security guards, cops, feds, they all profit from it”). It also suggests how militias such as the “Master’s” can easily become a tool of competition between market traders, entrepreneurs, the “black hand” of the police (“Negroes, those animals, are becoming too arrogant. Visit them!”), or various interest and political factions.

Impression > Today’s underground. Lost guard. Hopelessness. Here too (as in American History X ^[14]), anger and hatred are directed at one’s own family: destruction of oneself and one’s surroundings.

Best sequence > from the training camp for “unarmed combat and shooting.” You will also see: a “patriotic action” in the subway, an intervention against a whigga (= “white negro”); the band Kolovrat will be heard.

Note: the privileged position, which again has a problem with Jewish identity (cameraman Eddie is half-Jewish on his father’s side); the “betrayal” of Sasha’s sister; that Sasha’s family is complete, even multigenerational (birthday scene); the characters of the Master and his fateful mistake. [8]

Instructions from Sasha 1: “You are a fighter. Your body is your weapon. A weapon in the war against occupation. Train every day. Find a coach. Learn boxing, learn sambo, practice close combat. (…) Kill immigrants. That’s good. That’s better than good.”

Instructions from Sasha 2. (at the Dynamo Moscow stadium): “Dear hooligans, don’t kill or hurt each other. Race and nation. That is what guides us, right-wing patriots.”

The Master speaks: “We work undercover. No Lonsdale, no bombers, no unplanned fights. Leave all that stuff here. Don’t kill anyone. Just damage their property. Break a few noses. That’s our tactical task.”

The film was clearly inspired by the “guerrilla strikes” style of Format 18 ^[15] (founded by Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich ^[16]), which allegedly neutralized up to 600 “colonizers” (an unspecified list at the end of the film lists 77 killings). [9]

Combat Girls (Kriegerin ^[17] 2011, dir. David Wnendt) Marisa (20) works as a cashier in a convenience store in a small German town with a refugee center on its outskirts. She refuses to serve the “Kanaks,” knocks them off their mopeds, is an angel to her sick grandfather, a Wehrmacht veteran, drinks beer like a man, beats up “whiggas,” and dreams of having a child and a country house with her Nazi boyfriend, who is currently in prison. But then little dark-skinned Rasul, a refugee from Afghanistan, sticks to her, and that throws her off track for good…

The film spins the usual kaleidoscope of violence, sex, tattoos, hardening, and stupidity. Marisa’s boyfriend, Sandro, throws away a sort of “pseudo-NPD” brochure about the perniciousness of multiculturalism, saying that it’s “just words, words, words,” whereas he “is ready for war.” But it is precisely the fact that he “has nothing to say” that contributes to Marisa’s disillusionment after Sandro’s release from prison. [10] The second prominent female character, fifteen-year-old Svenja, mainly frightens the middle class with the idea of what kind of rabble their adolescent offspring might fall into if they don’t raise them… especially if they don’t raise them according to the “liturgy of ’68”: permissiveness, favoring the weak, etc. However, the repeated retro shot of the “problematic grandfather” who makes little Marisa march along the beach with a backpack full of sand as exercise clearly warns: Don’t raise your children to be fighters!

The year-older Skinning (Шишање ^[18] 2010, dir. Stevan Filipovic) also stereotypically attributes patriotic and nationalistic sentiments mainly to backward (= retarded) individuals and their gang. These socially excluded hooligans satisfy their primitive urges without restraint in a dimly lit basement lair. Sometimes, due to immaturity, complexes, or under the influence of some kind of shock, even a “decent person” succumbs to the temptations of manipulated, declassed anti-social individuals. This time, it is a top mathematics student Novica, who, surprisingly, does not sober up quickly, but on the contrary, quickly rises to prominence in the basement, underground hierarchy. . .

Such students can then become the “worst,” according to “kosher experts.” Or the “best”? The student’s initial motivation to transform into a “barbarian” is archetypal: in front of his newly acquired community of friends, and especially in front of the beautiful and fearless Mina (played by Bojana Novakovic), the shy-looking Novica shows what lies beneath the veneer of civilization. And he is truly rewarded for it. . . accepted by the gang and by her. [11] He becomes a man.

After this first combat “coup” (the beating of a gypsy), he resigns his “bourgeois” career in the system and deals firmly with his “rainbow” professor. He breaks off his existing shallow and disrupted family and friendship ties. He refuses to be exploited by that part of the Belgrade establishment that uses patriotic and conservative rhetoric for its own power goals, but a genuine anarchist “national revolution” would be even more destructive to their “commercial” and other interests than EU control and intervention in Serbia. He forms a commando resistance from a group of uncontrolled rioters. Their plan: to kidnap the local “boss” (agenda: corruption, hookers, drugs for “dance parties”) and raid and burn down the gypsy camp with Molotov cocktails, which will definitely unsettle Relja, the current “boss,” for whom the bomber jacket was more of a weekend outfit. . .

Note: the poster for the film 300 ^[19]: how Mina and Relja will turn out (oh, those cadres). Will Novica finally repent?

Most realistic character: the fat inspector Milutin, “protector of law and order.”

Notes:

1. Race—here in Chamberlain’s sense as an unstable spiritual and physical “entity” that evolves or declines over time, but which can also be consciously maintained, or even cultivated. See: The Foundations of the 19th Century and others.

2. Jews as the “ferment of decomposition” of nations and states: this description of their role in “static European societies” was also intended positively by 19th-century European liberal idealists. See J. P. Stern, The Führer and the People, 1975.

3. However, the intellectuals and ideologues of “Aryanism” generally saw (and see) it differently: materialistic Jews, they claim, are—as “children of the world”—more resilient than, for example, the “metaphysically inclined, and therefore fragile” Germans. A high degree of “attachment to the earth”—to material wealth—has thus made them capable of “surviving even the greatest and most famous nations.” Compare, however, the holistic (total) conception of life in Herbert Schweiger versus the “unraveling of life” into threads among the Jews, as Danny further describes.

4. Quoted from Robert Pynsent, Questions Of Identity: Czech And Slovak Ideas Of Nationality And Personality, 1994, p. 175.

5. Danny to a sleazy New York Times reporter: “Take sexuality, for example. Did you fuck a Jewish woman? See? And what did you notice? Jewish women love giving blowjobs. And Jews are obsessed with it. Why? Because a Jew is a woman.”

It was Weininger himself who, in his work *Geschlecht und Charakter* [Sex and Character], contrasted spiritual, creative, masculine “Aryanism” with instinctual, uncreative, destructive, feminine “Jewishness,” for “the true Jew, like the woman, has no self, and therefore no value of his own.”

“Oral sex is technically perverse, isn’t it?” Danny continues, “and that’s how it is with Jews in everything. Jews control the media and banks—investment banks, not commercial ones!” he clarifies, “but the main thing is that in these areas they apply the same principles as in sex.” Because of his inadequacy, the Jew resorts to perversion and then implements and presents it as a matter of society as a whole.

Weininger: “Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most feminine of all…” (quoted in Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators, 1996, p. 257). The Jew relies on “Oriental,” “Renaissance” pleasure, which is a weakness (the consumerist glow of “luxury”) that has effects on “Northerners” as devastating as alcohol has on Native Americans.

5b. In *The Believer*, Karla, the daughter of Lina Moebius, with whom Danny becomes close, is a masochist. Among other things, she “allows” him to watch her have sex with her mother’s boyfriend. Mrs. Frankel, in turn, recounts her concentration camp experience: “And when I refused to sleep with him, he had my sister Ester shot, right before my eyes. Everyone blamed me for it, so of course I did everything he wanted afterward.”

* The willing practice of fellatio was foreign to Christian-raised and chaste wives. This made the Jewish courtesans of Venice—who had long been under the strong influence of the Orient—the “queens of sensual love” as early as the late Middle Ages. From there, the reputation of their “sweet depravity” spread among the “dandies” of all Europe. Even many Czech writers from the early decades of the 20th century could not forget their Saras, Rachels, Judiths, or Adinas for a long time, at least judging by the frequency of the works they dedicated to them.

6. “We need intelligence. We need intellectuals—we’ve got enough rascals” Lina explains to Danny, urging him to become the “driving force” behind her movement. It’s a “subtle” allusion to the intellectual impotence of the “real” white “comrades.”

7. At Random Sasha: “When I got scared. There are billions of them, yellow and black bastards. They’re poor, angry, hungry. And they want to come here…”Peter: “I was forced into it. My circumstances forced me into it…”; Misha: “I believe in justice…”; Anton (the fat guy with the perpetually dumb expression): “I didn’t become this way, I was born this way.” Also interesting is the staged poll on the topic “Russia for Russians Only?”

8. A theatrical confrontation with immigrants on the bridge. Although the boys laugh at two friends dressed as knights during training, they themselves then show up dressed as “Rurik’s men.” Robert, the seducer of Sasha’s sister, was supposed to “disappear” completely unnoticed, according to the plan.

9. Let us also recall the case of the “Forest Brotherhood” from the spring of 2010, roughly a year after the premiere of Bardin’s film. A five-member (according to other sources, up to seven-member) group (the so-called Primorsky Partisans) led by former paratrooper Roman Muromtsev, a veteran of the Chechen War, killed one police officer and seriously wounded three others to avenge police corruption and abuse of power in Ussuriysk, a coastal region in the Far East. (Certainly, while Putin has managed to restore Russia’s status as a superpower, he has not restored internal order in this vast country: the Eurasian “Tatar-like Golden Horde” still reigns supreme there.)

10. When she exchanges a few simple words with Rasul, who speaks broken German, it contributes significantly to her “enlightenment” and “conversion,” at least according to the screenwriter.

11. The Iron Cross! Apparently, ever since the biker short film Scorpio Rising ^[20] (1964, dir. Kenneth Anger), it has been a standard prop in gay and S&M “games played by lovers of leather, tattoos, and latex.” It is sad to realize how films like Skinning continue to spread this perverse cliché among an already confused, decent public.