harvej

After the German conquest of France in 1940, Hitler decided to create a 'Hollywood' style Nazi film industry to entertain the enslaved populations of Europe. ReichsMinister of Propaganda Goebbels formed & financed the Continental Film Co. of Germany, and it signed up a bunch of collaborating French actors based in the Occupied Zone in Paris where the film was produced. Vichy was mentioned in the film, but there was no film industry in the Unoccupied zone, it was just shown there. To the extent that this successful film fulfilled the aims of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, French efforts in the film were collaboration. Or,if you wish, French efforts were Resistance in order to preserve what was left of French culture.

The point of view just depended on who held the knife at your throat when the question arose.

Its all there, the heroes, the artificiality of Belief, the fear of loss of an absolute morality by the masses, a solution to the problem of Evil in our Nietzschean 21st century. Old Nietzsche really hated Chrisianity, totally disliked the German bourgeoisie, and considered other philosophies just plain wrong. The hard part of dealing with translations of his books into English is that so many of the words have become clichés: 'ubermensch' did not mean people who were physically strong, it actually meant what we would call self-motivated or self-realized. He wasn't anti-semitic and considered German anti-semitism an example of bourgeois delusion in German culture. He wrote a number of books with odd titles, like 'The Gay Science' where the phrase God is dead appears (a better translation is 'The Happy Science', another example of bad translation).

Reality forces us to live and deal with the present, the here and now, and history is only interesting, but it is not a force. There is no inevitablity to history and its so-called trends. The idea of 'blood atonement' for historical acts is crap. Now, if Ebert wants to believe that that most members of all sects desire peace and non-violence, than he is wrong, but Mormons are definitely NOT a sect that presently seeks to murder non-believers. Morman voters in Utah consistently return to power politicians who are loyal Americans, lovers of democracy, and never want to kill non-believers. They are the very picture of a normal State in the United States. Where September Dawn steps over the line is to suggest that somehow the pre-Civil War hostilities between Utah Territory and the United States have some resonance today: that suggestion is incorrect, and the 19th century war has no relevance to how people should behave toward Utah or the Mormans today. And it is too hard to get past the polemics of the movie to get to the interesting history it contains.