Wait for The Carpenters interlude.

I don’t know why these folks are kickin’ it Third Reich meets P. Diddy stylee in this remarkable music video and I’m not sure I want to know either.

No wait, I do want to know… WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
 

 
Via Nick Abrahams by way of Chris Campion

 
This is a guest post from Tabitha Vidaurri, a writer and comedinette from Brooklyn

In 1971 Jerry Lewis infamously directed and starred in a film about the Holocaust titled The Day the Clown Cried.  For reasons that are still unclear, Lewis chose to depart from his trademark slapstick formula and play the role of Helmut Dorque, a German circus clown who ends up leading Jewish children to the gas chamber.

The film was never finished or released for obvious reasons (not even the French were behind him on this one). Apparently Lewis has refused to talk about Clown in interviews, which I find odd—you’d figure a comedian famous for falling down and making stupid faces would jump at the chance to discuss his utterly humorless movie about a clown in a WWII German concentration camp!

In the behind the scenes footage (see below) we get a glimpse of Lewis fulfilling his duties as a director: leading the film crew, checking the cameras, and dancing around wearing a neck brace. Ambient sound has been added to enhance the overarching sense of alienation, except it isn’t really necessary because this is footage of Jerry Lewis talking to Nazis.

This slideshow of rare production stills shows a gratuitous number of photos of Lewis in full clown makeup, and to escalate the creepiness of him posing with children he presumably later leads to their deaths, the sequence is set to doo-wop music performed by Jimmy Beaumont and the Skyliners.

Since the videos are absent of dialogue, here’s an excerpt from the script  to give you a little taste of the abyss:

HELMUT
(screaming at top of voice)
Come back, damn you, come back.  The
children… they’re laughing.  They’re
laughing. I am a clown.  I am a clown.


He turns back to the children and again bows.  He quickly leans down, looks at his reflection in the puddle, and scoops up a handful of mud which he plasters on his nose to make a bulbous, artificial proboscis.  He turns back to the children and in pantomime, pretends to see a fly buzzing about and tries to swat it.  The imaginary fly buzzes closer.

The CAMERA MOVES UP TO—CLOSE SHOT—HELMUT

As the “fly” lands on his nose.  He looks cross-eyed at the mud blob, then swats at it.  The blob falls off.

To cleanse yourself of this massive, historical failure I suggest taking a shower and then watching The King of Comedy.

This is a guest post from Tabitha Vidaurri. Follow Tabitha on Twitter
 

Nazis did yoga, too
 
In case there was any question, yoga does not, apparently, necessarily lead to spiritual enlightenment. Here we see the lovely Eva Braun, getting a little transcendent exercise at Hitler’s mountain vacation home, Berghof.

 
The artist, poet and playwright, Oskar Kokoschka sent the following letter to a young German prisoner of war, in 1946. In it he advised him to be warmed by love ‘the sight of our neighbor, other people, a foreign nation, another race,’ in which the ‘embrace of love will illumine the choice, form and shape of a new order of humanity.’ Kokoschka understood the young man’s trauma, having himself served as a Dragoon in the Imperial Austrian army, during the First World War, where he slithered in trenches through ‘bottomless mud,’ until he was seriously wounded and considered too mentally unstable to fight - the twisted logic of this was not lost on Kokoschka. Later, he was the focus of hatred and bigotry, when his art was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. It forced Kokoschka to flee Austria for Prague, before then moving to Ullapool in Scotland, where he remained for the duration of the Second World War.

In this letter, Kokoschka expounds his belief in the importance of art and the artist that could show the ‘way up from subjection of blind obedience to human freedom.’

To a German Prisoner-of-War (Fritz Shahlecker)

[London,] 4 July 1946

A close friend showed me the drawings you made in the camp in England. He told me of your prospects of soon regaining your freedom and returning home to Tübingen. Like many of your fellow-Germans, you were abused in your early youth by a criminal demagogy and thrown into a war of aggression, during which the authority of human precepts was thoroughly and totally suspended, and which appears even now to threaten the future validity of those same precepts.

As an older man, I am in a position to make comparisons which shed light on the changes that have taken place in the moral sphere. That gives me a right to offer a younger man some advice that may come in useful when you are home again. After every great disappointment - in your case, when one has been the victim of a betrayal - one’s insight is clouded, because one is always overcome by weariness at the same time. The tendency to feel sorry for oneself is only a natural consequence of that weariness. You are honest in your drawings, but it seems to me that you tend towards the idealized view which comes from being in the center of a world that one is trying to rebuild. In your drawings you are trying to give shape to a new world with artistic expressive media available to you, after the reduction of your old world to ruins. You want it to be a human world, in contrast to the physical, materialistic world where naked force ruled, and in my view that is the hopeful and promising aspect of your experiment.

But the advice I would like to give you, however great your present need and poverty may be, is this: stop surrendering to a tendency to study yourself alone and to forget that a sentimental outlook is just as sure to lead to waste and failure as the entire order that is collapsing before our eyes today. That order sprang from individual egoism, and was helped to ripen by nationalistic narrowmindedness. Humanism was believed dispensable. This materialistic attitude found its complete embodiment in Fascism. Bear in mind that your personal need and poverty, both physical and spiritual, are nevertheless infinitesimal compared to the need and poverty of the children abandoned to savagery in today’s world. If your heart turns in hope to the work of rebuilding, because you are young and want to do good, you must help to make a better world for these children. You saw for yourself that what was achieved by the sword came to nothing in the end, therefore take up your pencil in the hope of doing better. You do not succeed in expressing anything about the pain throbbing in mankind today, because you are not yet able to give shape to genuine emotions. It will be like that for as long as you idealize yourself as a man of sorrows, instead of looking for the redeemer in every innocent child. The child can truly be the redeemer, if we can genuinely believe in the possibility of a better world. Sentimentality does not help us to discover new worlds, it makes us cling to the past in fascination. The new world can only be given shape if we love our neighbor. If we are warmed by love, the sight of our neighbor, other people, a foreign nation, another race, will enable us to shape a new image of the world, in the contemplation of which the isolation of the individual and his nameless torment in a ruined world will give way to the splendor in which the embrace of love will illumine the choice, form and shape of a new order of humanity. All art, that of the great epochs as well as that of primitive cultures, that of colored races as well as our own folk art, is rooted in this soil, in which the moral man has vanquished dust, decay and force. Man overthrows the dictates of physical laws and the dominion of blind elements, and by that means fights his way up from subjection of blind obedience to human freedom.

Art is a means of feeling our way forwards in the moral sphere, and it is neither a luxury of the rich nor the rigid formalism that comes out of the theories of the academies. The modern art of the present time also tends towards arid formalism. Art is like grass sprouting from the frozen earth at the end of winter, like growing corn, and like the spiritual bread in which the human inheritance is passed on to future generations.

In hope that you will find the inner strength to practice the spiritual office of an artist in the future, I leave you with my best wishes,

Yours, Oskar Kokoschka

‘Oskar Kokoschka Letters 1905-1976’ is published by Thames and Hudson.
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal Chris Campion writes: “I’ve been joking for years that Ikea is part of some kind of fascistic experiment in social conditioning. And it’s probably true!”

According to a new book about Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, his youthful dalliance with rightwing Nazi groups is more extensive than he’s admitted in the past. Sweden’s intelligence agency actually set up a special file on him. From The Guardian:

Swedish author and journalist Elisabeth Asbrink says Kamprad joined the Swedish Nazi party in 1943 when 17, prompting the security police to start a file on him the same year.

Asbrink also claims in her book, And in Wienerwald the Trees Remain, that the founder of the Swedish furniture chain was in contact with Nazi sympathisers until at least 1950 – two years longer than he had previously acknowledged.

She writes that Kamprad’s letters were secretly opened by Swedish security police and their contents, including information about his effort to recruit members, were noted on his file, in which the police wrote “Nazi”.

“They were steamed open, copied and closed again,” Asbrink states.

The intelligence agency is also said to have noted that Kamprad “had some sort of functionary position” in a youth Nazi organisation that sent him newsletters.

Per Heggenes, a spokesman for Kamprad, told the Associated Press that the Ikea founder had never been aware of the file’s existence until now.

—snip—

In 1999, Kamprad admitted his past involvement with Nazism in a book about his life and asked for forgiveness for his “stupidity.”

He also admitted to Swedish media that he had attended meetings of Nazi groups between 1945 and 1948.

Kamprad has attributed his early sympathies to Nazism to his upbringing, saying he was greatly influenced by his grandmother, a native of the current Czech Republic region of Bohemia, who introduced him to Nazi propaganda magazines at an early age.

In a statement, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants demanded that an inquiry be opened into Kamprad’s past.

“Holocaust survivors are shocked at the reports of the depths of Kamprad’s Nazi involvement, which he previously had dismissed as mere ‘teenage confusion’,” it said.

“It is time for Kamprad to come clean. Swedish intelligence files describe his recruitment of others to the fascist movement and his involvement with it well after World War II. This can hardly be characterised as youthful confusion.”

Image by Bit Weird.

I’d heard the theory that the Smurfs were a ploy to get us used to the imminent arrival of little blue aliens, but this is news to me. A French academic has published a book claiming that the Smurfs were both Communist and anti-Semitic, claims that have met with a backlash from fans of the little blue guys. From The Guardian:

Antoine Buéno, a lecturer at Sciences Po university in Paris, makes the claims in his new book Le Petit Livre Bleu: Analyse critique et politique de la société des Schtroumpfs, in which he points out that the Smurfs live in a world where private initiative is rarely rewarded, where meals are all taken together in a communal room, where there is one leader and where the Smurfs rarely leave their small country.

“Does that not remind you of anything? A political dictatorship, for example?” asks Buéno, going on to compare the Smurfs’ world to a totalitarian utopia reminiscent of Stalinist communism (Papa wears a red outfit and resembles Stalin, while Brainy is similar to Trotsky) and nazism (the character of the Smurfs’ enemy Gargamel is an antisemitic caricature of a Jew, he proposes). A story about the Black Smurfs, meanwhile, in which the Smurfs are bitten by a fly which turns their skin black and renders them unable to speak, has colonial overtones.

Reactions to the book were immediate and hostile, with commenters on Smurf fansites calling Buéno a “dream breaker”, an imbecile and a crook with “paranoid delusions”, who is ruining childhood memories.

 
Is this strange video perhaps more proof of a connection?
 

 
Thanks to Nicola Blackmore.

 
It is positively mind-blowing that Michele Bachmann’s favorite “hard rock” preacher Bradlee Dean (whose ministry is reportedly under investigation by the IRS) is let anywhere near impressionable children with his bizarre version of (ahem) “Christianity.” And yet he’s not merely allowed to be with children, he’s actually invited to preach to them in Minnesota public school classrooms with his shitty heavy metal band, Junkyard Prophet! Now he’s also got a radio show, apparently…

From Right Wing Watch:

Bryan Fischer’s appearance on Sons of Liberty, a Genesis Communication Network radio show, was filled with his characteristic rants about the purported ties between gays and Nazism, gays and the Obama Administration, and gays and “brainwashing” students in public schools. While such claims are nothing new coming from Fischer, the American Family Association’s Director of Issue Analysis, he was spewing out his anti-gay conspiracy theories on a radio program hosted by Bradlee Dean of the influential Minnesota ministry, “You Can Run But You Cannot Hide.”

Dean’s You Can Run has found supporters in Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor Tom Emmer. Emmer’s campaign donated to the Ministry, and Bachmann even prayed to thank God about You Can Run “for how You are going to expand this radio program, how You are going to expand their video program, their publications, how You are going to advance them from 260 schools a year, Lord, to 2,600 schools a year.”

Fischer and Dean’s show was quite a meeting of the conspiratorial minds. Dean has claimed that Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim, is using gay rights to topple the Constitution and introduce Sharia law, and that executing gays is “moral.”

Imagine how you’d feel finding out that Bradlee Dean had “performed” his act at your kid’s school and you had no warning beforehand? I’d be fucking furious.

If you are brave enough to listen to this, have a barf bag handy. A pig-ignorant hillbilly homophobe like Bradlee Dean should be denounced, exposed and shamed as the bigoted jackass he is by the people of Minnesota. THESE TWO GUYS talking about Nazis?!?!?! (Note to Bradlee Dean if he’s reading this: Have someone smarter than you are explain the concept of “preposterous irony” to you, buddy!).

Yuck. What does it say about the state when low IQ asshats like this are not merely tolerated, but condoned—and even financially supported—by Minnesota’s establishment Republican politicians? Why aren’t Minnesota’s progressives making hay of this matter? An association with the likes of Bradlee Dean, let alone a monstrous dickhead like Bryan Fischer (I’m looking right at you Tim Pawlenty) should be, in a just and reasonable country, a reason to be ostracized and shunned, not embraced.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
America is a bottomless pit of idiots: Meet Bradlee Dean (and hear Michele Bachmann pray for him!)

 
Of course Howard Stern got it right when he re-dubbed The History Channel as “The Hitler Channel” back in the early 1990s, but did you know that there actually was Nazis television programing going out three nights a week during the Third Reich? That’s correct, the German television industry was, in many respects, far, far ahead of the medium’s fortunes in either Britain or America. Most people think of television as “starting” in the 1950s, but this is simply not true. Before I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone or Your Show of Shows, there was Deutscher Fernseh-Runfunk (AKA “TV Station Paul Nipkow”), which began broadcasting from Berlin in March of 1935. The story of the little-known history of Nazis television, including some downright bizarre examples of the programming, long thought to be lost, was told in Michael Kloft’s 1999 German documentary, Television Under The Swastika:

Legend has it that the triumphal march of television began in the United States in the ‘fifties. But in reality its origins hark back much further. As early as the ‘thirties, a bitter rivalry raged for the world’s first television broadcast. Nazi Germany wanted to beat the competition from Great Britain and the U.S. - at all costs. Reich Broadcast Director Hadamovsky christened the new-born “Greater German Television” in March 1935. And it was only in September 1944 that the last program flickered across the TV screens. For a long time the belief persisted that only very few Nazi programs had survived, but SPIEGEL TV has now succeeded in tracking down a stock of television films and reports which have remained intact since the end of the Third Reich. These include extensive coverage of the 1936 National Socialist Party Convention in Nuremberg which recalls today’s live broadcasts, and of a 1937 visit Benito Mussolini paid to Berlin. Interviews with high-ranking Nazis such as Albert Speer, Robert Ley and the actor Heinrich George are among the finds, along with numerous special reports (i.e. on the Reich Labor Service), a cooking show and the lottery drawing. Television anchorwomen greet their tiny audiences in specially installed television parlors in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg with “Heil Hitler.” The entertainment programs are particularly curious. Cabaret artists are featured - alongside singers extolling the virtues of the “brown columns of the SA and SS.” This documentary by Michael Kloft will reveal a rare and intriguing view of the Third Reich, one far removed from the propagandistic presentations of Leni Riefenstahl & Co. and the weekly cinema newsreel, yet no less ideologically slanted. This is Nazi Germany expressed in an aesthetic medium that we ourselves have only really known since the ‘fifties.

Check out the hottie/haughty blonde Aryan newsreaders! And don’t you love the way the Nazis elites show the little people how they should think and live their lives!?? Looks like the Nazis beat Rupert Murdoch to the punch on the FOX News formula he and Roger Ailes later perfected….

Originally produced for SPIEGEL TV in Germany, this English version of Television Under the Swastika was aired as part of Channel 4’s Secret History series in 2001.
 

 
There is no schadenfreude quite like Republican schadenfreude, especially when there is a male prostitute, hooker or “Nazi hobby” in the mix (note CNN’s lower third text in the video. Superb!).  Far be from me to stick up for the sole Jewish Republican in the House—I think Eric Cantor is a complete idiot—WHAT did Rich Iott, the Republican Congressional candidate from Ohio’s 9th District, EXPECT would happen once this particular GOOSE-STEPPING SKELETON fell out of his closest?

This guy is the best candidate the Ohio Republicans could come up with in this entire district??? Apparently so!

Via TPM

Above, Iott and pals indulging in some good clean Third Reich fun!
 
Rich Iott, the Tea party favored Republican candidate for Ohio’s 9th Congressional district, found himself in the unenvious position yesterday of having to defend himself against The Atlantic’s revelation that he—get this—donned a NAZI UNIFORM to play act in WWII recreations a few years back. Not to fear, Iott’s got a whole mess of rightwing blowhards blogging in his defense, because, as Charles Johnson writes at Little Green Footballs,  “this kind of thing really isn’t a problem for them.”

No, but it might be a problem for, I dunno, Jewish voters in his district and, let’s face it, anyone WITH HALF A BRAIN who MIGHT BE UNCOMFORTABLE voting for a politician whose judgement is so incredibly poor that he CHOSE to wear, and be photographed in, a Nazi uniform, for any reason whatsoever (professional actors aside).

It’s simply amazing to me how many skeletons (and now Nazi uniforms) are falling out of the Tea party candidate’s closets as we get closer to election day. To me, this idiot Iott and his NAZI UNIFORM are a STRIKING REMINDER OF WHAT WE ARE DEALING WITH IN THIS COUNTRY.

Tea baggers, I ask you: Do you see yourself in the below clip (taken from UK sketch comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look)? And if so, which character do you most identify with?
 

 
“…Disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity.” These are the elements cited by the Motion Picture Association of America in giving an R-rating to Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s intense-looking documentary, A Film Unfinished, which opens widely this month.

Produced and distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, A Film Unfinished centers around the making of the unearthed last reel of Ghetto, a Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto and proffered as a document of life there. The reel contains multiple takes of staged, exoticized footage of Jewish life, including a fictionalized depiction of the contrast between “rich” and poor ghetto dwellers.

The R-rating ensures that the film can’t be shown in public school classrooms, a situation ludicrous enough to be called out by Oscilloscope owner and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch a.k.a. MCA. From what I understand, the “graphic nudity” that the MPAA cites refers to female ghetto dwellers entering a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath. As for the atrocities, well, kids seem to be exposed to plenty of gratuitous and stupid violence on TV, movies and video games. Maybe it would be worth whatever trauma they may go through watching and discussing A Film Unfinished to not only viscerally understand genocide, but also get a classic lesson in media manipulation.

Nice work, MPAA.
 

 
Oscilloscope Laboratories will also release the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl and the doc William S. Burroughs: A Man Within this fall.

 
Der Fuehrer’s Face is a 1943 propaganda cartoon from the Walt Disney Studios, starring Donald Duck. It was directed by Jack Kinney as an anti-Nazi piece for the American war effort. The song, of course, was later made famous by the great Spike Jones and his City Slickers. The short film won the 1943 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film (the sole Donald Duck short to do so) and in considered one of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time, as voted on by animators.

The German oom-pah band is comprised of Emperor Hirohito (Sh?֬

Evidently, the fertile, painkiller-fried imagination of Rush Limbaugh has detected a connection between the swastika and President Obama’s symbol for health care reform.  The results?  Alarmist truth-stretching at its most amusing (and syntax-mangled)!  The LA Times’ Christopher Knight sorts it all out, or tries to:

‘You will find that the Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo,’ Limbaugh asserted to his listeners.  ‘I’m going to show you people watching on the Dittocam this, and there Nazi symbol you are: The middle frame is the Obama health care logo.  At the bottom is an official Nazi logo, eagle and everything, spread wings, or bird with spread wings.’

There’s just one hitch: Asserting a resemblance between the two logos is like saying Limbaugh resembles Gary Busey because both men have two eyes, a nose, a mouth and a drug addiction.  Obama’s health care logo includes no eagle, Roman symbol of imperial authority, and it has no swastika, the bent-arm cross designed by Hitler himself as the emblem of National Socialism.  Instead, the Obama design surmounts the red, white and blue landscape of his presidential campaign logo with a caduceus, the winged staff entwined with serpents that derived from the rod of Asclepius, son of Greek god Apollo.  An ancient symbol of healing, the rod is often used as a medical logo.  So the Obama design shows a medical symbol above the American landscape.

Rush Limbaugh Flunks Graphic Design 101

Rush Speaks: The Swastika In Obama’s Health Care Reform Symbol