Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.
The tag 'Leni Riefenstahl' is associated with 2 posts.

FTR #928 The Trumpenkampfverbande, Part 7: Locker Room Eclipse, Part 2

Con­tin­u­ing analy­sis of aspects of Don­ald Trump’s can­di­da­cy that have been eclipsed by his boor­ish atti­tude and behav­ior toward women, we note Trump’s use of thin­ly-veiled anti-Semit­ic rhetoric inti­mat­ing that Hillary Clin­ton is in bed with an inter­na­tion­al Jew­ish cabal. ” . . . . The speech was hinged to the orig­i­nal pur­pose of his cam­paign: to trade on the resent­ments of a restive rem­nant of white America—angry white men and the women who love them—and set the stage for may­hem in the wake of his like­ly elec­toral defeat. This was not your stan­dard, off-the-cuff Trump rant. This was a script­ed speech, deliv­ered with a teleprompter. It was craft­ed. It fea­tured the key words of right-wing com­plaints: “sov­er­eign,” “glob­al bankers” and “slan­der.” Real­ly, it came right out of a Nazi pro­pa­gan­da play­book. And when one con­sid­ers the themes com­mon between Nazi pro­pa­gan­da films and the films made by top Trump cam­paign staffers Stephen K. Ban­non and David Bossie (as ana­lyzed by Alter­Net), we should hard­ly be sur­prised. . . . The agen­da of the “media estab­lish­ment,” Trump said, was to elect “crooked” Hillary Clin­ton, in the ser­vice of “spe­cial glob­al inter­ests rig­ging the sys­tem.” There are a lot of ways in the land of Wingnut­tia to tele­graph that your tar­get is Jews, and these are two of them. Remem­ber them: You’ll be hear­ing a lot in com­ing days about the “media estab­lish­ment,” “glob­al spe­cial inter­ests,” oh, and “bankers.” . . . .”

Trump is also rhetor­i­cal­ly invok­ing the prospect of turn­ing to vio­lence to right the wrongs of the “rigged” elec­tion he has bruit­ed about. “ . . . . I watched his speech Thurs­day, and if I closed my eyes, I could smell the camp­fire smoke at the Mal­heur refuge and feel the Ore­gon win­ter wind on my face. Here were the con­spir­a­cies, the ref­er­ences to the shad­owy inter­na­tion­al cabals, the whis­pers about the ille­git­i­ma­cy of the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the Tri­lat­er­al­ist coopt­ing of the FBI. It was like lis­ten­ing to an immod­est Ammon Bundy. We have to pro­tect our­selves from not just the gov­ern­ment (because it is only a pawn) but from the peo­ple who real­ly run it. We should be watch­ful, resilient, ready—and though he is reluc­tant, he will sac­ri­fice him­self, for he is the only one who can save us from the ter­ror. Don­ald Trump shout­ed out every fevered dystopi­an fan­ta­sy I heard on the refuge . . . . I was out­raged by Trump before. But now I am wor­ried. . . . Thurs­day, Don­ald Trump trav­eled a step fur­ther down the path of mil­i­tant right-wing rev­o­lu­tion. It wasn’t a call to arms, exact­ly. But it was far past the point of com­fort. . . .”

A major point of dis­cus­sion con­cerns Trump’s deputy cam­paign man­ag­er, David Bossie. Even as Trump accus­es Hillary of being a tool of the “elites,” Trump is uti­liz­ing Bossie, who is the head of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed. It was a law­suit by Bossie’s orga­ni­za­tion that opened the flood­gates to vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed cam­paign fund­ing by the ultra rich, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed. Bossie and Steven K. Ban­non, Trump’s cam­paign man­ag­er, have uti­lized pro­pa­gan­da tech­niques pio­neered by Hitler, Goebbels and com­pa­ny. ” . . . . The late Andrew Bre­it­bart, founder of the web­site Ban­non went on to lead, called Ban­non the “Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty movement”—a ref­er­ence to the infa­mous cre­ator of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da films. While insist­ing to a Wall Street Jour­nal reporter in 2011 that his work isn’t pro­pa­gan­da, Ban­non went on to cite Riefen­stahl among his main influ­ences. . . . Ivana Trump, the candidate’s first wife, told Van­i­ty Fair in 1990 that her hus­band kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s My New Order, a col­lec­tion of speech­es that dis­play the Nazi dictator’s excep­tion­al abil­i­ty to manip­u­late real­i­ty, in a cab­i­net near his bed. . . . . The Nazi regime pro­duced a mas­sive amount of pro­pa­gan­da; it had an entire Min­istry of Pub­lic Enlight­en­ment and Pro­pa­gan­da, head­ed by Joseph Goebbels. A cen­tral tech­nique of Nazi pro­pa­gan­dists, accord­ing to the U.S. Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um, was to cast Jews as out­siders and dan­ger­ous ene­mies of the Reich, ‘‘sub­hu­man’ crea­tures infil­trat­ing Aryan soci­ety.’ . . . In her analy­sis of Riefenstahl’s ‘Tri­umph of the Will,’ Price not­ed that ‘per­haps most crit­i­cal­ly, Germany’s come­back is por­trayed as well under­way; the view­er need only jump aboard. What is being said implic­it­ly is that there is no alter­na­tive.’ In ‘Bat­tle for Amer­i­ca,’ Ban­non and Bossie fol­low the same for­mu­la, posit­ing the Tea Par­ty move­ment as the band­wag­on to jump on. But the for­mu­la isn’t the only thing about the film that car­ries echoes of Goebbels: a researcher and coun­sel for the film was white nation­al­ist Robert Van­der­voort. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The arrest of mili­tia mem­bers in Kansas for plot­ting an attack on Soma­li refugees, sched­uled for the day after Elec­tion Day; dis­cus­sion of UK Inde­pen­dence Par­ty leader Nigel Farage’s sup­port for Trump; the sup­port Trump has received from Russ­ian fas­cist Vladimir Zhiri­novsky; Zhiri­novsky’s fund­ing by Ger­man Nazi Ger­hard Frey; Frey’s dis­sem­i­na­tion of the dis­in­for­ma­tion that Lee Har­vey Oswald fired at Gen­er­al Edwin Walk­er; Frey’s close asso­ci­a­tion with Rein­hard Gehlen; Trump’s close rela­tion­ship with the Steuben Soci­ety.


FTR #436 Triumph of the Shill Pt 3: The Kaiser of California

Con­tex­tu­al com­par­i­son of the mar­ket­ing of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s polit­i­cal per­sona to that of Adolf Hitler.