Re: RE: Memorial Madness

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>The remark about it being reminiscent of Fasism is absolutely correct.
>There is a picture of it in the Washington Post and the thing looks exactly
>like the backdrop of the Nuremburg Rally.  What is interesting is that the
>Post pointed this out in earlier coverage but now only quotes people who
>think the "revised" design is just marvelous. Maybe next they will run the
>confederate battle flag up on top of the Lincoln Memorial.

Are folks aware that the screenwriter for "Saving Private Ryan" also wrote
the extremely reactionary "The Patriot"? Mel Gibson was just the right
choice for this piece of crap film that depicts happy darkies working in
massa's fields.

"He loves guns. The Columbine High School massacre hasn't shaken his
hostility to gun control, or his willingness to defend the carnage in his
latest vehicle, Payback. Asked at Cannes about Bill Clinton's fingering of
film violence for the massacre, moral Mel said 'the school shootings were
tragic but I think it's a bum rap that they always point to movies and TV.
In Hamlet there is mental cruelty and murder. If you don't have some sin,
you have no story.'

"From a family of 10 himself, Gibson has seven children (his wife Robyn
gave birth to their sixth son last month) and shows no sign of stopping
before he gets a football team. Not surprisingly, he's against birth
control. Fine for him, but not everyone can trouser fees of $ 20m for a few
weeks' work killing baddies.

"Mel G derives his Catholic faith from his father, a fundamentalist who
thinks that services said in English are heretical. And Mel is
ultra-conservative: he is anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment, dismissive
of feminism, unafraid of offending gays (see the 'push the poof out of the
window' scene in Braveheart) and says he tries to live by the Ten
Commandments. Quite how they square with the moral universe of the Lethal
Weapon series is not immediately apparent." (Guardian, May 24, 1999)

Meanwhile, the campaign to fund this garbage has been spearheaded by Tom
Hanks, the star of "Saving Private Ryan". To leave no doubt about the
reactionary intentions, here's a statement from the website
(www.wwiimemorial.com):

"Above all, the memorial will stand for all time as an important symbol of
American national unity, a timeless reminder of the moral strength and
awesome power that can flow when a free people are at once united and
bonded together in a common and just cause."

You want to know the antidote to all this rightwing flagwaving crap? Check
out the new book available at www.softskull.com:

The Hidden History of the "Good War"

[Michael Zezima's] Saving Private Power is the most provocative history of
the "Good War" ever published. It questions the ultra-patriotic assumptions
we have been taught since birth.

The U.S. did not enter WWII to end the Holocaust, to make the world a safer
place, or to stop fascism. The opposite is true. The U.S. business class
traded with Hitler and Mussolini up to and even during the war. Henry Ford
and Charles Lindbergh's public Hitlerphilia were symbolic of big business's
admiration for Hitler's anticommunism.

Using techniques gleaned from modern advertising, the U.S. Office of War
Information injected anti-Japanese bloodlust and hysteria into the
population. When the U.S. killed 672,000 Japanese through indiscriminate
bombing, even Secretary of War Henry Stimson wondered why "there has never
been a protest over...such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. There is
something wrong with a country where no one questions that."

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's The
Greatest Generation are cashing in on the revived interest in World War II.
But time's up for the trafficers of cheap nostalgia. The media elite have
sold us the myth about the U.S.'s noble role in the "Good War" for too long
and the facade is beginning to crack. The recent release of John Cornwell's
Hitler's Pope is only the beginning. Saving Private Power digs deeper, to
find the truth about the this war and the world it left in its wake.

Michael Zezima, a.k.a. Mickey Z, has worked as editor-in-chief of the Curio
magazine. His writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Z Magazine, In
These Times, Street News, Mouth, Poets & Writers, Anarchy, and Alternative
Press Review. He lives in New York City.





Louis Proyect

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