Brownstone Institute
The Familiarity of Old Evils: The Zone of Interest Movie Review
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
Last Thursday the New York Times published a very strange review of the new Holocaust movie, The Zone of Interest. The review was written by Manohla Dargis, who is one of the finest film critics in the country. But something was off about this piece.
Ms. Dargis is withering right out of the gate calling the movie hollow, a self-aggrandizing art-film, and pointless. I thought to myself, ‘What’s going on here!? New York Times movie reviewers generally have high praise for Holocaust films!’ And the words “hollow” and “pointless” are very different from calling something a “self-aggrandizing art film” (the first two terms are about emptiness, the last is about being overwrought). My Spidey-sense started tingling — Ms. Dargis is triggered! But why?
The more I read the more curious I got. The film is set in the residential neighborhood on the other side of the wall from the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp during the years 1942 and 1943 — at the height of the industrialized mass murder carried out by the Nazis. But the film never directly shows what is happening inside the death camp. Instead, the film is about how the family of the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, ignores the genocide that is happening all around them. It sounded like a fascinating premise, yet the review is just a long string of insults that ends with her calling the movie “vacuous.”
I wondered — was Ms. Dargis triggered because the movie is a perfect description of our current reality — an entire society dedicated to denying the genocide that is all around us?
So, I dropped my plans for the day and jumped in the car to see a matinee of The Zone of Interest at one of the two theaters in Los Angeles that is showing the film. It was the first time I had seen a film in a theater in four years. Here’s the trailer:
It turns out that the film is an absolute masterpiece — perhaps the most impactful Holocaust film I’ve ever seen. The film opens with a pastoral scene of a family enjoying a summer day along a river surrounded by lush green forests. But we soon discover that the National Socialists have turned this Eden into hell on earth.
The Zone of Interest is best understood as a horror film, however it never shows the violence directly. As the director explains in an interview it’s really two films — the visuals of the family going about their daily activities and the background audio that was created after the filming was completed.
The sound designer went to Auschwitz to record the natural sounds of the region and then interviewed survivors to identify all of the sounds that would have come from the machinery of death at the camp. So while you are watching the family on screen you are hearing the sounds of the death camp all around you. The sounds become omnipresent, oppressive, and terrifying but the family does everything they can to deny, normalize, and accept the genocide happening on the other side of the wall.
Many Holocaust films turn the Nazis into monsters — a cartoonish “other.” While indeed there were some monsters, Hannah Arendt teaches us that the genocide was run by the bureaucrats. Seeing the banality of evil depicted in this film — the camp commandant making sure his kids are ready for school and kissing his wife before going off to work — is far more scary because it points to the darkness that resides in the hearts of all people (even though it is not always expressed).
This is a theme I keep coming back to. As I’ve written before, I think it is a mistake to see the Nazis as singular in their atrocities. Yes, they had a particular zeal for their industrialized murderousness. But under the right conditions, lots of people are willing to participate in great evil.
Every day for the last four years New York has been the center of the American iatrogenocide:
New York City is the headquarters for Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance — the fake nonprofit that Tony Fauci used to send money to Wuhan to develop SARS-CoV-2 in violation of the US ban on gain-of-function research.
Upon hearing of Covid, the New York State Department of Health gave itself permission to set up quarantine camps to detain anyone for any reason without due process of law. Think about that — the first instinct of the public health authorities in the state with the largest Jewish population was, “How can we set up the legal framework for quarantine camps?”
New York hospitals implemented the murderous protocols of immediately ventilating patients, thus killing 80% to 90% of the people in their care rather than treating them with ivermectin or two dozen other off-the-shelf medicines that work.
New York implemented Vaccine Jim Crow that blocked the unvaccinated, including 75% of the city’s Black population, from eating indoors at restaurants.
And New York embraced the deadly Covid shots at a higher rate than the rest of the country and now they are dealing with the consequences — an increase in all-cause mortality and a rise in chronic health conditions.
So I think my hunch was correct — a movie about an entire society that ignored the genocide all around them hit a bit too close to home for Manohla Dargis and her bosses at the New York Times who have spent the last four years ignoring the genocide all around them. But for anyone trying to understand the murderous actions of the Covidians and their unwillingness to take responsibility for their crimes, this film is illuminating.
The Zone of Interest is currently playing in limited release in the U.. It will be released on February 2, 2024 in the UK and February 9 in Poland. I imagine it will arrive on streaming services in the US shortly after that. If you see it, I’m interested to hear your reactions. Please be forewarned though: the film will mess you up because it shows the worst side of humanity and reminds us that it is happening all over again.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
First Amendment Blues
From the Brownstone Institute
By
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Brownstone Institute
The Most Devastating Report So Far
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
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