Unclear and Present Danger - Fatherland (feat. Sam Goldman)

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

This week, Jamelle and John were joined by scholar and author Sam Goldman to watch and discuss the1994 alt-history thriller “Fatherland,” a made-for-HBO adaptation of Robert Harris’ 1992 novel of the same name. Both the novel and the film take place in a 1964 where Nazi Germany won the war in Europe. In the week leading up to the 75th birthday of Adolf Hitler, and the opening up of diplomatic relations with the United States, an investigator in the SS looks into the suspicious death of a high-ranking Nazi official. He soon discovers that a cadre of senior Nazis are being murdered under unusual circumstances to cover up something of great importance. Our detective, along with an American journalist, eventually discover the “something” in question: evidence of the Holocaust. “Fatherland” is not available for streaming on HBO Max, but you can find a free copy of decent quality on YouTube.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the Patreon is on “The Battle of Algiers.” It was a great conversation and you should check it out.

The war's over. We're allies now. Sure. But we know how many people died. It is 1964. Hitler rules all of Europe. Heil Hitler. Yeah.

And is on the verge of a treaty with America. You need the Americans. Without their cooperation, the war in Russia could call for years. But the horrifying secret of the Holocaust could destroy the Fuhrer's empire. I have proof of what happened. There was no resettlement. A German cop with a conscientious. cop with a conscience. He fell and broke his neck. No witnesses. An American reporter with

the truth. We kill him with gas. A race against time and the Gestapo to reveal Hitler's monstrous lie. You're out of your death, Marge. Hi, Lidler. Fatherland. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I'm finishing my book on. American politics in the early 1990s, and I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front.

And today we have a guest. Joining us is Sam Goldman, a professor of political science at George Washington University. He's the executive director of the John L. Loeb Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and the author of two pretty great books, God's country, Christian Zionism in America, and after nationalism, being American in the age of division. Welcome to the show, Sam. Thanks for having me. For this week's episode, we watched the 1994 alt-history thriller, I call it a thriller, Fatherland, which is a made-for-Hb-O adaptation of Robert Harris's 1992 novel of the same name. Both the novel and the film take place in the 1964 where Nazi Germany won the war in Europe

in the week leading up to the 75th birthday of Hitler and the opening up of diplomatic relations with the United States. An investigator, for the Nazis, I guess, looks into the the suspicious death of a high-ranking Nazi official, he soon discovers that a cadre of senior Nazis have been murdered under unusual circumstances to cover up something of great importance. And the film is us following along with our detective and an American journalist who discover that the something in question is evidence of the Holocaust. There are some important differences between the book and the movie that I'll get to later. But for now, we'll just note that Fatherland stars the great Rudger Hower, as our investigator,

whose name I did not write down. And Miranda Richardson adds the journalist. And there are a bunch of other character records you might recognize, particularly Peter Vaughn and Gene Marsh. It was directed by Christopher Menel, whose career was almost entirely in television, and there's not really much of distinction beyond that. Unfortunately, Fatherland is not available for streaming on HBO Max,

which I find kind of interesting. But you can find a free copy of decent quality on YouTube. YouTube. Fatherland aired on HBO on November 26th, 1994. So, John, what does the New York Times look like for that day? Okay, let's see. The one that's most relevant, the headline here that's most relevant to our podcast is NATO jets fly, but don't bomb as Bosnian Serbs attack enclave. NATO planes flew repeatedly over the Muslim enclave of Bihawk. I don't think that's how you pronounce that, but whatever. In northwestern Bosnia today, after National Serbs shelled the center of the embattled town, but the aircraft returned to base without dropping any bombs. After a day in which

the sentiments on the fate of the Beahawk pocket seemed to swing violently Lieutenant General Michael Rose, the commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia called in NATO airstrikes against the attacking Serbs. But the night already blanketing the Beahawk area, the NATO pilots were apparently unable to find their targets. United Nations official said Serbian forces and overrun the villages of Sokolok and Privileza to villages just south of Bihash. I'm going to say that's how you pronounce it. The Serbs they were added were now within half a mile of the center of Bihash and occupied about 20% of the whole of the so-called Bihash safe area, a zone embracing the towns and its environments that the United Nations

is theoretically bound to protect. I believe General Rose called in airstrikes because the shelling of the city was an even more flagrant violation of the Serbian occupation of the safe area, said Michael Williams, a spokesman for the United Nations Protection Force here. Okay, so we are getting deeper into the NATO intervention in the Bosnian-Herzegovina conflict. Basically, NATO has been kind of deputized by the United Nations to serve as close air support for these zones that the United Nations have set up to protect refugees and Bosnians from the forces of the Bosnian Serbs. Obviously, there was some horrible massacres that most consensus says added up to a genocide by

international standards. And, yeah, we have not quite reached the fever pitch of NATO bombing, but it is, it is escalating at this point. This is, as this kind of suggests, the intervention was troubled and not always successful, especially when these United States protection forces were easily swept aside from time to time by Serbian forces and unable to protect the people they were charged with doing. Yeah, and that's, you know, sort of the United States. States foreign policy, NATO's foreign policy, and what international organizations would be doing after the Cold War, this was one of the signal conflicts of the era. As a little subset thing here, there's an article that says Bosnia marring Europe's hopes. Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ethnic and religious conflicts that are no less

menacing than the divisions of the Cold War have erupted, wiping out what hope of progress it was to fall the end of communism. I mean, that's basically everything in a nutshell right there. Nowhere, and this is more apparent than in Yugoslavia, where national theory has cast the shadow of concentration camps in the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims across Europe. Basically, the wars in Yugoslavia were a great disappointment of the kind of utopian end of history hopes. Of course, in Fugiyama kind of hedged his bets, he kind of suggested in the end of history

that a recredescence of nationalism, of ethnic nationalism was popular, was a possibility of end of history. So he didn't, it doesn't quite refute what he was saying. But there was, there was extremely high hopes, you know, that there would be a flowering of liberal democracy. And what happened in the East, particularly, was a great disappointment of that. And we still live in that disappointment because now this kind of conflict is getting larger and more dangerous in a sense now with Russia and Ukraine.

So far in the movies we've covered, this kind of thing has not yet popped up, but pretty soon, like basically next year, I think Air Force One is 96 or 97, and in that the villain is like a Russian separatists or some sort of, and you begin to see these sorts of villains really begin to pop up in a lot of these movies, more or less starting like now. Yeah, I mean, I think it's not surprising. given the lag time in film production that you don't see a reflection of that right away. So the film is 1996, right?

And the novel, I believe, is 1992. So it's really reflecting, I think, an earlier period of approximately seven months when the end of history appeared to have arrived, at least in the exaggerated and triumphal way that some people interpreted the phrase. Yeah. I think the other thing is it's just Americans had no idea.

Like, these places might as well not exist to Americans before the middle of the 90s, you know, had a very vague idea of what was going on Yugoslavia. I mean, there's many, there's serving Americans and Croatian Americans, but, you know, these places were strange names to a lot of Americans. until this era so it took a little while for them to even penetrate the culture so let's see what else we got here uh too too too mostly domestic news but let's see ally that's new york news ally pataki replaces marino a state senate majority later not that interesting for this point

backlog of cases is overwhelming jobs bias agency some workers giving up as classes of protected people expand tight budgets are forcing cuts and staff. And the heathen hopes of the civil strife of a generation ago, Congress created an agency to stop discrimination in the workplace. Today, that agency, the Equal Opportunity Commission is choking on bureaucracy and a mounting backlog of discrimination in cases from blacks, women, and other people is supposed to protect. And even as Congress expands the pool of protected people, most recently with the 1990 law to fight discrimination against disabled workers, the commission staff is shrinking under the pressure of tight budgets. About one in seven workers who seek the commission to help have their complaints resolved

in their favor, and even then they have in terminal delays. By the end of this year, the agency estimates that it will be sitting on 97,000 unsolved cases, 24,000 more than a year ago, and more than the double in 1990. Complaints wait on the shelf for 19 months before investigators can reach them, 11 months longer than in 1990 commission records show. During the Republican administrations of the 1980s, the commission retreated from the big class action suits aimed at stopping widespread discriminatory practices overnight and found fewer individual cases sound enough to pursue in court. With long delays in appointment and pointing new commissioners, these trends have persisted

since the start of the Clinton administration. This is interesting. Well, the head of the EEOC for much of their Reagan era was Clarence Thomas. And basically, the philosophy, the conservative philosophy for dealing with the EEOC was, look, we don't really, if individuals have claims that they were discriminated against, we will look into that. But we're not going to use this as a kind of a tool of social policy to kind of attack discrimination as a social evil. so much, which is kind of what they, what they were doing. It's interesting in the United States, you know, we don't, especially in this era,

labor movement is weakening. The basic way people, workers, kind of have recourse against their employers is through some kind of labor protection in the workplace, be it civil rights or through disabilities is a workplace injury. So you can kind of see some of the problems cropping up in this era where, you know, we've sort of moved the mechanism into litigation, individual litigation or sometimes class action litigation, but that's already becoming less of a thing. But there's not as much resources.

The resources aren't really available to do it. So I forget the exact context which we've discussed us, but we've discussed something similar here, just the degree to which, you know, over the course of the 80s and 90s, and as you mentioned, especially with the decline of labor, which I think in a recent episode, we noted that was basically approaching terminal decline at this point. Ordinary workers just don't have much in the way of direct influence with their employers. And there's this shift to litigation to civil rights law in order to kind of like pick up the slack. And the kind of shift away from, you know, politics to law is a thing you kind of see across

political life. And this also favors, it favors white collar workers in a certain way because like they, not always. That's too big of a generalization. But the whole idea that like, oh, well, you know, I had some kind of property interest in my career that's being hurt by the fact that I can't get. promoted properly is more appropriate kind of to to a white collar worker than someone who works in a factor so the kind of this is yeah so it's sort of like treating everybody like oh you you have

a career that you're pursuing you know you can expect certain amounts of promotions and if you're being discriminated against that's being you know you're not progressing you know as a in the and is a member of the white-collar workforce the way you should. I'll also note just real quick, in terms of the African-American community, I think this, you can see here, right, the real class divide within the community and the extent to which so much of the energy of black activism or mainstream black activism does go toward things that ultimately are like more beneficial to middle-class blacks or upwardly mobile blacks and less so for working class and less upwardly mobile blacks.

Last week, you know, last week, I'm sure listeners know, the court struck down affirmative action. And it's been interesting kind of observing the discourse because there's sort of like, there is among people who disagree with the court's decision kind of, you know, there are, of course, people who are like, this is absolutely terrible in all ways, we should maintain it for, we should have We should maintain affirmative action programs as they exist, but there is a real amongst others sort of like, well, you know, not happy with the reasoning, not happening and happy with how the court is deciding to interpret the 14th Amendment and so on and so forth. But like we have to acknowledge that like affirmative action in college admissions and especially at like elite institutions isn't really something that benefits, um, uh, anything close to sort of like a broad number of black Americans. I feel like this particular story kind of is, you know, part of this larger and kind of unresolved. Conflict is too strong of a work, just like tension.

Yeah. Anyway, those are the stories that really jump out as to me as interesting of things we talked about in the podcast in the past. I'll just quickly note communities veto integration plan mistrust of state upsetting Connecticut school effort. Just to quickly note that important to remember that like school desegregation wasn't just a thing in the south. There was a thing in the north as well. And in a lot of respects, it was like much less successful in the north than it was, to the extent that it was successful in the south. Okay. So movie, Fatherland.

I can't fake a German accent, so I'm not going to attempt to say it as such. There's not really much in the way of production notes here. The book, which again comes out in 1982, is actually kind of a big hit. I have it on my bookshelf somewhere. It's pretty good. It's pretty, you know, good. Page Turner. It was optioned by Mike Nichols originally.

He bought the film rights and tried to develop it. We couldn't really get that off the ground. And so I believe HBO bought the rights. And they adapted the book kind of on the cheap, which you can tell. They spent $7 million shot in Prague, which I assume was like very inexpensive. and, you know, put out the movie pretty quickly, not very long in production. Hauer got good reviews for his performance, Richardson received the Golden Globe for her performance. Robert Harris himself, the author of the novel, called the film Very Bad, quote,

by the time it was shot, there'd been so many artistic compromises, in particular two fundamental changes in the story, that it ceased to have the feel of the novel. Some people like it, but I have to say I don't. And those changes are significant. The first is that the novel does not end with the kind of like happy ending of sorts of the movie in the film. Richardson's character frantically is able to get evidence of the Holocaust to President Joseph Kennedy. And this President Kennedy is so appalled that he, At the last second, averts his meeting with Hitler.

I feel like I'm going to have this problem discussion. That's where every time I describe a plot point, it just sounds so ludicrous. Yeah. The other plot point, Marsh, Zavi Marsh is the character, is in the movie he's betrayed by his son, but his son is sort of like it's like very innocent and kind of like, you know, trying to, in his own way, help his father. In the book, he is betrayed by two people. one of them is a son who is much more doctrinaire Hitler youth type and denounces him. And his buddy, his friend, he's been driving him around and helping him out was actually a Gestapo plant and rats him out to the Gestapo.

So I think both the changing that really does change the tenor of the film. Oh, I didn't mention in the book, the ending is Marsh on the run from the Gestapo and is able to make his way to the site. of Auschwitz where he sees sort of like the remnants of it confirms to himself that the documents are real and then basically it's suggested goes on in a shootout with the Gestapo where he's killed that's like it doesn't say that but that's the suggestion so that's how the novel ends and the movie ends uh you know a little different uh what'd you guys think of this movie well i think unfortunately i agree uh with harris that it It was not very successful, which is a disappointment because it really is good material,

not only as a page-turning mystery, but also as sort of a satire of the EU, or as it was then the European community, one of the bits of sort of atmosphere in the book, and I think the original UK edition has on the cover, a swastika and an EC flag with the yellow stars on the blue field, is that the Nazi-dominated Europe is not that different to the Europe of what would become the EU. And Harris, of course, is British and is sort of playing on the troubled relations of Britain with the EU. All of that gets lost in the film version. And probably that's partly because it was done on the cheap, which you can see and feel, maybe also because the American producers thought that would just be unfamiliar and boring to American audiences.

but whatever the explanation, the satirical edge of it really gets lost. And I think that's part of the fun of the novel and also part of the fun of a lot of successful alternate history. I have a soft spot for these sort of budget television movies for nostalgia reasons. You know, there are some things. are kind of pleasing about it like the sets are kind of cool they shot it in these sort of places totalitarian architecture vistas in the east and you know it looks pretty cool and it's it's very menacing with all the people walking around at peacetime in their SS uniform so from a

from a from the standpoint of a dystopia it's you know for the budget like pretty well constructed in terms of just the background. And, you know, these are fine actors. Harker is a good actor. Miranda Richardson is a good actor, not really used that well. The script is not that exciting. I also just personally, you know, you were mentioning Jamel that the plot points sound so absurd to you. I find this genre of Nazis winning World War II, to what I know of it. I haven't read all of it or seen all the movies. To be really no one's pulled it off that well because there's just things about it. Like, first of all, how are they still in a war with the Soviet Union? This is not possible. There's a limited amount of people, you know, that could

fight in this war that already consumed, you know, millions of the citizens of both countries and the resources. So the idea that there's some kind of stalemate between the remains of the Soviet Union and the Reich is absurd to me. The idea of Germany winning the war once it begins a war with Soviet Union, certainly once it begins a world war with the United States is just not almost physically possible because of manpower and material. The other thing is I think what they try to do well and this tries to get at is the kind of what might happen to the Nazi state, would it moderate? You know, we see this a lot of times with dictatorships. You know, they transform from a period of kind of fanatical activism to something that's more every day.

So what would the peacetime Nazi state be like? Which is an interesting question. And I think, you know, this kind of does some interesting things showing that, oh, you know, the 60s are sort of happening in this weird way. It's a little bit more like East Germany or the East. It's still, but there's, you know, there's a Beatles poster in the background. There's a softened totalitarianism like you'd see maybe during the Khrushchev thaw or something like that. I think that's kind of credible. Maybe the Nazi regime would have changed a little bit. What's incredible to me is the, okay, first of all, the idea that the Holocaust was a secret was not true even during the war.

It was known both to, you know, it was known to the leadership of the allies who, to be fair, some of them had kind of trouble believing it or didn't understand the extent of it, you know, and it was known to many, many people in the Nazi regime and to ordinary Germans as well, so who had participated in it or new people who had disappeared or, you know, had some feelings. The idea that the Holocaust, there might be something ideological. we could tease out of that. The idea that the Holocaust could be kind of obliterated as a memory and then needed to be recovered by this. The second thing is, and this is reflected in one character in the movie, this member of the SS, the idea that the hero of the, this is almost offensive to me, the idea that the hero of the movie, the fact is that this main character as a member of the Nazi regime

would have been indoctrinated in a highly anti-Semitic worldview, which was the center of the entire thing. The fact that he could have been convinced to care about the Jews or believe that anything to do with the Jews wasn't based on the intrinsic evil and inhumanity of Jews to me is unlikely. There's such a central ideological point of Nazism. The interesting question is what would have happened if the Holocaust, I mean, there's a horrible thought, but what would have happened if the Holocaust was successful and the quote unquote Jewish problem had been solved? What is the center of Nazi ideology go? I mean, maybe in this continued fight with the Soviet Union.

Anyway, these are my, these are pedantic historical problems that maybe are no fun for me to bring up. But every time I watch one of these shows, I'm just like, I cannot get past. And I cannot. And the idea that Joseph Kennedy would give a shit is also something I just don't quite believe. Anyway, these are, yeah, these are my pedantic issues when I, watch something like this. That's sort of what I had in mind when I said it was an end of history move me. You know, the scenario at the end, where the information is transmitted to President Kennedy, who's so horrified that he calls off his summit with Hitler. And then

there's sort of an afterward delivered by March's now adult son. who is filled with regret that he turned in his father, but we're given to understand has played some role in the fall of the Nazi regime and the establishment of some sort of liberal democracy. And that strikes me as sort of the end of history fantasy, that, you know, it's one crazy trick to bring down a totalitarian regime. Right, if you just have the documentation. Right.

You know, you just have the documents. You just have the photos. And everyone, including Joe Kennedy, is like, oh, my God, this is intolerable. This is terrible. And the summit is called off, and Hitler or his followers are removed from power, and history returns to the right track. And I couldn't get past that. On the scenario itself, this is another divergence from the book that I think was not

successful. So in the film, there's a brief prologue explaining how this has. happened. And basically, the story is the Normandy invasion, Operation Overlord fails, and Hitler is then left in charge of Europe. And that just makes no sense. I mean, the Allies had already invaded Europe via Italy. And even if Operation Overlord had failed, it's totally implausible that the U.S. and Britain would just have sort of given up say, well, you know, that didn't work. It's even suggested that Churchill is driven out of Britain. Eisenhower returns in disgrace. No way. In the book, there's a more elaborate

scenario that goes back to an earlier stage of the war in which there are a series of bad breaks for the allies. I think the first divergence is that Hydrish is not successfully assassinated in Prague and he becomes a very effective leader of the SS. Then the invasion of the Soviet Union is successful. The Nazis win the Battle of Stalingrad. And finally, if I'm recalling correctly, they discover that the Enigma Code has been broken and recall all the U-boats to set up a new coding system. And having done that, they're able to successfully impose a blockade on Britain, which is then forced to surrender. Now, again, this is still sort of implausible. But the story in the book, I think at least makes some effort to say, well, if the war had gone differently in a few

key respects, how might the outcome have looked different? I think what you were saying about the end of history fantasy about it like oh no if only only people knew then this would change everything all it requires is well-intentioned people sharing information that you know doesn't need to be politically shaped or anything like that and that makes all the difference that's I think you're absolutely right and that's sort of like oh well you know in the future once once all the historical truth comes out and the narratives are known then then things will, you know, take their, their correct shape. There's no need for politics.

It just happens once you share the correct information. The other thing about it is, I think there's a certain, there's a certain sense at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-historical period. And what we're also living in now is an anxiety over the, forget the, forgetting the stakes of the war, forgetting the Holocaust, and forgetting kind of like what I call, or the, the end of the anti-fascist hegemony. So like, you know, the consensus across both West and East, really, that, well, within this,

this is like kind of the structuring principle of the countries that after the war is that, you know, we've set up our economies, we set up our ideological superstructures in order to fight war and defeat fascism. And then, you know, we sort of retinker that to fight the Cold War, which we both sides tell themselves is a continuation of the war against fascism. We come up with totalitarianism theory. The Soviet Union is a totalitarian regime, much like the Nazis. The Soviets tell them the more paranoid side of Marxism-Ladism within NATO is a hidden Nazi You know, like these guys were never really put out of power. So the anti-fascist ideology kind of finds a way to continue.

And then with the end of the Cold War and the end of history, all of these monsters start to return. And we see that in the debates about fascism in the U.S. But we also see that in the returns of national, of this hardcore ethnic nationalism and that we thought we all knew was a disaster. So I think, and this is also, you know, we just saw this when we were discussing the newspaper with the discussion of concentration camps

and Europe, sort of the disappointment of Europe of the return of genocide, the return of these ethnic nationalisms. How could it happen? And I think there's a big emphasis in this point of a Holocaust memory. You know, obviously that's, involved with Zionism in certain ways,

is involved with the United States trying to figure out what happened to itself in the passage from the war to the end of Cold War, but I think it's also just like, was meant to be a moral grounding for the world order. Like, at least that was like, you know, Adorno has the famous line,

you know, behave in such a way that to prevent another Auschwitz. and then like that that starts to kind of fall apart and and I think that's also what's going on this this film is like this anxiety about the loss of that as an ordering moral and political principle um and then the fantasy is well all you need to do is reemphasize and it'll somehow be okay as long as that truth stays alive um so that's one of the first thing reading of the film. I mean, it's interesting to think that around 1994 in the U.S., when this movie comes out,

does sort of mark the beginning of a couple years of kind of greatest generation, kind of greatest generation commemoration, commemoration of the day, 50-year commemorations of the end of the war in Europe. You see kind of like a blitz of, no pun intended, of, um, popular culture and materials related to this generation. Obviously, saving Private Ryan comes up a couple of years later, but there's a bunch of this stuff kind of happening in the culture. And I think your observation, John, of a kind of anxiety about like what happens when

these people finally do pass from the scene when they pass out of leadership, which was already happening, right? sort of George H. W. Bush just left office. In the two years, the Republicans will nominate Bob Dole. And then he'll really kind of be the last national leader of consequence to have served in the Second World War. I can't think of anyone else after Dole. Bush very much tried to lean on his great membership, his war record, which was extremely impressive. and his membership in that generation and tried very hard to recall the spirit of the era

and fell largely on, not entirely on deaf ears, but did not work anymore, essentially. He compared himself to Truman, which was sort of absurd, but like makes sense. Like, he's the Truman to Reagan's Roosevelt. You know, he posed in front of his airplane on campaign. And, and interestingly enough, in the Gulf War, What he really started to, he settled on, they came up with many rationales for the Gulf War, but what they really settled on and seemed to kind of excite people more than anything else was the idea of Saddam Hussein as a second Hitler, right, as a dictator on the level of Hitler.

So there's all these like real efforts to get the more spirit going again, kind of jumpstart it. And I think that that sort of, and I think that we have to remember as also British, I think you see this in Britain, too, where the generation of the war is aging and dying and also the Blitz spirit and the few, that feeling of loss, which paradoxically, I think, drives Brexit because it's a feeling of England's self-sufficiency and heroism and being opposed or separate from Europe. physically too, and that's like guarantees it's safety in a way. I think we also start seeing. So the war was able to create an order that reconciled left and right for a long period. And that kind of breaks down. It begins to break down. One of the things I find interesting about this period of American pop culture, because although this is based on a novel written by a Brit, this came out on HBO.

This was like four American audiences. So I'm sort of thinking about this in the context of like American pop culture. And I mentioned the kind of greatest generation commemoration and kind of the real triumphalism of this moment of the kind of this is what the United States, the modern United States is built on. One of the interesting things about this to me is that so much of it, for reasons I make total sense kind of rely on smoothing over and erasing maybe the more discordant elements of what happened in the U.S. during the 40s, not just the fact that there is real domestic opposition to American

involvement in the war, but that, and this is work that's, there's been a lot of great work on this quite recently, but that, you know, Jim Crow extended to the U.S. military and part of what happened in United States was there was a real rash of violence against black service members at the military bases often in the south outside of military bases within you know army units deployed abroad all this was was there and very little this is like even acknowledged in the pop culture of the mid 90s to the extent that there's like anything that to my to my mind stands out as like commenting on the very different historical memories of well you had it you had an interest in tuskegee airmen but it was a very triumph right story yeah very triumphant yeah as an aside

I remember at my church we have like a tuskegee airman come by when I was a kid and like talk about you know um his experience it's which was very cool uh but in terms of like popular culture in terms of sort of like noting the real discord and the narrative. Like the only thing that even comes close is John Singleton's movie Rosewood, which I think is like very much commenting on all of this. What about what about Devil in a Blue Dress, which has a hint of that? Yes, yeah. Yeah.

In, you know, there are a few. I don't remember precisely, but there are a few moments where Easy Rollins is, you know, he has a picture of his unit, which I think was deployed in Italy, and, you know, it's clear that he gets a raw deal when he comes back. He's fired from his factory job. So that's not, that's not the main theme. But that's another movie of the period that I think at least has hints of that. And maybe there are even more in the novel than the film. Right, right. And that movie was relatively successful, a critical darling, but not like, and is now kind of like a cult hit and people are like, oh, why wasn't this more popular?

Wow. I think, you know, that might be part of the story there. Denzel gets beaten up a lot. That might be part of it. The thing I was going to bring up is that there is, when I was watching Fatherland, kind of the thought that I had, and you, John, mentioning how in the narrative of the movie, it's just all it takes for everything that changes just information, like non-politicized information.

What I kept thinking about was the fact that the United States does have this history of racial atrocity that's been sort of like, you know, very much in, I guess, in vogue in the past couple years. But outside of the communities to which it experienced it for a long time, wasn't really broadly known beyond that. And the introduction of these stories and narratives to mainstream life, hasn't necessarily resulted in sort of, like, oh, we got to do something about it. It's become sort of like immediately politicized, right? It's a place of political contestation now over, over memory, over narrative, over all these things. And that's all, that's sort of what I was thinking about watching this movie.

It's sort of like there is, it's like, it's very naive. It's both very naive in this way, but also just sort of like, what if there were this atrocity that no one knew about, you know? Yeah, I've thought this. same. Yeah. Well, it's like, what if, you know, I don't even mention it. A world spanning power that had in its past a horrible thing it did and the public is not generally aware of it. And, you know, yeah, I think that that's, there's, that, it's hard to, it's hard to avoid that. Like, what is, you know, what power is

it's standing in for? Obviously, you know, there's, hints in the movie that we're taught that it represents the east and the communist regimes um you know there's all these little hints of of kind of east german bureaucracy in the film all these libraries and archives and so and so forth but yeah it's it's difficult to say oh you know um the the the state sort of the thing that's so horrible the thing that i don't find credible about this film and its perception of Nazi ideology is, I just do not think people would care. I think that they were on their way to creating a society in which that the Holocaust would have been viewed in retrospect as a essentially salutary and necessary for the development

of the German people and their dominance of the world. And that's, there is no, also, it does not make sense if this is supposed to be a totalitarian regime that they would need to have this secret murder conspiracy against these members of it these people could have been gotten rid of in any sort of way but oh the police discovered these people are being murdered I suppose in the relaxed environment of this kind of post-totelitarian Nazi regime it sort of makes sense I think what the more horrible thing and the darker thing would be well the people people think that revealing this information would make a difference. Turns out people are either indifferent to it or, in fact, positive about it. That's what I think would happen under conditions

of a Nazi victory. I mean, a better ending, even if they had to simplify it, I think, would have been if Charlotte McGuire, the journalist played by Miranda Richardson, gets the information to President Kennedy, and he says basically, so what? You know, this is high diplomacy. I'm attending a summit with another world leader. What do you want me to do with this? Not even as an expression of some, you know, fundamental anti-Semitism, although it's true that Joe Kennedy was not a great admirer of Jews, but just as an expression of political

reality. Like, what are we supposed to do? What do you imagine is going to happen? But I think that does get back to the question you raised, which is an interesting one, what happens to the Nazi regime if they win and continue for a generation? And you mentioned East Germany, but, you know, clearly the parallel is to the Soviet Union. And, you know, the Soviet Union in 1964 under Khrushchev was not an idyllic place by any means, but it was not the Soviet Union of the terror. And whether or not it would have worked out that way, it's sort of interesting to imagine

what does a Nazi thaw. That's basically how it's depicted. you know a Nazi thaw look like i just don't think it's possible because basically at its core war is so central to the ideology the belief in racial the belief that there is a natural racial war taking place on the face of the earth is so central to the ideology it just does not lend itself to peace or cooperation or economic anything it's the the the the the the the the the the the the the social Darwin, just the Darwinism of Hitler's worldview, you know, was so psychotically bent on war that the self-destruction of the Nazi, I mean, this is maybe too deterministic

based on ideas and politics change, but like the self-destruction of the Nazi regime was kind of baked into it from the beginning because basically what it existed to do was to fight an apocalyptic war against the other races of the world. That was the basis of its ideology and it was to fight to fight wars of extermination essentially and to accept nothing except total dominance I suppose we can imagine well you know because of the inconsistency and the fact that fascists were so ideologically flexible sure can we under I could you know you could say well the Soviet Union was supposed to spread revolution around the world and then it didn't do that because it couldn't so they created all these sort of you know exceptions

and reasons why that didn't happen. So, yeah, okay, maybe it's possible. But I just think that the, I think the psychosis of, of Nazism is really profound. Maybe if Hitler was not in charge anymore, right? And there was some second generation of Nazi leadership that was like, all right, that was a little crazy. But now, you know, we won the war. And now let's try to build something else.

But Hitler himself was such a lunatic. And in a way, Stalin was also, but in a different way. I just don't believe that it's impossible to believe that Hitler, that there was an outcome of the war that wasn't just the destruction of Nazi Germany, maybe longer, but it was just so wildly insane regime and its goals and that it's also like, and that's what I think also bothers me about this is like the, the belief that any of it was accomplishing. that like the Reich was a possibility is sort of buying into Nazi propaganda in itself is something that bothers me. I was like, this is stupid. Like the whole fucking idea was so insane and impossible. And then to build, to create a science fiction world where it takes place is sort of taking

it at face value in a way that bugs me. I'm like, it was so intrinsically self-destructive and wildly stupid that I just find the idea that it could be successful to be like, come on. Like, that's not right. So in that sense, you prefer the man in the high castle, or at least the novel, rather than the TV adaptation, because it's sort of about that sense of impossibility and unreality in, you know, Philip K. Dick's insane, somewhat drug-addled way. Like, this is just, you know, somewhat drug-out.

The point of that is not to do plausible alternate history. It's to create a scenario we were supposed to say, this is insane. This makes no sense. Something has gone fundamentally wrong in the order of the universe, whereas Fatherland, and this is true, I think also of the book, maybe even more so, is sort of a plausible story. Yeah, you know, what would it really look like? Dick, Dick is saying there is no possible reality here. You have to be hallucinating in some sense to imagine what that would be.

Yeah, I think, like, okay, this is the other thing that Boggs. I think basically the, the, the, the, the, the, the text of all of these is Orwell's 1984, right? A totalitarianism, what if totalitarianism was globally successful? And I think his... And his self-criticism that he kind of wrote was his criticism of James Burnham's, you know, managerial revolution and his various ideas were basically Orwell said, look, this worldview of these regimes being unstoppable and able to create this new world order that's going to be so dramatically different from what we've seen before and uproot humanity as we've known. it is sort of kind of buying into and worshipping their own propaganda. And the actual intelligent way of almost resisting this mentality is to kind of take a more skeptical tone. And in a way, he doesn't do that. In 1984, he sort of by, I mean, the end is ambiguous.

But he sort of buys into totalitarian propaganda as being able to set up, you know, a state, a permanent reconfiguration of the human condition, right? Literally, you can make people a different kind of humanity and reshape people permanently. The state will crush people forever. I thought, I mean, I thought Fatherland was trying to resist. I mean, I sort of read it. as following the trajectory of the Soviet Union, which is to say, you can't do what Orwell is describing. And they still want the Beatles and the 60s are still kind of happening and they watch TV. There was no transformation of human nature. And then at the end, it's the return to what's perceived as normality. I mean, that sort of goes too far for me. Right. Right. Okay. That makes

sense. It's a little bit like, okay, this is the Nazi Germany would be a little bit like apartheid South Africa meets the Soviet Union, you know, that that makes sense. And I appreciate the effort to create a realism there, but I just, we discussed this in our Patreon episodes on state of siege and missing, which is just the observation that authoritarian regimes, And on Z as well, and we did the whole Costa Gavis thing, that authoritarian regimes are just much more brittle than people tend to recognize or imagine in that the idea that they can be sort of like everlasting in any meaningful way just really isn't borne out by experience. The Soviet Union might be the one that sort of like went further.

And I guess we still have to see how China works out, but that, I mean, that's sort of interesting because it suggests there are two dangers in thinking about this. And on one, on the one hand, you have one easy trick, which is what this film ultimately indulges it. And the great secret is revealed. And that's, you know, that's it. We're back to the end of history. And that doesn't seem plausible for all the reasons we've described. On the other hand, there's the risk of taking 1984 too seriously, where totalitarian regimes establish permanent oversight that fundamentally suppresses aspects of human nature, and it just sort of goes on like that. And that's not really plausible either. So whether or not this is a successful film, I mean, I think it's probably

not, although I did enjoy watching it. Plausibility lies somewhere in the between. And another movie that I thought of that's much more successful in doing this is Gorky Park, which came out 83, 84, with William Hurd as a Soviet detective. And there, I think you can see some of these sort of tensions played out in a way that's more interesting, but also more entertaining. That was also a much higher budget, higher profile production that could really let some of this stuff breathe. One of the problems with Fatherland is that it felt as if they had a set of plot points.

They had to jog through as quickly as possible and landmarks in the reconstructed Berlin they wanted to show you. It's all event rather than atmosphere. I think that's true. And it would have been more successful. if they'd show in the atmosphere a little bit. I just think there's something, I want to suggest,

and my kind of political psychoanalysis reading of these fantasies of totalitarian victory, is that there's something intrinsically, they're meant to be warnings. They're meant to observe as, you know, fables and object lessons about what happens if we don't get this stuff under control. I think that there's something intrinsically troubling about them as fantasies of, you know, the success of total, the relative, at least relative success of totalitarian regimes.

I think that the fantasy of totalitarianism is that it can put an end in certain ways and brutal ways to the problems of politics, the problems of pluralism, the problems of, you know, just living in a complicated modern society. society. And I think as much as these works attempt to be critical, there's something intrinsically utopian and weird enjoyment involved in these people in showing the Nazi uniforms everywhere, showing the monuments, showing the successful rebuilding of Germany. And I'm saying like basically they take Nazis. They literally. take Nazi propaganda like Spears and fantasies, Spears model for a new Berlin, and make it like it happened. And I just think that there's, to me, on the surface, you can say, oh, yeah, you know, like we're, it's like people who do World War II reenactments, right? And they play the

Nazi side. And they say, well, you know, we're here to make sure the people remember these things. you say to yourself, why do you like dressing up in an SS uniform so much? You know, like there's there's a certain, there's a certain things about it that begin to creep me out. And not to say that, you know, oh, we mustn't, you know, fantasize about those things. This is a territory of, um, that we can't go into in artworks and we shouldn't. No, absolutely not. I wouldn't say that. I would say it's a territory we do go into artworks. Should, it's interesting that we go to our works. But while we're doing it, we should ask, what are the, is that fantasy? What are those fantasies really saying? There's obviously in every, you know,

every dream there's a wish fulfillment. So, and I think it's strange to be like, there's an insistent need to fulfill this wish and then kind of say, well, no, it's, it's bad, but wouldn't it be fun to kind of think about what might happen if the Nazis won? Well, fun for whom? I don't know. That's my thought sometimes with these, with these dystopias. There's a essentially pornographic temptation, I think, in the whole genre. And it's not just dystopias or alt fiction, but the whole World War II genre where inevitably, you know, the Nazis are tall and handsome and they have the boots and it's impressive. you know, I mean, it's, it's Star Wars. And it's very difficult to resist that unless you're trying to.

Right. Also, like, the get that, I thought that man in the high castle show that they made was horrible. I thought it was, it was, I watched one episode. They show like somebody, like, they showed somebody being, like, there was the Japanese doing it, but they show like a family being gassed in the first episode or something. And after that, I was just like, fuck this. I'm not watching this bullshit.

There's a certain way in which the genre itself is a little, to me, and I don't want to be fucking a killjoy about this or overly moralistic about it. There are certain parts of it where I'm like, this is a bit frivolous. This is a thought experiment, and it's a bit frivolous to the actual reality, the seriousness of the actual underlying thing. And I think, you know, like to me, maybe this is just because I'm dry and pedantic and like history, the real history is interesting and the fantasies that arise out of it are interesting part of that real history, but I'm a little bit suspicious of it. And I think what you're saying about the pornographic aspect is absolute or the the risk of going into pornography of it is really absolutely true. On the other hand, I like it too.

like I'm so I mean you guys know I'm very interested in this era of history and I have fascination with it so when I see the depictions of it and see the kind of artistic rendering of it it is attractive I'm not saying I'm not attracted to it as well I'm saying that I'm I'm a little disturbed by my own attraction to it as I make that as someone who is very interested in the Civil War who has like a whole little mini shelf on like just books on the Confederate state itself. I kind of, I can't see, see we were coming from here. Well, I think that comes with Confederate fetishization too. Well, it was, it's less possible to do that now. But there was a time in the United States when you could, you could be a absolutely obsessed with the Confederacy. And that didn't necessarily say anything. You could say that doesn't, I don't mean that ideologically. Why do you have all these portraits of Confederate generals? Why do you have all this Confederate memorabilia. Oh, I just think it's interesting.

You know, like it had no political valence. And now I think we're more like, what are you doing? Yeah. Well, we have to wrap up, but I'll say it did have political valence. It's just that that view sort of like dominated the mainstream, right? Sort of like the idea that the two things, it's like the Confederacy was in a lot of ways drained of its ideological content for the purpose of. being like acceptable in mainstream life among whites for like this other actual ideological purpose

of like, you know, sectional reconciliation and, you know, advancing national goals. So it's sort of like it's like a couple of things happening simultaneously that that result in the situation where, you know, the hall in which my college debating society, held its meetings, had like a giant portrait of Robert E. Lee, I think until 2010. I remember this correctly. If anyone listening to this podcast and was also in the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, please tell me how long that Robert E. Lee portrait was up. It was up when I was in, but I don't quite remember when it was taken down. Okay. I think it's time to wrap up. That is our show, unless you guys have any final thoughts.

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For this week in feedback, we have an email from Michael, different Michael than our last episode. And this email is titled, Anime. Hello, great discussion on the net. I thought it was an interesting point that in the 90s, the paranoia about the internet and movies and TV had a different flavor that doesn't quite make sense today. In 1960s, new left fear of being crushed by a giant bureaucracy just computerized.

But I think that there are some classic 90s anime productions that do have a more recognizable modern paranoia. The big ones that come to mind are serial experiments lane and ghost in the shell. These are concerned with questions like, when you're not physically embodied and you can always create and discard new identities. What effect does that have? Does it make you vulnerable to manipulation? And what kind of society do we get if everyone lives like this? If I had to guess why, and this is if he had to guess why this shows up in anime, it's because the otaku subculture was already unused net in the early web, already living their lives in a weird

detached identity soup. An anime production was extremely responsive to the fans. Many animators and manga artists even began their careers doing fan works. So you have people who were, quote, too online very early and were actually making the media. I guess even in the 90s, you have some English-speaking fandom cultures that are pretty much the same as Otaku. But it seems like, at least in TV and film, the tight feedback between the actual media production and English-language fandom didn't really pick up until the 2000s. I think none of these work fall within the mandate of your podcast, except maybe arguably ghost

in the shell, which did come out in theaters. in the U.S. in 1995 and is kind of a paranoid filler. Thanks. Michael, I've never seen serial experimentally, but actually I bought two months ago a 4K copy of Ghost in the Shell and rewatched it. And it might fit the mandate of the podcast, maybe. Have either of you seen Ghost in the Shell? I haven't. I have a long time ago, and I wanted to rewatch it. I got to tell you, every time I like Akira a lot as a movie, but I got to tell you, every time I, every time I trying to get into anime. It's not worked.

I know Ghost and the show is supposed to be really excellent, and it looks incredible. So I'm definitely willing to give another shot, but I tried it recently and turned it off within five minutes to starting it. I find the voice acting of those anime things to be so bad. Maybe I'll just watch it with the subtitles on. But like the voice. You got to get subs.

Subs, not dubs, Batman. You got to do subs. All right. All right. So in terms of what this person was saying, that's very interesting. And I think.

I mean, there's something that something's been going on with anime and the decomposition of people's identities, animas, all these weird online subcultures are obsessed with anime. So that's kind of, I believe that that's at the, it was at the, you know, it's kind of the avant-garde of stuff that was going on with that, with that, with that, you know, with that kind of thing. But I, and I think there must have something. to do with the fantasy content of animation itself being so like a world of infinite plasticity in a way where you know like anything is possible and it gets very close to just you know the imagination itself which is kind of like animation in a way so there's something going on there

which i've been thinking about and been thinking about writing about and i've tried to get attack it in different ways, but never quite got there. But now that this person said that I want to take another look at that, that, that there's a connection between anime and the internet itself, which makes sense. Because so many of these have like these cyberpunk paranoia themes of plugging into some kind of system, losing your identity, becoming a Android, you know, all that kind of shit. So I need to take another look at it. Unfortunately, that might require me watching a bunch of anime, which is not something I particularly

I have to say that I watched Akira probably half a dozen times when I was in high school and I could never make hits or tails of what was happening. I still remember some of the images which were just extraordinary, but I don't get it. Oh, it's very, it's very it's very straightforward. At some point in the past, the government did experience. on psychics that caused a giant explosion and created one of them that became a disembodied kind of like spiritual force that inhabited the body of a new child who then grew into it and then had to be taken up into the spiritual ethers to prevent the destruction of Neo-Tio, Tokyo. Yeah.

I just bought the Blu-ray like a couple months ago and also rewatch that. So for whatever reason, I just have it fresh in mind. And somehow he needs to turn into an enormous sort of biometh State Puff Marshall Melo Man on the way that that's the that's the part I never quite got what what struck me about that movie was heartbreaking trauma about being a country that a nuclear bomb was dropped on that's what I took that's what I kind of take away from like whatever things were floating around in that movie yeah that makes me think that's for the patron we should do at least one Godzilla movie.

I would love to do a Godzilla movie. I would do Ghost in the Shell. I mean, that could be interesting. Yeah. Coming up on 95. Yeah. And this has been brought up in emails before, but there is at least like one anime series that very much is like in the wheelhouse of the podcast.

And that's just the, uh, the mobile suit Gundam series, which is all about kind of like war and conflict and, and all that stuff. Yeah. But there, there aren't like Gundam movies. I mean, okay, I should not say that out loud because I'm a lot. because someone will be like, oh, but there is this one. You're going to get us killed with those stuff. But generally that that's like a, that's a bunch of series,

like kind of somewhat long series. So anyway, yeah, we can do Gosh in the show. Thank you, Michael, for the email. Episodes come out every two weeks. So we will see you then with an episode on Catherine Bigelow's 95 days. I think it's her debut, Strange Days. Oh, cool, cool. Here is a brief plot synopsis.

In the last days of 1999, ex-cop turned street hustler, Lenny Nero, receives a disc which contains the memories of the murder of a prostitute. With the help of bodyguard mace, he starts to investigate and has pulled deeper and deeper into a whirl of murder. Blackmail and intrigue can pair live to see the new millennium. Strange Days is available to buy on Amazon and stream on HBO Max. I've never seen Strange Days. I only know exactly one line of dialogue. And that's a line of dialogue that is sampled in the Fat Boy Slim song right here right now. And that's all I know about saying.

I have seen it. And I've seen it on the big screen because it was playing at MoMA for a Catherine Bigelow retrospective. So, yeah, I think I've seen it once or twice. She's still in director jail, I think. She got put in director jail after Detroit a couple years ago on the, on the St. Algiers Hotel. killings. It wasn't a very good movie. And it's like she, you know, no one's, no one's financing anything for her. So please don't forget our Patreon. I mentioned it earlier, but we have our Patreon show on movies that take place or movies that were released during the Cold War that

are about sort of Cold War politics, military and political through the period. Our late Patreon episode is on the Battle of Algiers, which is incredible film. Even if you do not listen to that episode, and it's a very good episode. Even if you don't listen to it, you should at least watch the Battle of Alger's kind of like major cinematic achievement that movie. So you should check out the film regardless. You can listen to that episode and much more at patreon.com slash unclear pod. Just $5 a month. We do two episodes a month. Generally speaking, I think this month, we'll just have one episode because I am out of town for a bit, but two episodes a month. And we kind of, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not chronological like this main feed.

It is, uh, whatever we are interested in. So we just, we just did Battle of Algiers. Before that, we did four films by Costa Gavras. Um, we did a whole, um, Graham Green, uh, little mini series. So lots of good stuff on the Patreon feed and you should check it out. Sam, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. It was fun. And we're doing, we're doing Day of the Jackal next on the Patreon. The movie about, you know, the attempt to the assassination of Charles de Gaulle. Got to have a nice follow-up to Battle of Algiers, thematically. All right.

For John Gant and Sam Goldman, I'm Jamal Bowie, and we will see you next time. Thank you.