Triumph of the Will

Triumph of the Will gave a very interesting view of Nazi Germany. It gave the side of what the Nazi's saw and how they viewed the war. It highlighted Hitler as the "good guy" and showed the people that what the Nazi's were accomplishing was good and helpful for the entire world. They tricked the people into thinking that they were benefitting the country and that deceived them by showing fake situations and events. It is crazy to think that the people actually believed what they were being told and would be convinced to join the cause. The amount of lying and deceit to the people that was happening was crazy and it is so weird to think that they saw Hitler as the good guy.

Lee Atwater Response

There are many things that could be said about Lee Atwater. He did many things that hurt people in America but he also was very smart in how he planned his strategies. This film was very interesting because it showed how someone can work really hard but work without morals. Lee Atwater made strides in the political history of America. He uncovered a new game that politicians can play to win elections and hurt their competitors. After his years of working with and against the American people karma finally came back to Lee Atwater. The question was asked in class if we thought Atwater was sincere near the end of his life. When he was dying he made the world believe that he was sorry for what he did and that he was a new man. I personally believe that he did change a little even though the bible he had was still wrapped in plastic. When someone fakes being something for a very long time a part of them start to believe it. The phrase "fake it till you make it" applies in this situation. Deep down I believe that he was scared of what would happen to him when he died but he still fell into his old ways.

Jesus Camp

This film did not shock me in the slightest. I lived in the midwest for 12 years and this is common practice all over the state I lived in. One of my close friends was homeschooled after attending school with me till fourth grade. When she became homeschooled she had an entire hour dedicated to Bible time. She was also not allowed to watch movies like Harry Potter or certain songs in High school Musical because it was too self-centered. This film reminded me of what I left behind when I moved to Massachusetts. There are many concerning things that happen to the children in this film. I personally do not think it is okay to tell your kids that there is only one way of thinking. An example of this would be when one of the moms told their child that global warming did not exist and that evolution is wrong. She did not let her kids ask questions or even tell them other people's point of view. This film is scary because it shows how there are groups of people who are setting their kids up to believe in a system that is very narrow-minded. This film is also scary because it shows that some adults do not think that their point of views have any faults and are not open to other ideas. This movie is also very interesting because the children featured in it are so passionate about their cause to an intense level. You do not see many kids in society today that are passionate about something they believe in. One thing I think everyone can take away from this film would be that it is important to recognize that not everyone in the country thinks the same way and that their background has a huge impact on how they perceive the world.

Jesus Camp

This is the first time I have seen this movie and it is very shocking and almost disturbing to watch. It is crazy to think that there are people out there that believe what they believe and actually go through their entire life like this. The things that they put the kids through and made them believe is almost borderline child abuse and it's scary to think that they are putting them through all that. The part that was most shocking to me about the film was the things that they taught them in school. They refuse to teach them about global warming  and evolution which is crazy to think about. I know that they have different belief's but science is science and although they might not want to believe it, it is the truth. By choosing to disregard global warming and evolution they are hurting their children and hurting the community by not teaching them these important things. This is crazy and honestly hard to believe.

Response to Triumph of the Will

This movie was very informative on how propaganda can really change the way people think. This film was very impactful because it showed how even the director of the film, Leni Riefenstahl, believed that this film was a documentary and not a propaganda film. When people do not even know they are being tricked or deceived then it becomes very dangerous. When this happens people believe the ideas in their heads are their own and then they act on those ideas not knowing of the consequences. There were many small details that made this propaganda film so successful at the time. One thing that Riefenstahl did was make Hitler seem larger than life. Every time he was filmed the camera was below him. This made the viewer see Hitler as a man of power. The film also created the picture of a mass following of the Nazi party. Many shots had hundreds to thousands of Hitler supporters in the background. This makes the people watching the film feel like they should be following the crowd. The speeches in this film also create an environment of intense environment where people hear new information and see support for it. I agree that Riefenstahl did groundbreaking work for women and made a place for herself in the film world. However, the way she did that was not correct and brought harm to other people. This film is very important to show students because it shows what propaganda looks like and how it can be avoided in the future.

Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy

The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context.

By Rick Perlstein •  November 13, 2012 

https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/

 

 

It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves: 

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here, The Nation publishes it in its entirety for the very first time. 

Listen to the full forty-two-minute conversation with Atwater:


The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years. 

Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. 

For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.

So what does the new contextual wrapping teach us? It vindicates Lamis, who indeed comes off as careful and scholarly. And no surprise, it shows Atwater acting yet again in bad faith. 

In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.” 

It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death). 

He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class  black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater). 

“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it. 

Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears demonstrated that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions—like whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie (which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters…the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.” 

Which one particular Republican spinmeister, when he wasn't preening before political scientists, knew fully well—which was why, seven years after that interview, in his stated goal to “rip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]” on behalf of his candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, “repeatedly raping” an apparently white girl. Indeed, Atwater pledged to make "Willie Horton his running mate." 

The commercial was sponsored by a dummy outfit called the National Security Political Action Committee—which it is true, was a whole lot more abstract than saying "nigger, nigger, nigger." 
 
For more on the GOP's effort to roll back enfranchisment, read Ari Berman's Why We Still Need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.