Oliver Stone's mediocre analysis

Oliver Stone's mediocre analysis.

This blog views itself as a corrective: No need to mention Gilad Shalit when the rest of the world knows his name and ignores the Palestinian prisoners and thus also: No need to criticize Oliver Stone, when so many others criticize him.

The question that Oliver Stone was dealing with in his hard hearted statement was: why the emphasis on the murder of six million Jews when more Russians than Jews were killed. The answer that soft hearted Oliver offered was that Jews control Hollywood. The effect of his answer was to denigrate the Jewish dead and not emphasize the Russian dead.

In fact there are other better answers that reflect history and storytelling rather than the power of Hollywood's Jews.

First: history: The Nazis' cruelty towards the nations to their east: including the Poles and the Russians is well documented history, if not represented adequately in American cinema. The Nazi hierarchy consisted of Aryans on top, Slavs as slaves and Jews as vermin to be exterminated. If once lacks the historical sense to differentiate between the attitude towards the Slavs and the Jews, then one might become a filmmaker rather than a historian.

Second: storytelling: The single mindedness of Hitler and the Nazis towards the Jews is well documented and does not deprive those killed by the Nazis in the course of their conquest of their attention because of special treatment by historians or fiction writers, it is because war as destruction (kill every human in our path) has one storytelling value (meaning value as a story device) and killing as selection: find the Jew and kill him has a greater storytelling value. A tank rolling through a town and crushing everything in its path is different than a knock on the door and a request for "Any Jews here for us to kill?" True both people end up dead and killing is killing and a person is a person, but fictionally there is a different weight to the intentional gathering of the Jew rather than the indiscriminate destruction of a killing machine.

There are many more films about the deaths of the Jews in concentration and extermination camps than there are films about the deaths of Jews to einsatzgruppen, shooting squads. This disproportion does not reflect the fact that the Jews in Hollywood have a special attachment to those killed in camps rather than those killed by shooting squads. Again it is the narrative value of the process involved in the death camps rather than the lack of narrative of the process involved in the killing squads. The Holocaust, particularly the knock on the door, "Are there any Jews here?", the train ride, the selection, the camp with its workers next to the chimney expelling the ashes of millions has a storytelling quality that the killing of the death squads and the deaths of the Russians does not possess.

But it is much easier to blame it on the power of the Jews in Hollywood than to attempt to dissect either the history or the intrinsic story values of the history.