Month: September 2022

While I was not anticipating this read to be particularly good, it was worse than I had originally expected. The writing was hard to get through and while reading through the intro was tough, it gave some insight into the main characters of Hitlers youth and life growing into a dictator. 

Hitlers education as a child never went beyond a secondary school. He recalls in some of the early chapters that he was a good student and it was up to him to decide if he wanted to pass or fail a class, however a couple of footnotes scattered through the chapter show that he lies about his educational record more than once. This further proves his narcissistic personality that is clearly seen throughout the book. We are also introduced to the man who sparked Hitler’s interest in nationalism, his high school history teacher Leopold Poetsch. Poetsch later distanced himself from Hitler after being considered an enemy of Austria, even though hitler gives credit to Poetsch as a defining factor in his future.

Following Hitler through the book he speaks a lot of his rise to power, and his motivation behind those actions. After joining the German Worker’s Party he took more of an interest in propaganda, which led to him climbing in the party’s power structure. But it also opened the doors to the propaganda tactics he used in the Nazi party. One of his many criticisms of the war he states is that Germany lost partly because of British propaganda, and goes in depth into how propaganda should be used and how people are so easily influenced. All of his statements in this book about himself, his upbringing, and the Jewish people of Germany and Austria show the narcissistic mind of the man who created arguably one of the most famous books to follow a political movement.

To me, the text was clearly comparable to Salten’s own childhood growing up in Vienna. Bambi as a word connects to the word bambino meaning child. Focusing on Bambi growing up in the forest learning everything he can about the world around him, but also being kept in the dark about the danger around him when he is young. Ultimately he gets exposed to Him and learns of the reality of the forest. Salten shows us the more gruesome and real side of the forest as it turns to winter.

Towards the end of the book, we see Bambi lean into isolation and he learns from the Prince who had kind of become his mentor. To survive in the forest as prey he sees the only option to distance himself from those he cares about and passes that on to Bambi. One of the scenes that comes to the front in my mind is when Bambi hears Faline’s calling him and doesn’t realize it’s the hunter’s call. The prince tells him this and Bambi understands the importance of his mentor’s advice. The book is later published and Salten writes a sequel while fleeing Austria that follows Bambi and Faline and their children and is more gruesome than the first book.

I had not seen that movie in at least 10 years, I had forgotten the old Disney style and how beautiful it was. His cartoon studio with his brother started in 1923 that would later become the famous Walt Disney Studios.

Snow White was their first film in 1937 and Walt had planned for Bambi to be their second but it ended up being the fourth, partly because of the amount of work that went into the film. Disney even going as far as to have his animators travel to Maine to photograph a specific kind of deer to replace the Roe deer since roe deer are only found in Europe. During production, his team was not so sure of the timeline for the release because they had to adapt the book to a movie and had trouble creating the plotline from a story they claimed didn’t have one to begin with. So many changes were made to adapt the movie from the original text to make it friendlier to a bigger audience.

Yet the film was still met with criticism from staff as well as the viewers. Partly from the hunting community who claimed it portrayed hunters as irresponsible and cruel for starting of forest fires and use of hunting dogs. And overall people had said it was “too emotional for children.” even when it became one of Disney’s best films at the time, with some of the most beautiful animation that is still appreciated today.

Going through the museum to all the exhibits, you saw the evidence chronologically about Hitler’s rise to power with nazism and then the aftermath. But in the basement, you got to see and interact with the American perspective of the Holocaust. Seeing what the government knew at the time and Americans’ perspectives on the genocide were.

While we couldn’t have stopped the genocide completely, there were several things we could have done and didn’t. The American Jewish population wanted the government to condemn what was happening overseas while disagreeing on what exactly the next step should be to help.

But then on the other side of things, we can also see the uprise of the American nazi movement led by people like Fritz Khun and Charles Lindbergh. While parts of America were working to help allow more german refugees, boycott nazi goods made, and urging the government to do something. At the same time, you had people like Charles Lindbergh who led the group of people with the opinion that the Jewish population of Austria and Germany did this to themselves and that we shouldn’t help. Even today we see Lindbergh as an American hero and pilot and his history of nazism didn’t become readily available till later.

In 1903 portions of a set of papers were published in ‘The Banner’ which was an early Russian newspaper which is how they originally got introduced to the public, then the protocols in full were published as an appendix to The Great in the Small: The Coming of Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth, which began the process of getting the protocols wide spread through several different countries and languages where they eventually made their long lasting mark on the world.

Out of the 24 protocols, there is a clear intent to portray Jewish people as power-hungry conspirators against the state. The text makes several points resembling a Machiavellian and ruthless mindset that doesn’t make sense under the ideas and values of Judaism. It makes sense that it was later proven to be plagiarized and forged from a satirical essay. 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is considered one of the most famous conspiracy pieces of the last couple of centuries, mostly because of its impact. The Kishinev Pogrom took place in 1903 on Easter killed 43 and gravely injured 92, is considered to be an effect of this text. Going further, we can trace it to the Holocaust because of Hitler’s praise and use of the text repeatedly in his speeches and its similarities to Mein Kampf. Though this book is one of the worst forgeries of its time the impact very visibly changed the course of history.

While people today and back then raise concerns over the wild content in Sade’s work, the connections aren’t hard to make when it comes to the censorship of literature. After its second publishing in 1956, there was a backlash saying that the company had committed an “offense against public decency.” The publisher ended up being convicted but was overturned on appeal because the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was then effect, and the case of R v. Penguin Books took place, changing the game of how publishers could release books like The 120 Days of Sodom to the public. 

The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 covers how to determine if something is considered obscene, as well as defense of the public good, and search and seizure policies. They had decided that something was obscene if “a significant amount of persons read it and were likely to become corrupt”₁. At that point, challengers of the book were worried Sade’s work would fall into that category and influence the public, and after the Moors Murder Trial of 1966, they were convinced. The Moors Murder Trial followed a couple that committed the brutal murder and sexual assault of five children, and one of the perpetrators had several works of Sade on his bookshelf. After the trial a ban on the publication and importation of the works was quickly put into effect. 

After the publication stopped, several scholars and literary students came forward trying to prove that Sade’s work didn’t cause violence by words alone, more that it addressed the violence of human thought and nature. With the Libertines we see the case of monkey hear monkey do in the stories told by the women to them. Following the revival of publishing in the 90s, it was discovered that Sade’s work didn’t convert anyone into something they weren’t before they picked up the book.

1. Participation, Expert. “Obscene Publications Act 1959.” Legislation.gov.uk. Statute Law Database, June 1, 1978. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/7-8/66/contents. 

Without going deep into the specifics of the piece, the introduction covers the basic description of the four libertines and their daughters/wives in the messed up web of relationships and marriages Sade creates in the first five pages. Very early in the text Sade also makes clear the theme of his opposition to religion and societal norms.

He mocks society by portraying priests, bishops, and noblemen as perverts and criminals of the time. He also brutally punishes those who dare pray to any god, suggesting Sades complicated relationship with religion. So it’s definitely a question as whether they see themselves as above those who have faith in a god or completely separated from religion all together. 

One of the more prevalent points of the text I noticed while reading is the connection to Freuds theory of psychoanalysis. “nothing was unjust except that which caused pain” (page 10). Several quotes resemble that one throughout the book in each section of events. It is the most direct point of Freud’s theory that states that a person is motivated by our desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain, whether emotional or physical at all costs. Libertinism is defined as the disregard of authority or convention in sexual or religious matters it is characterized by self indulgence and a lack of restraint, a disregard of authority or a rejection of moral boundaries. The libertines seek out any and all pleasure though the 120 days, creating a power dynamic in which all four are on the same plane but above everyone else in the castle who is there only to cause them pleasure.

Worldwide, and throughout history, people know Judas as a villain. He turned in Jesus and was seen as greedy and selfish but Reading this gospel takes us beyond what is already known to think more in-depth about why Judas did what he did and why he knew it was necessary.

This text highlights Judas’ connection with Jesus in a way we have not seen before. He’s shown as the favorite apostle who truly understands Jesus’ teachings more than the others. There’s a private conversation between the two that leads to Judas being told he is a member of the ‘holy generation. His soul can transcend past his mortal death, unlike the other apostles. He’s asked to release Jesus of his mortal body. “For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”

We know that Judas dies after Jesus gets arrested. He regretted what he did there is one account that Judas committed suicide and a second that says he more spontaneously combusted and points to God as an explanation for that. Both times Judas is guilty and regrets what he did, even though according to the gospel, that is what he was asked to do. Before this text we saw Judas as the sole person responsible for Jesus’ arrest and death. He was a villain in the story that is known worldwide. The discovery of this gospel humanizes Judas as a person who had this ultimate faith that led him to an unfortunate end for him.