Mr. Jones, a film directed by Agnieszka Holland, chronicles the fate of a country under the sway of an unscrupulous, mendacious, insecure head of state. The “elites,” along with a portion of the general population, seem mesmerized and inspired by these very failings. It’s as though his supporters see themselves in him and imagine that they too might one day wield incalculable power. He is, in fact, their proxy.
The villain in Holland’s film is, of course, Stalin, but the behavior feels distressingly familiar. Under orders from their leader, Soviet bureaucrats and their mouthpieces lied at every turn about the state-engineered famine ravaging Ukraine in 1933. It’s hard not to see a parallel between their silence and the concert of lies emanating from the White House about COVID-19, and just about everything else...
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It’s very hard to stop once you’ve begun to play the game. Politicians and citizens alike keep buying into new rules permitting ever more extreme behaviors. And it gets darker from there. As Holland’s searing film shows, the famine has little effect on elites with a ready supply of everything—think personal protective equipment, appropriate ventilation, frequent testing. Most never hear the cries of the hungry.
And this where I hope the analogy ends. Because Stalin and his supporters’ lies led to the starvation of millions who were left with nothing to eat but their own children. In fact, Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide to describe the tragedy.
Hard truths often take a long time to surface. Unfortunately, Holland’s movie couldn’t be more timely. The United States is at a crossroads. One only hopes that the fate which befell the people under that dictator remains merely a cautionary tale. But it sure looks like we’re heading for a cliffhanger.
It might not be impertinent to think of Minima Moralia as noir philosophy.