Final Account: Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 58 seconds 

New Nazi documentary ‘Final Account’ is a powerful and prescient warning for our identity politics obsessed age

Luke Holland’s film, which chronicles the complicity of ordinary German’s in the crimes of the Third Reich, is a reminder that it’s easy to label our enemies as Nazis…but the true search for evil should begin with a look in the mirror.

The new documentary Final Account is a collection of interviews with elderly, ordinary Germans recounting their experiences of life under the collective madness of the Nazi regime and their connection to, or complicity with, the Holocaust.

The film opens with a quote from Primo Levi, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Director Luke Holland, whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust and who himself died of cancer in 2020 after the film’s completion but before its premiere, goes on to prove Levi’s thesis.

Holland began production in 2008 and ultimately interviewed 300 people for this fascinating project, and his bare-bones, oral history approach, works exquisitely well in revealing the banality of evil.

Holland’s subjects were indoctrinated into the Nazi system early in life. The women went through the League of German Girls, the men the Hitler Youth. The males then graduated to the Waffen SS, some becoming concentration camp guards and one becoming a member of Hitler’s elite body guards, the Leibstandarte.

Their recollections regarding the holocaust run the gamut. Some claim to have known nothing, while others say they heard whispers and gossip but were too afraid to speak up or act. Others give grudging admissions of complicity, while some admitted the egregiousness of the crime but doubt its scale. And one, a former member of the Leibstandarde, is unbowed by the weight of history.

This former bodyguard of Hitler says the Fuhrer was a great leader with a good plan, except that the Jews should’ve been deported and not exterminated. He’s so unabashedly defiant he refuses to accept the Nuremberg ruling that the Waffen SS, of which he was a member, was a criminal organization because “then I would dirty myself”. His reasoning is wrapped in patriotism as he explains that the Nuremberg court wasn’t a German court, and therefore lacks authority in his eyes.

Other stories reveal how Jew hatred and the Holocaust were normalized. Stories of children being taught anti-Semitic songs in school, reading books with derogatory Jewish depictions and being indoctrinated by teachers into Nazi ideology are common.

Tales of visiting camps in order to get a cavity filled from a dentist who was a prisoner, or of routinely seeing prisoners escorted to and from camps, some being worked or starved to death slowly before their eyes, are mundanely recounted.

None of these revelations are met with tears or even overt remorse, just a stern, steely-eyed matter of fact-ness.

The most compelling subject in the film is Hans Werk, a former member of the Waffen SS. Werk is at times elusive and at times defensive, but he evolves over a series of interviews.

The most electrifying moment in the entire film is when Werk goes to the sight of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leadership made official the Final Solution policy, to speak to a group of college students about his guilt.

After saying he is ashamed of what he did as a member of the SS, these students push back. At first it seems they’re resistant because they think he’s lying about his contrition, then it becomes clear they’re actually angry with him for his shame. They call him a traitor for being ashamed of being German and having fought for Germany.

This scene is electrifying because it’s the only time the veneer of control recedes and the beast comes to the surface baring its teeth. Werk is shaken by the young men confronting him, and his horror at the realization that the disease of Nazism has passed to a new generation is readily apparent on his face as he pleads with them to “don’t let yourself be blinded”.

Werk’s warning fell on deaf ears in that room, and across the globe as well. The Nazi disease, or as my Jungian therapist friend describes it – the “not-see” disease, is back in our collective psyche with a vengeance. “Not seeing” the humanity of the other has reached epidemic proportions.

The dehumanizing sentiment of Nazism is readily apparent in recent videos of Jews rampaging on the streets of Israel attacking Arabs, Palestinians roaming the streets of New York attacking Jews, blacks viciously attacking Asians and whites, militarized police brutalizing minorities and rioters wreaking racially motivated havoc, as well as in stories of Uighers being held in Chinese concentration camps.

This ugly sentiment is also found in the establishment approved Critical Race Theory, a shamelessly anti-white and anti-Asian ideology that demands people be judged by racial and ethnic categories instead of by the content of their character, which is now being used to indoctrinate students in schools and becoming the default setting in corporate American.

This industrialized effort at dehumanization is horrifyingly reminiscent of the process which created the legions of “functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions” which populate the Nazi nightmare of Final Account.

Final Account is not a great film, it is somewhat derivative in style as evidenced by its repeated use of a melancholy cello played over shots of hollowed out concentration camps, but it is most certainly a powerful and prescient one.

It is cold comfort that the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi evil in Final Account will soon be dead of old age, for the spirit of Nazism is obviously alive and well in our world, living in all of our hearts, whether we have the courage to admit it or not.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

The Crime of Critical Race Theory Indoctrination in Kindergarten

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 11 seconds

The Orwellian indoctrination of kindergarten kids with Critical Race Theory is outrageous and must be stopped

Woke teachers and school administrators are waging a culture war for the minds of kids as young as four by inculcating them with toxic social justice teachings.

This summer I got an unpleasant initiation into the culture war when, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, my 5 year-old child’s K-8 public charter school here in Los Angeles went from an academic institution interested in preparing students for the workplace and college to an ideological hot bed devoted to promoting Critical Race Theory over all other subjects.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a philosophy of hyper-racialization that looks to radically transform our “inherently racist” society, including children. Under CRT, Martin Luther King’s dream is abolished as racial identification is mandatory and white children are taught self-loathing and black children to embrace victimhood. Like a religion, it is unfalsifiable, elevates subjective experience above objective reality and crumbles under intellectual scrutiny.

A shameless example of CRT indoctrination in action is that the very first lesson taught to my child’s kindergarten class this autumn is “how to be an activist”.

Merriam-Webster defines activist as - "a person who uses or supports strong actions (such as public protests) in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue." My child’s school decided to perniciously redefine “activist” as “someone who notices that a system is unfair to another person, group of people, or animals and then creates a new system that ensures fairness for every person, group of people, or animal.”  

Redefining “activist” is as Orwellian as it gets. Words have meaning and meaning matters, for instance calling an ass an eagle doesn’t make it sprout wings and fly. But the mendacity doesn’t stop there. The school also teaches the four traits of an “activist”, which they claim to be “Observe. Ask questions. Have Empathy. Show compassion.” These positive traits are more defining of a good neighbor or good friend…rather than “activist”.

Contorting the meaning of activist to suit an ideological need and claiming that all “activists” have “empathy” and “show compassion” is the kindergarten equivalent of teaching “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength”.

Do the “activists” of the Westboro Baptist Church, Antifa, or KKK “have empathy” and “show compassion”? Some of the greatest “activists” (using the Merriam-Webster definition) in history - Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Osama Bin Laden, are not exactly profiles in empathy and compassion.

George Orwell once wrote, "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought". It seems obvious that CRT has corrupted the language used by my child’s school, and that corrupted language is intended to corrupt the thoughts and minds of young students.

This intentionally deceptive “activist” lesson runs throughout the school year and is accompanied by the “activist song”, sung everyday to the tune of “row, row, row your boat”. The lyrics are… “I am an activist, I look and I observe, I ask questions and find out, what has been unheard  -  having empathy, helps me understand, I can make a change, working hand in hand.”

This isn’t education - this is blatant indoctrination. The school isn’t teaching children how to think but rather what to think.

The school claims its mission is to develop “critical thinking” but does misinforming children about the definition of “activist” spur critical thinking? I’ve asked the leadership of the school this question…as well as for their specific definition of “equity” and “anti-racism”, terms they frequently espouse? Does “equity” mean “equality of opportunity” or “equality of outcome”? Does “anti-racism” mean “opposing discrimination in all its forms” or “discriminating to benefit minorities”? These questions have been entirely ignored.

I also asked if my child would face discrimination at the school, and the principal and CEO steadfastly refused to answer that question too…which unfortunately seems like an answer unto itself…one that may carry legal liability.

The fact that this tax-payer funded charter school which, according to reports, just received between $2 and $5 million in PPP funds from the federal government, refuses to say it won’t discriminate against a 5 year-old, is quite an indictment and reveals the ethical rot at the center of CRT and the catastrophic error the American education system is making by embracing it.

At best CRT is an intellectually flaccid and insidiously vacuous ideology that focuses on “unlearning” alleged “implicit bias” at the expense of learning the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. At worst, it is a malevolent, mendacious and cancerous cult that demands discrimination against some children under the guise of “equity”.

Parents should be in charge of their children’s moral and ethical education, and if parents want CRT taught to their kids, let them teach it at home. Just like I wouldn’t impose my Catholic faith upon other people’s children, I don’t want their CRT cult imposed on mine.

Many parents privately tell me they’re horrified that CRT is being taught in kindergarten, but are reluctant to speak out for fear of being labeled “racist”. This is part of the “social justice” game, where people are shamed into silence and compliance with scurrilous labels. But parents must screw their courage to the sticking place and fight back now because the war for children’s minds is being waged and teacher’s unions, school boards, woke faculty and administrators are moving fast and pushing hard to make CRT the default foundation for all education in America.

Indoctrinating children with CRT is akin to systemic child abuse as it steals innocence, twists minds and crushes spirits. Parents must move heaven and earth to protect their children, and they can start by coming together and aggressively rooting out CRT from their schools by any and all legal means necessary.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020