Kevin MacDonald on the Gary Oldman Debacle

Kevin MacDonald
Occidental Observer
June 27, 2014

You have to wonder what Gary Oldman was smoking during his Playboy interview — the one where he defended Mel Gibson and said that Jews “run” Hollywood.

So they persecute. Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That fucking kraut” or “Fuck those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, “Isn’t that shocking?” [smiles wryly] All right. Shall I stop talking now? What else can we discuss?

It seems like every few years a Hollywood celebrity comes out and states the obvious—Marlon Brando, William Cash, Oliver Stone, Rick Sanchez, Mel Gibson, and now Gary Oldman. The list includes not a few Jewish commentators as well, including Joel Stein in the LA Times, Manny Friedman writing  in the  Times of Israel, Ben Stein (see below) and this issue of Moment.

The LA Times, on the other  hand understands how the game is played. Every year around Oscar time they put out editorials and articles bemoaning the “overwhelmingly white male membership of the academy” and that “film, TV diversity doesn’t look like America’s.” Then the next year, they do it all over again because nothing changes.

Some bastions of “White power” are not to be seriously contested.

The reason one must question Oldman’s state of mind is that we all know what happens next. The ADL goes crazy and Oldman issues an abject apology. Here’s Oldman’s apology, as reported by JTA:

“I am deeply remorseful that comments I recently made in the Playboy Interview were offensive to many Jewish people. Upon reading my comments in print — I see how insensitive they may be, and how they may indeed contribute to the furtherance of a false stereotype. Anything that contributes to this stereotype is unacceptable, including my own words on the matter.

“I hope you will know that this apology is heartfelt, genuine, and that I have an enormous personal affinity for the Jewish people in general, and those specifically in my life.”

Oldman also said that he had just finished reading “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” by Neal Gabler. “The fact is that our business, and my own career specifically, owes an enormous debt to that contribution,” he wrote.

Heartfelt or not, it wasn’t enough for the ADL:

“While his apology may be heartfelt, Mr. Oldman does not understand why his words about Jewish control were so damaging and offensive, and it is therefore insufficient,” the statement said. ” His reference to the Neal Gabler book he was reading only reinforces the notion that Jewish directors, producers and financiers are there in Hollywood as Jews.  They’re not, and the book does not draw that conclusion.”

The ADL is implicitly saying that yes, Jews run Hollywood, but it really doesn’t make any difference. Their Jewish identity has absolutely no influence on the product. It’s reminiscent of Ben Stein noting that about 60% of the top positions in Hollywood are held by Jews: “Do Jews run Hollywood? You bet they do — and what of it?” (here, p. l). Such pronouncements are made ex cathedra, as it were. We are not given a reference to a sober assessment of whether Jewish identity makes a difference.

So, as a public service to the ADL and other like-minded organizations, I refer them to an article I wrote on the topic (Ibid., p. li ff)

In general, television portrays Jewish issues “with respect, relative depth, affection and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish—often depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 5). …

Television presents images of Jewish issues that conform to the views of mainstream Jewish organizations. Television ‘invariably depicts anti-Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every turn’ (p. 103). It is seen as metaphysical and beyond analysis. There is never any rational explanation for anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is portrayed as an absolute, irrational evil. Positive, well-liked, non-Jewish characters, such as Mary Tyler Moore, often lead the fight against anti-Semitism ….

Regarding Israel, ‘on the whole, popular TV has conveyed the fact that Israel is the Jewish homeland with a strong emotional pull upon Diaspora Jews, that it lives in perpetual danger surrounded by foes, and that as a result of the constant and vital fight for its survival, it often takes extraordinary (sometimes rogue) measures in the fields of security and intelligence’ (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 173). …

In the movies, a common theme is Jews coming to the rescue of non-Jews …

Christianity is typically portrayed as evil, even going so far as depicting Christians as psychopaths. [citing Michael Medved] … small towns [are portrayed] as filled with bigots and anti-Semites.

*    *   *

Since the 1960s the Hollywood creative community has disseminated views on issues such as sex, marriage, and family very different from those held by the majority of Americans and traditional American elites (Lichter et al. 1994; Powers et al. 1996; Stein 1979). A substantial percentage of the Hollywood creative community (which now includes the higher levels of control over movie content rather than only the process of screen writing) have self-consciously aimed at a complete restructuring of America’s basic institutions in a left/liberal direction (Lichter et al. 1994; Powers et al. 1996). “The elite was [since the 1960s] and remains disproportionately anti-Establishment in its social and political views and . . . remains so even as a large segment of the American public continues to be ambivalent, or opposed to the new social paradigms” (Powers et al. 1996, 48).

Moreover, the social and political messages emanating from Hollywood have been impervious to election returns, and “if anything, the ascendance of conservative politics in Washington may have accelerated television’s leftward tendencies by alarming and mobilizing the predominantly liberal Hollywood community” (Lichter et al. 1994, 418). Powers et al. (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter et al. (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants. On the other hand, Powers et al. (1996) find that themes of racial conflict resulting from white racism are more typical of the movies: “Today, moviemakers seem preoccupied with exposing and rectifying the evils of racism and are thus inclined to convey a quite pessimistic view of race relations” (p. 173). (Chapter 2 of Separation and Its Discontents, p. 57)

In other words, the Jews who run Hollywood have attitudes that are squarely within the mainstream of the American Jewish community and often sharply divergent from the attitudes of the rest of America. As Andrew Joyce notes,

But what of the impact of this cryptic Judaic subculture on the production of secular culture for the masses? It’s evident that in many cases the resultant cultural production is incredibly hostile towards the behaviors and traditions of non-Jews, and that the impartial objectivity of “Jewish artists” … is itself a self-deception. (see following link)

But what I would like to stress here is Andrew Joyce’s account of how Jewish identity influences Hollywood in his excellent series on Jewish self-deception, particularly Part 4: “Self-Deception in Jewish Participation in Secular Culture.”

Jews involved in the media and the entertainment industries have to a marked degree engaged in self-deception about the influence of their Jewish identity on their activities in these fields. For example, David Dresser and Lester Friedman have pointed out that literary critics are often perplexed by the denials of Jewish authors that their works have been influenced by their ethnicity, even when such influences are obvious. Dresser and Friedman note that such flagrant, yet apparently earnest, denials have been attributed by experts to “conscious evasion, a personal blind spot, or a psychological problem.”[3] The second argument here is that Jews have engaged in self-deception about the extent and nature of that involvement. Self-deceptions regarding the extent of Jewish influence in the media are principally facilitated by two enablers: lies of omission, and the employment of language euphemisms. A typical example would be the fact that, even discounting the presence of Jews in the most influential positions, the enormous over-representation of Jews in the media professions is down-played to a truly remarkable degree. The most popular expression of Jewish self-deception in this respect is the concession that there is, as stated in the ADL-sponsored Anti-Semitism in America, only a “grain of truth” to assertions that this over-representation is vast and amounts to domination.[4] 

Producer David O. Selznick who proclaimed “I am an American, not a Jew,” is a good example.

This was despite the fact that Selznick had previously contributed to the work of the American Jewish Congress,[11] and was strongly attached to the Jewish causes like the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews during the 1940s — along with other ‘assimilated’ secular media Jews like Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Harry Cohn.[12] That Selznick was embedded in a non-religious Judaic subculture is further evidenced by the fact he was involved in one of its most popular fads — he had a “preoccupation with psychoanalysis on both an individual and a social level,” which led to his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound.[13] Selznick was “zealous in fighting anti-Semitism,” made personal financial contributions to Jewish charities, and also used some of his influence to ensure the subtle but steady presence of Jews in war films during the 1940s, in what Steven Carr describes as an “attempt to sell a pluralistic American ideal.”[14]

When asked to review the 1936 French biblical film Golgotha, Selznick found the picture to be anti-Semitic. He subsequently wrote to the head of the board of directors at his production company: “It is my duty as a Jew to do everything in my power to keep the picture from being distributed or exhibited in this country, and I will stop at nothing to achieve this end.”[15] Selznick even worked directly with the AJC on movie production. Carr writes that both Selznick and Irving Thalberg (producer of The Good Earth and Ben Hur) attended a meeting with the American Jewish Congress in 1936, during which they were given “story outlines for films” that would “promote a positive vision of the Jew.”[16]

It is therefore abundantly clear that there is more than a little deception and self-deception in Selznick’s claim “I am an American, not a Jew.”

Yes indeed. But of course the ADL is not concerned with honestly ascertaining Jewish identities and what that means for what comes out of Hollywood and what is off limits (e.g., any sense that it is legitimate and natural for Whites to identity as White and pursue interests as Whites). For them it’s not really about deception or even self-deception. It’s about coming up with a line that has some surface plausibility (if one doesn’t investigate any further) and then usoldmaning all its power against anyone who says otherwise. For the ADL it is truly a matter of “Is it good for the Jews?,” and since attributing too much power to Jews in Hollywood has an obvious downside for Jews generally, they will do what the can to crush people like Gary Oldman.

When the ADL and the people who run Hollywood are through with Oldman, he will become yet another example of a career destroyed by saying something that everyone knows is true. And in that sense, Gary Oldman will become an exemplar of the power of our hostile elite to enforce thought control.

It’s well known that if you you repeat an idea often enough, it starts to sound true and obvious — so much so that it will become a psychological reflex. So my advice is that you should studiously rehearse just what to say during interviews in very public places like Playboy. That way when you are feeling full of yourself during your interview (“Wow, I must be really cool to be interviewed by Playboy!”), you won’t impulsively blurt out inconvenient truths that will destroy your life.

So to stay out of trouble, just keep repeating thoughts like these over and you will be just fine:

Jews do not run Hollywood;
and even if they do (or, as the ADL says, even if there’s a “grain of truth” in it), the Jews who run Hollywood have no sense of Jewish identity;
and the values promoted by Hollywood have nothing to do with being Jewish;
so even if Jews run Hollywood, it makes absolutely no difference that they do.

I know it’s a mouthful, but when these thoughts become psychological reflexes, you will feel much  more confident going into interviews, and your career will not be endangered by a moment’s thoughtlessness.

So study up America! Your life depends on it.