Welles and the State of Israel

[Black Irish]

As Secretary of State, General George Marshall, whom Welles once said was the greatest man he ever met, strongly opposed recognizing the state of Israel. Marshall felt that if the state of Israel was declared that a war would break out in the Middle East (which it did in 1948 one day after Israel declared independence). Marshall saw recognizing the Jewish state as a political move to gain Jewish support in the upcoming election, in which Truman was expected to lose to Dewey. He told President Truman in May 1948, "If you (recognize the state of Israel) and if I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you."

Albert Einstein also opposed the State of Israel, labeling future Israeli Prime Minister Manachem Begin as a Fascist:
http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/Einstein.htm

The so-called "Balfour Declaration" of 1917 was basically the reason why Germany lost the war. After the fall of the Czar (financed by internationalist Jewish bankers), German Jews were persuaded to make sure Lenin did not align with Germany. The reward for this betrayal was the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The Jewish Question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Question

In his book The Jewish Question, published in 1843, Bauer argued that Jews can achieve political emancipation only if they relinquish their particular religious consciousness, since political emancipation requires a secular state, which he assumes does not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Man
True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.

Marx contradicted Bauer's view that the nature of the Jewish religion prevented Judaism's assimilation. Instead he focused on the specific social and economic role of the Jewish group in Europe which, according to him, was lost when capitalism, the material basis for Judaism, assimilated the European societies as a whole.

In Marx's analysis, the "secular state" is not opposed to religion, but rather actually presupposes it. The removal of religious or property qualifications for citizens does not mean the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction* from them....while individuals can be 'spiritually' and 'politically' free in a secular state, they can still be bound to material constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critiques of capitalism.

* Galileo introduced abstract thinking into science. For example, one could not observe the motion of the earth around the sun. So Galileo needed a different method of acquiring knowledge, which consisted of combining experimentation with calculation--or the transformation of the concrete into the abstract and the assiduous comparison of results. "The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics," Galileo famously said. While Bertolt Brecht's play Galileo uses poetic license to dramatize Galileo's life, Brecht's friend and translator Eric Bentley nailed this concept in his introduction to the English edition of the play:

What actually happened to physics in the seventeenth century is that it became mathematical. This meant that it became, not more concrete, but just the opposite. After all, the evidence of one's senses is that the sun goes round the earth. That the earth should go round the sun is completely counter to that evidence. The average man today accepts the latter idea on pure faith. So far as he knows, it could be wholly untrue. For the demonstration lies in the realm of the abstract and the abstruce.

In other words, our eyes can only perceive so much. Our brains are wired to only conceive so much. Math, however, gives us an extra sense. And there are truths that can only be accessed through mathematics.

"What is it that distinguishes us from cavemen?" asks the mathematician Edward Frenkel. "I would say it’s the level of abstraction that we can reach."

A deeper understanding of math that involves key skills such as posing the right questions and turning real world problems into math formulations. That's what the computers can't do. That's what we need students to excel at if we hope to get ahead in "the computational knowledge economy" of the future.

"Abstraction is king in this brave new world," Frenkel says, "and the key to abstraction is mathematics."

Acheson and the State of Israel:
http://ihr.org/other/trumandecision_curtiss.html

Welles opposed the founding of Israel at the time too, and spoke about it on one of the Commentaries shows-

[Black Irish]

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Welles recognized that there were two distinct kinds of "Jewishness". One was the Nationalistic Jewishness, where Jewishness is linked to Geography, a specific homeland, Israel. This is "Zionist" Jewishness. The other kind was international, diaspora Jewishness, where it is more of a state of mind to be a Jew. The Yiddish culture, which Welles loved, was a large part of this international Jewishness, and gave birth to things like Vaudeville and an irreverent, anarchic attitude towards authority. Welles preferred this kind of Jewishness, although he was sympathetic to the other kind, because of the Holocaust.

Almonds and Raisons (Welles narrated)

[Black Irish]

Charles Fawcett:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cg ... d=24915977

Upon learning of American journalist Varian Fry's 'Emergency Rescue Committee' in Vichy France, he joined the organization whose purpose was to assist in the escape of countless Jews and anti-Nazi artists, writers, academics and professionals. A number of those rescued included artist Marc Chagall, German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, sculptor Max Ernst, composer Alma Mahler-Werfel and her husband Franz Werzel, a novelist of Jewish descent and author of 'The Song of Bernadette'. Being the idealistic Southern gentleman that he was, in a 3-month period Fawcett married six Jewish women who were refugees from concentration camps, thus enabling them to leave France with American visas. Upon hearing that the Gestapo was on the way to arrest him, Fawcett escaped to Great Britain where he became a member of the RAF. While in the midst of this current adventure, he redeveloped tuberculosis, which he first had as a child, and spent some time in Arizona recovering. He was soon back in the throes of battle by rejoining the war effort in Alsace with the French Foreign Legion and later fighting Communists in the Greek civil war. Afterward, Fawcett tried his hand at acting and would go on to appear in mostly foreign films in a career spanning about 25 years, during which he made friends with stars Orson Welles and William Holden and had a love affair with film beauty, Hedy Lamarr. When the tuberculosis returned he went into semi-retirement, living in Houston and becoming a part of its elite society circles. But adventure called again in 1979 when he learned of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There he filmed footage of the conflict and the atrocities. He enlisted his friend, socialite Joanne Herring to help him bring these events to the attention of the U.S. Government. This documentary, narrated by Orson Welles, greatly influenced the U.S. to secretly arm and fund the Mujahideen, tribal warriors who were fighting the invasion of the Red Army. This chain of events was recently dramatized in the film, "Charlie Wilson's War" starring Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks.

[Black Irish]

Charles Fernley Fawcett:
http://www.varianfry.org/fawcett_en.htm

Charles Fernley Fawcett—rescuer, freedom fighter, actor, musician—died Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008, in London, at the age of 92.

Fawcett, an American expatriate and moral adventurer most of his life, became best known in recent years for his rescue work alongside Varian Fry in Marseille in 1940, after France fell to the Nazis.

After the war, he drifted into acting, a profession he thoroughly enjoyed: “For a short while you could be what you wanted to be.” A handsome man with a booming voice, Fawcett performed in over one hundred films, sometimes as the villain, working with stars such as Errol Flynn, Alan Ladd, and Robert Taylor. Living in Rome in the 1950s, the man-about town developed a local reputation in the press as the "Mayor of Via Veneto," escorting such beautiful stars as girlfriend Hedy Lamarr.

Always vulnerable to a good cause and the battle for human rights, a swashbuckling figure off-screen as well as on, Fawcett helped Hungarians escape their country after the Soviet invasion in 1956. Especially close to his heart was the Afghan cause after the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979.

In the recent motion picture Charlie Wilson's War, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is invited by Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) to a party to see a documentary about the Afghanistan resistance made by a friend of her's. The unnamed friend is Fawcett, and the documentary was Courage Is Their Weapon, narrated by his friend Orson Welles. Since Fawcett was known to old friends as Charlie, this war was also Charlie Fawcett’s War.

Welles knew Fawcett from the Via Vaneto, the famous street in Rome, which was the setting of Fellini's Le Dolce Vita.

http://washingtonlife.com/2008/02/01/tr ... charlie/2/

Fawcett guided Joanne and her barrel into the war zone, where he was training the mujahideen freedom fighters – shoeless boys and weaponless men defending their villages against air strikes. Joanne interviewed them for Courage is Our Weapon, the documentary they filmed; he got pal Orson Welles, to narrate, and they set off to tell the world.

Congressman Charlie Wilson, (played by Tom Hanks, in the film) was a slim, handsome Texan, seven feet tall in his cowboy boots, widely known around Washington as a “hard-drinking, skirt-chaser,” which flamboyant Charlie never denied. He barely knew Joanne then, though she was later his fiancée.

A longtime anti-communist, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made her an activist. Seeking Washington support, she urged Wilson to come to Houston, see their film and meet the legendary Fawcett, who has been the subject of 18 books. Stirred by Fawcett’s account, Wilson pledged his Congressional committee clout to quietly find anti-aircraft weapons for the Afghans. The most surreal covert operation in US history was launched.

Washington Life (back issue):
http://www.washingtonlife.com/backissue ... d_town.htm

He paid his tuition through art school in France by modeling and wrestling, then,while still a youngster, took off for the Spanish Civil War, where he joined the famed Lincoln Brigade on the Republican side against Francisco Franco. Concerned about the pounding London was taking during the Blitz,he joined the RAF and flew fighter planes to help defend Britain. Hearing early rumors of the Holocaust, he traveled to Marseilles to join Varian Fry in a dangerous, underground “Schindler’s List”-type operation to help save countless lives from the gas chambers. He aided in other humanitarian efforts in Hungary and the Congo, and served a term in the French Foreign Legion. In Rome, he began a career of acting in or directing over 100 films in 23 countries.When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the ‘80s, Charlie, disguised as a camel driver, shot footage for the documentary film “Courage is Our Weapon” (narrated by his friend Orson Welles).

Former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson summed it up: “You can go anywherein the world …where people are in danger, and you are likely to hear the name of Charlie Fawcett.”

[Black Irish]

".....After seeing the recent Storyville episode on the Shah of Iran's repulsive billion-dollar filmed desert extravaganza, narrated by Welles in the most grovelling fashion, I can't take him seriously anymore. Talk about blood money. Why didn't he use some of that to finish his opus?".

Yes, that was a brilliant Storyville and that film was weird, filming split screen like 'Woodstock', 'The Boston Strangler' or '24'.

You're actually correct. Some of the money for both 'The Other Side Of The Wind' and 'F For Fake' did indeed come from Iran. A 'making of' about this film is essential.

[Black Irish]

Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (or Orson Welles and Neoconservatism vs. Multiculturalism);
https://books.google.com/books?id=0R3P9 ... ve&f=false

Neocons attack multiculturalism as being anti-European, or anti-West in general. In Neocon thinking, Multiculturalism puts the West under attack, attacks the idea that Europe and America share a common intellectual, artistic, and moral legacy, descended primarily from the Greeks and the Bible. Politically correct multiculturalists supposedly want to substitute this with African and Asian traditions and values.

But multiculturalists point out that ancient Greece, supposedly the fount of universal civilazation, was not proto-Europe itself, but was rather a synthesis of African, Semitic, and Asian influences. As Jan Pietarse points out, all the celebrated stations of European progress - Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Rennaissance, the Enlightenment - are monents of cultural mixing. Western art has always been indebted to and transformed, by non-Western art. The West, then, did not just "take in" non-Western influences; it was constituted by them.

According to the neoconservative caricature, multiculturalists want to belittle anything by "dead white males", including throwing out Shakespeare as racist, sexist, and colonialist. But on the contrary, multiculturalists would prefer to point out all the multicultural reverberations in Shakespeare, from Moor vs. Venetian in OTHELLO, Egyptian vs. Roman in ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA, European vs. African & Native American in THE TEMPEST, and Jew vs. Gentile in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

A multicultural approach would point out how OTHELLO could not be performed in Jim Crow South, because Shakespeare had taken the cowardly murderer of the Italian source play and turned him into a tragic hero. It would also speak of the wedding between multiracial performance and Shakesperean text, as in Orson Welles's "Voodoo" MACBETH.

[Black Irish]

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