The biopic about Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir premiered at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival and is scheduled for release in the USA later this month. I of course cannot render full judgement until seeing the full movie, but the theatrical trailer is crammed with every Biden 2024 talking point, so let’s start with those.
Golda Meir’s family fled Kiev while she was a young girl. She spent most of her life in the USA until she moved to Palestine in 1921. But even then, Golda enjoyed a revolving door relationship with the USA, meddling in American politics often and and advocating for zionist ideology. Judging from this trailer, the plot seems to focus on the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Golda serves some fairly obvious propaganda roles in today’s political situation. It will no doubt appeal to American conservatives, with their gleeful enthusiasm for “Israel first, America last” on every possible issue. Ask not what Israel can do for Americans, but what Americans can do for Israel. It will also appeal to liberals, both young and old, and their rabid Russophobia. The trailer overtly claims the Soviet Union played a role in provoking the conflict, which is nonsense. Even RAND admits that the Soviets opposed a war between Arabs and Israel.
Immediately after a sound byte referencing Soviet troops in Egypt, Golda states that “they” beat Jews to death in Ukraine. Hmm, who’s “they”? Of course someone watching this trailer would think she’s referring to the Russians. This is a good example of how liberals love to make up false statements that contradict each other, and are often self-contradicting. The country of “Ukraine” did not exist when Golda lived in Kiev, and it still did not exist in 1973. Would the real Golda refer to Ukraine like she does in the movie? Unlikely. I don’t see any evidence that she actually differentiated Russians and Ukrainians in any meaningful way. So the script writers want their audience to believe “Ukraine” existed in 1906, but at the same time, this “Ukraine” wasn’t responsible for anti-semitic pogroms that happened on its territory, and within Kiev itself. This is Schrodinger’s Russian. When he does something good like digging the Black Sea or inventing democracy, or joining the EU 1,000 years before the EU existed, he’s a Ukrainian. When he does something bad, like stealing grain or murdering Jews, he’s a Russian. Ukrainians and Russians are completely separate ethnicities, but they’re so interchangeable it is possible for the same person to be Russian one day and Ukrainian the very next day.
Then there’s the obvious insinuation that the “free world” can’t allow an army using Soviet weapons to win, which is hilarious because the Soviet Union was Israel’s first arms supplier and the reason they were able to exist at all.
Oh, and I have to comment on that dialogue between Kissinger and Golda.
Remember that I am first an American, second I am Secretary of State, and third I am a Jew.
You forget that in Israel, we read from right to left.
So Kissinger put Jews first and Americans last, and this is a cute, funny line worthy of being in the trailer? Imagine if Donald Trump any other right-wing figure said this about Kissinger. The ADL would demand that person be canceled. But when someone says literally the same thing, but in a positive light, that’s okay.
Movies like this one just prove that the American empire never benefited Americans. One could make a fairly solid argument that the American Empire was never really even controlled by Americans either. Our entire foreign policy after WWII has been largely dictated by expats from places like the Soviet Union, Poland, Cuba, Ukraine, and Israel. Some of these loyalties can overlap, but they never overlap with loyalty to the USA. These voting blocs make demands and give nothing in return. The USA must help Israel. The USA must sanction Cuba. The USA must kill Serbs. The USA must topple Saddam. The USA must stop Russia. But not one of these pet projects has any tangible benefit to Americans, and often come at great expense and risk. Some American conservatives have finally started to notice that regime changes and forever wars have no benefit to us, but turning this observation into actionable policy requires a degree of self-awareness that conservatives usually are just not capable of. A conservative might feel that opposing Russia now rather than be allies with them is a terrible mistake, but that would require at least some acknowledgement that opposing the USSR was also a terrible mistake. How can a conservative who grew up in the Cold War and remembers “winning” the Cold War is willing to accept the idea that this was all a mistake based on a lie? He can’t, so rather than focus his energy on regaining control of American foreign policy, he wastes his time with crusades against “woke” beer cans.
The reality is that this clown world absurdity practiced by Democrats mostly started with Republicans during the Cold War. I would go so far as to say that a Cold War Republican is the most woke person to ever exist. Republicans spent 50 years stirring up ethnic hatred against white people; encouraging, funding, and arming every separatist and ethnostate movement willing to kill Russians. But now some Republicans are upset about this weaponized diversity monster that they themselves helped to create? Please.
Ian Kummer
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I liked the main point of the story. And yes, divide and conquer doesn’t benift Americans. It only benefits a tiny community of money makers.
And let me add that Golda has very little to do with Kiev. I read her autobiography. She was five when her parents sent her to live in Pinsk (Western Belarus). There she started learning about Jewish heritage. It was anything but an antisemitic place then. She stayed there till they went to the States a bit later. Her father served in the Russian army which gave him some priviliges, btw. Kiev wasn’t an important thing in her life, neither antisemtism was, at least at that point. Her dad went to earn money, saw some opportunities, that’s it.
The illegitimate racist apartheid zionist colonial settler entity in Occupied Palestine is the capital of America. This is obvious. In no country, including America, would politicians have to ritually grovel in public fealty before a foreign nation in order to have a chance of winning office.
I feel insulted not because foreign countries bought our government. I’m insulted because foreign countries bought our government and paid so little for it. Biden sold himself for $10 million, it’s an embarrassment.
Great article Ian. You’re a voice of sanity.
A notable tangent about the ““they” beat Jews to death in Ukraine” tidbit:
Think back to An American Tail, an animated movie several Americans I’ve known called their favourite. What does the movie open with? The sequence of a Jewish village and its proxy-Jewish mice being attacked and savaged by hellish-looking soldiers wearing Imperial Russian army uniforms and likewise hellish Russian cats.
It’s nothing new. If anything, I always observed that American Jewish self-mythologizing pinned all blame for Jew-related issues and violence solely on Russians and the Russian state – fully exculpating the Poles and even, since the 1990s, the Ukraine. Even though virtually all cases of ethnic violence and blood libel occured in the territories of modern-day Ukraine and Poland. In this view, it’s never the Ukrainian country bumpkin or the Polish townie brandishing a pitchfork against a Jew – it’s always a Russian permitted or outright ordered to do so by the state.
Furthermore, this mythology clearly posits that the violence had implicit or explicit official backing and was even performed by regular army units ordered to ethnically cleanse Jews, even though every anti-Jewish violent episode was a failure of the government to handle tensions or contain radicalized townsfolk, not a government action against Jews. In this way, Russia is conflated with Nazi Germany, just like with the entire Soviet prison system being conflated with Nazi death camps with the mythological “GULAG”.
So, it can safely enough be said that the mythologized version of the Eastern European Jewish population’s past is already there. This new movie is just going to “update it for the modern times” and help cement the idea that the USSR was somehow the enemy of the Jewish people, and America the bodyguard standing in its defense against those Russian cossack cats.
Great asides on the Schrodinger’s Russian bit and below, too. You can observe the Schrodinger thing with Western cultural venues and events – they keep re-labeling great Russian cultural figures as Ukrainians, even when they lived in a town that ended up in the 1991 Ukraine for a few years out of their entire life, even when they were ethnically not even Russian nor “Ukrainian” in the modern “understanding” of it. Meanwhile, any figure from Russian history seen as negative is firmly kept as Russian – even when they lived on territories that were in the 1991 Ukraine for most of their lives, or not Russian at all. Heck, even Stalin is sometimes insistently called Russian, even though his original last name Jugashvili was never a secret from anyone, nor his early life in Georgia – all because “Stalin Bad, Russians Bad, therefore Stalin Russian”.
It really is grimly hilarious how blind trust in emigrants who may have ulterior agendas ended up essentially bankrupting America. America had virtually everything, but the emigre elite with bones to pick and axes to grind and other nations’ historical grudges to fight over (hello, Poland! among very many others) misspent all that power and resources with the actual American people ending up not even getting to benefit from it much.
Doubly grimly hilarious on your note of Republicans doing far more of what the modern Wokies are doing. Really does ring true, especially when you think back to stuff like photos of Mujaheddin in the White House being feted because they’re the battering ram against Russia – just like Azovites are now; and to things like America starting up the modern-day abuse of sports as a medium to make political statements at the expense of sports themselves, with the 1980 Olympics.
You write long and well-thought out comments here, you should maybe consider a guest contribution some time, I would enjoy it!
Regarding your statement about conservatives and winning the Cold War unable to realize that it’s based on a lie, I do realize that it’s based on a lie.
Israel First = Israel Uber Alles. I call them Zio-Nazis and the ADL is their propaganda arm.
America First = America Uber Alles. As you’ve written, our government has been taken over by Nazis. Yes, Neocon Nazis, Neolib Nazis, Femi-Nazis and Zio-Nazis.
In 1967 with the 3 Day War I was 13 and a big fan of Israel. In 1973 with the Yom Kippur War I was a 19 year old Sailor and a big fan of Israel. Today, at 69 I’ve realized long ago I was fed Lies.
Your father was instrumental in my enlightenment. Now people like Andrei Martyanov and Larry Johnson as well as you, educate me more.