JoJo Rabbit and the Shining Path To Zionism

JoJo Rabbit is zionist propaganda, and I will explain why.

Yesterday I happened to see some clips from this movie floating around on YouTube, and was curious enough to give it a watch. I tried to approach this film with an open mind, which was difficult because each scene was worse than the previous.

The problem with JoJo Rabbit is that it is not anti-war, anti-genocide, or even anti-nazism. JoJo Rabbit is anti-nationalism, which it intentionally conflates with nazism. It’s absurdist with everything that happened in World War II portrayed silly, and that’s the point of the movie; nationalism is pathetic and stupid, and anyone who is proud of his country should be ridiculed. Unless that country is Israel, of course.

I am reminded of two other films; Woody Allen’s 1975 Love and Death, and Elem Klimov’s 1985 Come and See.

JoJo Rabbit and Love and Death are structurally very similar, and in messaging they are almost the same movie. JoJo Rabbit mocks Germany in WWII, and Love and Death mocks Russia in the 1812 Patriotic War against Napoleon.

Movies about war typically identify the opposing sides very early. Star Wars shows us the Empire and the Rebel Alliance locked in combat right in the opening scene. Lord of the Rings does the same with elves and orcs. In Love and Death, the enemy is not the French, like you might think. They’re barely in the movie, actually. Within the first five minutes there is a scene when an Orthodox priest shows a Russian boy an antisemitic caricature of a Jew. So the enemy of Russia is not the French, it is the Jews. This is important because up until that point in the movie, Russians are shown as very stupid and ridiculous people, but that alone isn’t enough reason to hate them. But revealing that Russians are antisemitic is a justifiable reason to hate them for a holocaust-primed audience.

In JoJo Rabbit there is an identical scene right near the beginning, when a nazi instructor shows German children an antisemitic caricature on a chalkboard. So again, Germans are portrayed as very stupid and ridiculous people who like this Hitler guy a bit too much, but the real reason you should hate them is because they’re antisemitic.

The other similiarity JoJo Rabbit has to Love and Death is that it makes the audience feel smart with low-hanging fruit tricks. Love and Death makes some visual references to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which literally anyone who has taken a college level film class will be able to recognize, and therefore will feel smart. Likewise, JoJo Rabbit has a big Chekhov’s gun moment, which every redditor who has seen the movie is proud for recognizing. JoJo’s mother has bright red shoes which are seen several times, then there’s a moment he sees that she has been hanged. The audience feels clever because they saw the red shoes, and later understand that the feet wearing red shoes belong to her, because they have seen them before. Only people with a 5,000 IQ can understand this!

That, or Quentin Tarantino was a consultant on this film and he just wanted to look at Scarlett Johansson’s feet a lot. If true, I can’t say I blame him. I would be willingly sent to Auschwitz and turned into a shoe, as long as I would be worn by Scarlett Johansson.

Come and See, the iconic Soviet movie about Belarussian partisans, and JoJo Rabbit share some similarities too. And they are probably intentional, or at least consciously inspired. JoJo is a typical, one might even say ideal, German boy with blonde hair, but then he is disfigured in a grenade training accident. Come and See’s main character, Flora, is a typical blonde Slavic boy who is so psychologically traumatized by the horrors of nazi atrocities, by the end of the movie he resembles an old man.

A Russian before and after the war

The scarring likely represents a loss of innocence, which is a trait shared by both Flora and JoJo. They’re idealistic and patriotic for their respective countries, but with a crucial difference. Flora is given a heroic moment while JoJo is not. They both have a personal confrontation with Hitler; for Flora this happens at the end, while for JoJo, Hitler was a personal companion representing nationalism. After surviving the nazi atrocities, Flora wishes he could kill Hitler, and the universe seems to grant him the opportunity to do exactly that; go back in time and kill the ruler of the western rules based order as a baby, which he refuses to do. Flora refuses to seek revenge against the German people, thus breaking the cycle of violence. So while Come and See is probably the darkest Soviet film ever made, it alludes to an attitude of optimism that was prevalent at the time, that the centuries of bloodshed were over, and the two countries were now in an era of peaceful cooperation. Come and See was shown in East German theaters not to browbeat them over nazism, but to emphasize that the Russians didn’t want revenge or further conflict with them. In hindsight, that was a hopelessly naive thing to believe, but that’s how it was, apparently.

JoJo is not allowed to have any such moral epiphany, and it is largely due to power dynamics. Flora is on the winning side, so a declaration of not seeking revenge has some weight to it. JoJo, of course, is on the losing side of the war, but the plot cheats him out of any opportunity to influence the world around him, and simply has to accept defeat and the new international order imposed upon him. Yes, JoJo does kick his imaginary Hitler friend out the window, but it’s a pointless display of defiance against a regime that has already been defeated and a leader who is already dead; even imaginary Hitler in this scene has a bullet hole in his temple.

Also like Flora, JoJo is befriended and sexually fascinated by a girl. Glasha teases Flora at first, but they soon become close companions for the first half of the movie, until the war separates them. The separation is simply a necessity, she stays at the refugee camp and he leaves to fight. JoJo finds out that his mother has been hiding Anne Frank. By the end, he clings to her desperately, terrified she might leave at the end of the war. This fear is rational, as she is all he has left. A boy with no nation, family or anything else left except his Jewish older sister figure. But JoJo doesn’t contribute to saving Anne Frank in any meaningful way, his role is entirely to be passively accepting of the decisions made by others, whether it is his mother, the German governments, or the governments that defeat it.

None of the older characters are treated any better, except for Anne Frank. The Germans down to a man are deliberately absurd caricatures. There are no good or positive people, even the German officer who seems disillusioned with the regime is portrayed as an ineffective drunken moron. The one exception is JoJo’s mother and the other German partisans, but they are not allowed to have an identity of their own. They’re not overtly portrayed as patriots, nor are they communists, which just makes them people who vaguely oppose the regime. But opposing an ideology is not an ideology in of itself. In fact, if a Martian watched this movie with no additional context, he might conclude that the partisans are actually the bad guys of the movie because they’re undermining their own country while it’s facing serious external threats. Despite constantly ridiculing the German people as incompetent and pathetic, JoJo Rabbit doesn’t actually say why they are bad except that they are antisemitic. This apparently is the only crime that matters or is even worth discussion. I am reminded of when the Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to a Ukrainian nazi a couple of years ago. After being exposed online, they backtracked and issued an apology to the Jewish community. Not anyone else, just the Jews, because they are the only group that matters, so it would seem.

Modern Hollywood propaganda like this movie generally fails this “Martian test” because it is dependent on the audience being already propagandized.

Then of course there is the obligatory Russophobia, but it is more surreal than I have seen anywhere else. In the final battle, American troops heroically defeat the nazis, suddenly transform into Russian soldiers to cruelly round up and execute unarmed people, then transform back into Americans to peacefully interact with the people. It’s frankly some of the most astonishingly cynical propaganda I have ever seen. JoJo Rabbit assumes, correctly, the audience are morons who will watch this scene and not question it. Because asking questions is antisemitic!

As an American, I don’t feel flattered by the heroic cowboy depiction of US troops and their flags, it just comes across as extremely cynical. There is such a thing as a sincere compliment, but I don’t like being manipulated. Taking a bunch of cheap shots at Germans and Russians then heaping hollow praise on Americans is just obvious manipulation.

The Anne Frank character represents the only permissible path for the defeated German boy. They don’t part ways like Flora and JoJo and that’s not even an option for him. He has no family or national ties left, so is absolutely dependent on Anne Frank. JoJo’s dependence on her quite explicitly also extends to Israel. And this dependence isn’t imagined out of thin air for the sake of drama. As I have written about before, some real Germans did literally reject their own identities and convert to Judaism, the greatest act of capitulation possible. So to be fair, this movie isn’t just propaganda, it symbolizes 80 years of self-fulfilling propaganda, the erasure of the German nation and its replacement with subordination to the Israeli nation.

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Ian Kummer

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

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