RIFLE RANGE BOY

Old Charm of Prague @ Praha Unlike common assumption, Jews have been everyone’s bogeyman since time immemorial. They did not only endure torture under the hands of the Nazis alone. Throughout their existence, they have been subjected to much humiliation and suppression. Even as early as the 10th century, the Jewish community was prominent in Czech lands. At one time, 20 per cent of the population of the land were Jewish and a good thing going. They were laborious, wealthy and could fend for themselves. Unfortunately the stigmata of practicing Moses’ teachings made them an outcast. They were confined to a fenced quarter, picked from the most treacherous part of Prague. This was the most frequently flooded area that people kept away. They had to be identified with a yellow star badge of shame stashed on their tunics or to wear a yellow conical dunce hat for identification. Even though some had become rich and one, at one instant, had become a federal minister and a philanthropist, he had...

The Parasitic Mind:  How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense Author: Gad Saad When the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, the world thought the leftists and their ideas were buried in the rubble of what was once considered the panacea of all of Man's woes. They were wrong. The concept of unhappy people blaming all their woes on the system continued. The leftists just went into universities and infiltrated the world media. With neologisms and complicated, contradictory coined phrases, they managed to create a world of similar thinking individuals. It would have been fine if these new ideas were just another armamentarium to research for the ultimate truth.  It instead was meant to create a herd of an unthinking population whose way of thinking permeated all layers of society. Radical militant feminists insist that being born male means toxicity oozing from all his orifices. The cancel culture practitioners literally shoot down people if their narrativ...

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2008) When we were very young, we used to think the world of our parents. They were the strongest, the brainiest and the smartest. Somehow, they knew everything and could do no wrong. Slowly, we grew older and started hating their guts. We view their world viewpoints as archaic and promise never to be like them. We abhor their un-PC statements and over-glorification of the good old days. And yet with the passage of time and dents from the School of Hard Knocks, it soon dawns upon us their wisdom and ability to juggle so many things despite their limited resources.  This film is historical fiction from the point of view of Bruno, an 8-year old son of Army Lieutenant, in Nazi Germany. His father is stationed in the countryside to take charge of a concentration camp. The young boy befriends Shmuel, an 8-years old Jewish inmate, on the other side of the concentration camp. Bruno burrows himself into the camp to help Schmuel locate his missin...

Hannah Arendt (German, English; 2012) Hannah Arendt, a political thinker, who is famous for her assessment of the Eichmann trial and the coining of the phrase 'banality of evil' is depicted here. The film depicts the time surrounding the trial and the controversies of Arendt's articles in the New Yorker and her subsequent book, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' in 1963. First of all, the trial was considered an illegal exercise. Eichmann was charged in the Israeli Courts for cruelty against humanity as if Israel had jurisdiction over this; there was already the Nuremberg trial for that, and the International Courts would be the appropriate platform to try war crimes. Furthermore, the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad,  apprehended him in Argentina through clandestine methods. Prime Minister of Israel then, Ben Gurion, thought it was apt that the world should hear the plight of the Jews during the Second World War. It was an opportune time for the Jews to showcase to th...

Hollywoodism : Jews, Movies and the American Dream (Documentary; 1998)  The main driving point of this documentary is that the American Dream that Hollywood is trying to propagate is no American invention. It is the message brought in by a few Jewish immigrants who escaped the pogroms in the shtetls (Jewish village) of Eastern Europe. They invented Hollywood and owned the six leading studios in Hollywood in the 1920s. The message that they try to disseminate are their own experiences; Harry Warner and his three brothers who brought sound to the motion pictures; Samuel Goldwyn @ Goldfische, the biggest of the independent producers;  Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios; Louis B. Mayer, founder of MGM; Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount; and William Fox of 20th Century Fox. They all came from an area within a 500-mile radius area in Europe, between Poland, Hungary and Russia. They end up living in Los Angeles within a 15-mile vicinity. After leaving the tyranny ...

Denial (2016) It is said that the Holocaust is a sensitive word. Firstly, the term has been hijacked only to denote one event, to what happened in Auschwitz and the many concentration camps during WW2 to the 6 million Jews there. True, there were many other equally bad, if not worse, atrocities were done by Man to his fellow kind; this event always took centre stage. Perhaps, Hollywood helped to sell this story too. After all, many of the pioneers of the silver screen were disgruntled Jews who themselves were movie doyens who escaped Hitler's tyranny to settle in America. Human history is marred with many bloodbath events and senseless deaths. What comes to mind are The Indian Partition, The Bengal Famine, death under the Stalin regime, Russian deaths in WW2, Rape of Nanking, hunger deaths during the Cultural Revolution in China, Communist witch-hunt in Indonesia, the Armenian genocide and the World Wars, which may have been actually started off by the Russian Revolution....

A Dangerous Method 2011 This is a classic piece that would probably appeal mostly to readers and students of psychology. As it is neither filled with action-packed scenes nor with cliffhanging sequences, it may excite only a niche portion of viewers. In essence, it tells the interaction between Freud and his student, Karl Jung, their correspondences and Jung's search for the meaning of life. Central to the story is Jung's Russian patient, a Sabina Spielrein, who he treats for hysteria and eventually becomes his mistress. Jung is a diligent Swiss psychiatrist who immerses himself in work, paying scant attention to other things in his life, including his pregnant wife. He receives a troubled Russian young lady (Sabina, Keira Knightley) as a patient. Jung treats her with his 'talking cure', a new technique learnt from Freud's writings. Through his psychoanalysis, he deduces that her tics and appalling behaviour can be related to her father's abuse of her. Ev...

Son of Saul (Hungarian; 2015) Just how far would you go to maintain cultural and religious practices? Even went your life is in danger? In a World War 2 concentration camp when Jews are shovelled into incinerators by Nazis? Well, this is what Saul does. In this disturbing Hungarian movie, set over two days in one of those camps, Jews are lined up, 'processed' to be killed, burned alive, shot and buried in mass graves, emptied their coats of their belongings, and have their ashes spread unceremoniously by the river. It is just a banal activity that goes on there. Saul is a sonderkommando, a run-around helper of the Nazis, who is threatened with death if they do not help the German soldiers in their nefarious act. Probably to avert his attention from the stresses of yells, screams, and cries of dying people around him, he goes around looking for a rabbi to do the last rights of a young Jewish whom he tried to help and died. His search for a rabbi amongst the ca...

Fascinating photographs show the people and places of pre-revolutionary Russia Colour photographs from one of Russia's most famous photographers,  Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky Tsar Nicholas II commissioned him with taking photographs after being impressed by a colour portrait of Tolstoy The pictures, from the early 1900s, show Russia on the brink of the First World War and on the cusp of revolution By  KATE LYONS PUBLISHED:  07:00 GMT, 5 March 2014  |  UPDATED:  07:00 GMT, 5 March 2014. Amazing photographs, captured in vivid colour, show life in Russia in the early 1900’s as the country stood on the brink of the First World War - and revolution. Photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was one of the nation’s leading photographers at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. He was commissioned to capture a photographic record of Russia after the monarch saw his colour portrait of Leo Tolstoy.  The portrait of Tolstoy, taken in 1908, just tw...