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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Emigration / immigration

Hitler, 10

Hitler was well aware of the industrial strength of the British Empire and the United States, but in his view the struggle against the Anglo-Americans during the First World War was not decided solely by material factors. His vision of international politics was essentially human-centred. On Hitler’s reading, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been an epic demographic contest which the German Empire had spectacularly lost. She had failed to provide an outlet for her excess population either through economic or through territorial expansion, with the result that millions of Germans had emigrated. Meanwhile, her enemies built up huge empires which they could parlay into strength on the European battlefield. Hitler lamented ‘that the Entente sent alien auxiliary peoples to bleed to death on European battlefields’. He had personal experience of this, having confronted (British) Indian troops in 1915 and (French) Algerian Zouaves in 1918. Hitler’s anxiety deepened on beholding the Africans and Moroccans who formed part of the French occupation forces in the 1920s. He accused France of ‘only waiting for the warm season to throw an army of 800-900,000 blacks into [our] country to complete the work of the total subjugation and violation of Germany’. Hitler’s concern was thus not only racial, but strategic: that France would use the human reserves of Africa to oppress Germany, a weapon no longer available to Germany as she had lost her much smaller overseas empire as a result of the war.

The main threat posed by the European empires, however, was not the deployment of men from the ‘subject races’, but from the white settler colonies. Some of the most formidable British troops on the western front had come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They were numerous, well fed, fit, highly motivated, and often extremely violent. Worse still was the fact that the Germans whom the Reich had exported in the nineteenth century for want of land to feed them had come back to fight against her as American soldiers during the war. In later speeches, as we shall see, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment he had encountered his first American prisoners. The emigration question was the subject of his second known major speech in September 1919, and it also underlay his next disquisition, which was on the internal colonization of Germany. His thoughts on that subject so impressed his sponsor Captain Mayr that he announced his intention ‘to launch this official report abridged or in full in the press in a suitable manner’. Emigration was part of daily life in post-war Germany, so much so that a whole newspaper in Munich, Der Auswanderer (‘The Emigrant’), was devoted to the topic.

That said, although contemporary concern with the emigration issue went well beyond Hitler, it does not seem to have enjoyed a particular salience in the broader inquest into the war. It thus represents his distinctive contribution to the debate on German revival and one of the most important lessons he drew from the war. Henceforth the emigration question, and the associated American problem, lay at the very heart of Hitler’s thinking.

Categories
Israel / Palestine Videos

Not that smart

Judge Napolitano’s interviews of Col. Douglas Macgregor (e.g., this one) prove that Jews, in this case, Israelis, are not that smart, as many in the American racial right claim.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Judeo-reductionism

Hitler, 9

Brendan Simms, professor of history, University of Cambridge.

Note that Simms’ volume—the hard copy in the hardcover edition I own is over 900 pages long—is replete with endnotes, so every biographical claim about Adolf Hitler’s intellectual odyssey that we see in this volume is backed up by primary sources. Although in years past I have browsed through other voluminous biographies of Hitler that have been selling in mainstream bookstores, I didn’t buy them because I wasn’t motivated by the POV of the biographer in question (e.g., Ian Kershaw’s volumes). The revisionism of another normie on the other hand, Simms, really caught my attention. Let’s continue quoting what Simms wrote in chapter 3 of Hitler: Only the World Was Enough.

Hitler put the inquest into the defeat at the heart of his world view. The alleged fractures in German society played an important role here, the ‘inner internationalism’ to which he had referred during the war itself. By this Hitler primarily meant the Social Democrats and Independent Socialists (USPD), who allegedly put loyalty to their class comrades over that to the nation; it was their internationalism, not their socialism, that he objected to. It was the same anxiety as over capitalism, which Hitler rejected in its global, but, as we shall see, not necessarily in its local ‘national’ form. He also took aim at German particularism, especially in Bavaria, which threatened the integrity of the Reich.

The principal internal enemy, however, was the Jews, who had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’, although Hitler rarely used this precise phrase. All this has given the impression that Hitler, like so many other Germans, sought to blame the defeat primarily on internal scapegoats rather than facing up to the strength of the Entente. In fact, Hitler never subscribed to a monocausal [bold & red added by Ed.!] domestic explanation for the disaster and much of his thinking, especially the later quest for Lebensraum, would be inexplicable if he had. Eliminating the Jews and healing the domestic rifts inside Germany were necessary conditions for the revival of the Reich, but not sufficient ones.

I bolded the above because I was unaware that a renowned historian had used the word I have used on this site in my dispute with white nationalists, whom I have branded as ‘monocausalists’ in the sense that they have refused to see other factors, besides Jewish subversion, that have been contributing to Aryan decline. Now it turns out that an academic, Simms, says the same thing I say about Hitler even though his POV is altogether different.

The point is to find out whether Simms is right about Hitler. And if he is, one can use his information simply from the POV of the 14 words.

Categories
Americanism

US delenda est

Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), the most persistent advocate in the Senate for the total destruction of Carthage, was associated with repeated use, in or out of its proper context, of the phrase
Delenda est Carthago.

A little over two years ago I quoted some passages from an article published in The Occidental Observer that, now that I am reviewing Brendan Simms’ book on Hitler, are worth repeating:

Hence, early America prospered and flourished in spite of, not because of, Christianity; in spite of, not because of, Blacks and Jews; and in spite of, not because of, the principle of equality. Blacks, Jews, “equality,” and Christianity were millstones around the young nation’s neck…

Therefore, it is time to accept reality and give up America for lost. Put away your flags, your pins, and all your red-white-and-blue paraphernalia. Toss out your MAGA hats; America will never be “great again.” Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool. The country is rotting from above and below. Vermin are calling the shots from on high, and human detritus washes in over the borders. This was precisely how Ancient Rome fell. Such is the terminal stage of many an empire…

America is dying a slow and painful death. Let us euthanize the long-suffering nation, redraw the boundaries, rethink the guiding principles, and begin again.

To achieve this, the first step is to look in the mirror, as the quote from Canadian Sebastian Ronin says in one of my posts this week.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right

Hitler, 8

Brendan Simms continues in the third chapter of his book:

From mid November 1919, Hitler mounted a series of full-scale attacks in public speeches on the main enemy—‘absolute enemies England and America’. It was Britain which had been determined to prevent Germany’s rise to world power, in order not to jeopardize their ‘world monopoly’. ‘That was also the reason,’ Hitler claimed, ‘to make war on us. And now America. As a money country it had to intervene in the war in order not to lose the money they had lent.’ Here he explicitly made the link between his anti-capitalistic critique and the hostile behaviour of the western coalition. This was closely connected to Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ‘The Americans put business above all else. Money is money even if it is soaked in blood. The wallet is the holiest thing for the Jew,’ he claimed, adding: ‘America would have stuck with or without U-boats.’ What is remarkable here is that the terms ‘the Americans’ and ‘the Jews’ were used almost interchangeably.

As I said earlier, a small faction of the American racial right, represented by Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960) and the retired Michael O’Meara (1946 – ) were, like Hitler, harsh critics of Anglo-American capitalism.

Anyone wishing to be introduced to Yockey’s thought can do so by reading Kerry Bolton’s essay, ‘A Contemporary Assessment of Yockey’, pages 47-70 of this PDF I compiled.

Anyone wishing to be introduced to O’Meara’s thought can do so by reading my excerpts from his Toward the White Republic here.

O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic was the first book published by Counter-Currents. In yesterday’s post I discussed ‘White Nationalism is Not Anti-Semitism’: an article by O’Meara that should have been included in Toward the White Republic (the first page of the hard copy I own contains a few words the author wrote to me). Greg Johnson delayed the publication of the short article ‘White Nationalism is Not Anti-Semitism’, whereas O’Meara wrote it in 2010 and Johnson published that piece in October 2011.

O’Meara always wrote very clearly, concisely and didactically, which I cannot say of Yockey, although Bolton’s essay linked above summarises Yockey’s philosophy admirably. But even if a visitor reads carefully the summaries of these two intellectuals linked above, he still won’t have arrived at the Christian Question that Hitler himself would, years later, understand. Even more than Mammon worship, the CQ has been the real poison for ethno-suicidal whites. For example, although the Chinese have become Mammon worshipers, by not submitting to Christian ethics they haven’t become ethno-suicidal like the white madmen, who import millions of coloureds. But let’s take it one step at a time. Simms continues:

If Hitler’s profound hostility to the Anglo-Saxon powers was shaped by his anti-Semitism, it was also distinct and, crucially, anterior to it. He had, after all, spent almost the entire war fighting the ‘English’, and latterly the United States. Hitler became an enemy of the British—and also of the Americans—before he became an enemy of the Jews. Indeed, he became an enemy of the Jews largely because of his hostility to the Anglo-American capitalist powers. Hitler could not have been clearer: ‘We struggle against the Jew,’ he announced at a public meeting in early January 1920, ‘because he prevents the struggle against capitalism.’

The rest of Germany’s adversaries, by contrast, fell into a second and milder category. The Russians and the French, so the argument ran, had become hostile ‘as a result of their unfortunate situation or some other circumstances’. Hitler was by no means blind to the extent of French antagonism, but it is striking that he discoursed at much greater length about the financial terms of the treaty, and the blockade, than the territorial losses to Germany’s immediate neighbours. This focus on Anglo-American, and increasingly on US, strength, with or without anti-Semitism, was by no means unusual in Germany, or even Europe generally. It reflected a much broader post-war preoccupation with the immense global power of the United States. As we shall see, Hitler’s entire thinking, and the policies of the Third Reich after 1933, were in essence a reaction to it.

Remember the words by the Canadian Ronin in my post yesterday: ‘The betrayal of the White European race stems from deep, deep within, so deep that it is not visible or obvious for most’. That’s something the white nationalists south of Canada still don’t want to see! These are the words of Greg Johnson, Michael O’Meara’s editor a dozen years ago, in the thread discussing O’Meara’s article that white nationalism, as O’Meara understood it, is not simply a synonym of anti-Semitism:

I think that O’Meara has a chip on his shoulder and is spoiling for a fight with people who are essentially on his side. I don’t see any good that can come from that.

This, of course, is to misunderstand the whole thing, as O’Meara wasn’t trying to unnecessarily provoke the Counter-Currents commentariat. What he was trying to convey is that there are more serious causal factors in white decline than Jewish subversion, and that consequently our horizon shouldn’t be limited to the JQ.

Johnson’s words quoted above are from 2011. What American white nationalists still don’t want to see, we will see in this extensive review of Simms’ revisionist biography of Hitler.

Categories
Judeo-reductionism Michael O'Meara Racial right

Deep, deep within

Judeo-centric white nationalism is just another variant of the prevailing country-club conservatism.

—Michael O’Meara

The O’Meara article linked in my post yesterday is basic, I said, to understand our point of view. In case something happens to Counter-Currents, where the article is hosted, I copied it for this site. Although C-C’s images are absent from our copy, you can read the 2011 comments in that copy’s thread.

If one reads the article carefully one will notice that, with his critique of Anglo-American capitalism, O’Meara unwittingly placed himself close to the young Hitler we were talking about yesterday in the context of Brendan Simms’ book. O’Meara even presents us with a competing paradigm to Kevin MacDonald’s: the paradigm that currently represents, shall we say, orthodoxy in American white nationalism. O’Meara said:

…anti-Semites prefer to indulge in fairy tales about “cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurter bogey man—unconscious of or uninterested in the larger subversion.

The larger subversion! (this smells like the content of The West’s Darkest Hour). Too bad that, because of his Irish Catholicism, O’Meara didn’t admire Hitler. Several years ago I asked in a thread on this site why Solzhenitsyn didn’t espouse Hitler’s cause if both Solzhenitsyn and Hitler wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. An English commenter replied that, for axiological reasons, Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity prevented him from doing so. I think that although Solzhenitsyn was an Orthodox Christian and O’Meara a Catholic Christian, the commenter’s response is accurate. In the 2011 thread on C-C, O’Meara continued:

Kevin MacDonald, unlike his epigones, knows how to make an argument and support it with substantiating evidence. Nevertheless, his argument proves NOTHING (except his own intelligence), for with the same methods but in reference to different facts, I could make an equally convincing argument to “prove” that corporate capitalism (or the Cold War state, Catholicism, Protestantism, or a half-dozen other factors) were far more influential in legalizing the formal de- Europeanization of the American people.

We have focused on the Christian Question on this site because it is a taboo subject among many on the American racial right. But O’Meara, like Hitler, was absolutely right to mention other factors. For example, when I read MacDonald’s entire trilogy on Jewry, after finishing the third one I was left with the impression that his analysis—basically blaming the Jews for the West’s dark hour—fell short. Those were times when I considered myself a white nationalist, before I began to harbour some doubts about that simplistic explanation. O’Meara was one of the intellectuals who began to broaden my perspective.

I think the discussion thread in that relatively old C-C article is paradigmatic in terms of how, unlike O’Meara, white nationalists don’t want to look in the mirror. O’Meara stopped being active on racial right forums when he realised that American racialists weren’t going to abandon their monocausal dogma. Something similar happened with the retired blogger Sebastian Ronin, whom I mentioned in my recent entry on the 42 films I will no longer review individually. The following year of the discussion in C-C, Ronin wrote: ‘The betrayal of the White European race stems from deep, deep within, so deep that it is not visible or obvious for most’, and then added:

The first step of the revolution does not begin with the expedient and safe blurting of Jew, Jew, Jew; that is after the fact. The first step of the revolution begins upon the surface of a mirror to identify the source of weakness that has allowed the penetration of an alien and poisonous spirit.

Looking in the mirror is precisely what I try to do with my autobiographical books. Hopefully, the lengthy review I will be doing of Simms’ book will do something to broaden the POV of the common racialist, insofar as Hitler’s meta-perspective was certainly broader than the short-sighted perspective of those who criticised O’Meara in C-C, including Johnson.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 7

The previous post, ‘Hitler 6’, will be the longest in this series. But it was essential to illustrate how I will be commenting on the book by Brendan Simms, who, as a normie academic, failed to make it clear from the very first pages of his book that the Jewish problem isn’t a hallucination of the patriotic Aryan, but something real. So real that, as we saw in ‘Hitler 6’, the Jewish academic Albert Lindemann acknowledges it.

Keep in mind that once this series on Simms’ book is finished, the resulting PDF will be linked in ‘On the Need to Undemonize Hitler’ page, which appears in red letters at the top of this site. Given that those pages are aimed at the honest normie searcher, I find it astute that I have quoted the Jew Lindemann so extensively in my attempts to show that the System’s narrative about Hitler is a myth, especially since his book Esau’s Tears received the imprimatur of a prestigious university.

Having clarified that the so-called Jewish problem is not a hallucination, but something real, the next step is to point out that the System brainwashes us with words that anaesthetise our understanding. Among all these words, statistically speaking, the one that has been used the most is precisely ‘anti-Semitism’ (even more than ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacism’!), as clearly illustrated this month by Jared Taylor through some graphs. It is precisely because the media have assigned a pejorative valuation to ‘anti-Semite’ that I prefer to use ‘Jew-wise’, in the sense of a sage Gentile in matters of Jewry.

Having understood this, throughout his book Simms uses the old expression ‘anti-Semite’, and doesn’t properly clarify what we have clarified thanks to Lindemann’s book in ‘Hitler, 6’. Since I will be quoting Simms, based on what Martin Kerr said (that valuable material can be gleaned from the books of anti-Nazi biographers or historians), we should always keep in mind that in its origins the word anti-Semitism had no negative, only descriptive, connotation. The same can be said of words like ‘racialism’, ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacism’: it was only when universities, Hollywood and the media used these words to designate opprobrium that the Aryan internalised the supposed negativity of what should be considered a great virtue (as it was for the Aryans of India, the Dorians who conquered the ancient Hellas and the Iberian Goths before they were Christianised).

That said, let’s continue to comment on the biographical material in Simms’ book. Before the huge interpolation I put in from Lindemann’s book, we were talking about the letter to Gemlich: Hitler’s earliest surviving political text. That very first text, in which Hitler calls the Jews the racial tuberculosis of peoples, is virtually indistinguishable from the ideology of the typical white nationalist today. Matt Koehl, the heir to the National Socialist organisation after George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated, had it translated into English and it can be read on the internet because that organisation still exists.

But what I find fascinating about Hitler’s life is that he didn’t get stuck with that idea but saw the big picture: something that with honourable exceptions, such as Francis Parker Yockey and Michael O’Meara, the American racial right has been very reluctant to do. After mentioning the letter to Gemlich, in the third chapter of his book, Simms wrote:

But Hitler’s primary emphasis was another aspect of the ‘problem’ entirely. His initial anti-Semitism was profoundly anti-capitalistic, rather than anti-communist in origin.

This is what Rockwell, whose POV seemed at times to coincide with the anti-commies of his day, failed to see. Despite the great nobility of his soul, Rockwell lacked the meta-perspective we now have.

He [Hitler] spoke of the ‘dance around the golden calf’, the privileging of ‘money’, the ‘majesty of money’, the ‘power of money’ and so on… As yet, two years after the Russian Revolution, he seems to have nothing to say about communism, Bolshevism and the Soviet Union. Hitler, in other words, became an enemy of the Jews before he avowedly became an enemy of Russian Bolshevism.

Simms then observes that none of this is surprising because both what he calls ‘anti-Semitism’, and what we call a wise stance on questions of Jewry, was a political constant along with anti-capitalism in the political thought of 19th-century Germans. Then Simms mentions some of the 19th-century’s Jew-wise organisations but, unlike the long quote we put from Lindemann’s book, he sums it up in a single paragraph (which is why I felt obliged in ‘Hitler, 6’ to fill the gap with my excerpts from Esau’s Tears). Simms continues:

One way or the other, in Germany, and perhaps in Europe more generally, anti-Semitism and anti-(international) capitalism have historically been joined at the hip. With Hitler there is little point in talking about the one without the other.

Above I mentioned Yockey and O’Meara. It is impossible to understand The West’s Darkest Hour without them and, now, by adding a more comprehensive biography of Hitler than the non-revisionist biographies we are used to.

New visitors who know nothing of Yockey should read our paraphrase of some of Yockey’s passages on what he called ‘the enemy of Europe’, the United States. And as for Michael O’Meara, he withdrew from racialist forums not long after a heated debate in Counter-Currents with the Judeo-reductionists of white nationalism, whom I used to call ‘monocausalists’ in the sense that they were incapable—and still are incapable—of seeing the causes of white decline beyond Jewry (e.g., Christian ethics and rampant capitalism that the Anglo-American world has always suffered). The image above is taken from O’Meara’s short article in Counter-Currents.

Categories
Art Film

The remaining 42

I have just modified the hatnote of the 50 films I recommended not to be bored at home when the COVID-19 epidemic started because I will no longer review those films individually.

While it is true that those films made a big impression on me as a child and young man, once I woke up to the real world, in the sense of stepping out of the System’s matrix that controls us, most of those films lost their original meaning. I prefer to continue reviewing Brendan Simms’ book about Uncle Adolf insofar as, now free from the matrix that controls the white man, I feel a moral responsibility to convey who he was under a completely different narrative from that of the ubiquitous System (a narrative that includes Simms’ POV). Nevertheless, I would like, in a single entry, to say what I think roughly about the remaining 42 films that I won’t review individually, as I did with the first eight on the list.

First of all, I have already said something about Shane, #9 on the list. (Incidentally, when the month before my dad died, I showed him the DVDs of the films we had at home to see which one my ailing father wanted to see, he chose Shane.)

About other films on my list from the 1950s, ten years ago I already said something about Ben-Hur and I don’t have much to add. The two movies that the Swede Ingmar Bergman filmed in his country the year before I was born are watchable, especially The Seventh Seal. Although Wild Strawberries is the only one, along with A.I., that made me cry, I would have to explain why I projected myself into it, and that would be getting deep into my biography, which I won’t do in this entry. (By the way, when I saw Wild Strawberries on the big screen I met, on the way out, my first cousin Octavio Augusto whom I said a few years ago he had just killed his daughter and then hanged himself.)

I already said something about Forbidden Planet in 2012 in the context of some paragraphs by the Canadian Sebastian Ronin that are worth re-reading. Of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I had already said something in 2011 (incidentally, it’s worth watching the clip of the film that I uploaded on YouTube, embedded in that post).

The other film from the 1950s, Lust for Life, I haven’t written anything about: the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Given that I have several books—huge books, by the way: those deluxe ones that seem to take up an entire table—on Vincent’s paintings, and that as a small child I tried, modestly, to copy his paintings with my watercolours, his life has a special significance.

This film was shot when the Aryans weren’t yet betraying themselves as nefariously as they do today. For those who still appreciate 19th-century Europe, it is worth seeing this novel-based interpretation of Vincent’s life. And the same can be said of Sleeping Beauty and The Time Machine: once upon a time there was an optimistic ethos about the Aryan race, with very blonde and extremely beautiful women indeed: films that one could even play to children being educated in NS.

So much for the films of the 1950s. As far as the films on my list from the 1960s are concerned, I have to say that 2001: A Space Odyssey is my favourite film, and I can conceivably write a review in the future about the film that has influenced my life the most. As for the others from that decade, I’ve already commented here and there but unlike the previous ones, I won’t link to my posts. And I can say the same about the films on my list from the seventies, except Death in Venice of which I’ll say something.

As for the only film on my list from the 1980s, Fanny & Alexander, I already said what I had to say in my entry on the 50 films; and as for my recommendations of films from the 1990s, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride & Prejudice—an English TV series, although here we could also include the 2005 film—, I already said what I had to say in Daybreak (page 42) and On Beth’s Cute Tits (pages 134-135). It’s precisely in this context that Death in Venice could be understood, albeit in the sense of purely platonic admiration that is in line with what I wrote in Daybreak (pages 163-164).

As far as the films of our century from my list of 50, why A.I. caught my attention so much can be guessed from what I say in Day of Wrath (pages 32ff) in the context of the bonding or imprint we all have with our abusive parents; and about LOTR I already said something here.

If a visitor is curious about the details of how any film on my list affected me (or another film that doesn’t appear on my list, as long as I have seen it) I’m willing to answer any questions.

Categories
Aryan beauty

Categories
Child abuse Film Mexico City

Los Olvidados

Known in the US as The Young and the Damned (1950)

 
This is the only Mexican film on my list of 50. The director wasn’t Mexican but Spanish, Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), whom I met in the living room of Arturo Souto Alabarce’s family a few years before he died. Part of Los Olvidados was filmed very close to where I now live, although the area has changed a lot in the last seventy-three years.

As a young man Buñuel studied in Madrid and emigrated to Paris, where he and Salvador Dalí made two films of the surrealist movement, one of which was banned in Spain. After an unsuccessful stay in the United States, and being unable to return to Franco’s Spain, Buñuel moved to Mexico and became a Mexican citizen. He was even awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961 and a Hollywood Oscar for his 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but he didn’t go to collect it.

If Los Olvidados has any value, it is because, even now, there is not a single degree of how the mistreatment of parents destroys their children’s lives. 1973 and 1980 mark bibliographical milestones with the publication of Lloyd deMause’s History of Childhood and Alice Miller’s Am Anfang war Erziehung. For the first time, the magnitude of the psychological toll of childhood abuse—i.e., mental disorders—was discussed with due solidarity. But their work has become taboo in the so-called mental health professions.

Another facet of the toll of parental abuse is destitution: the number of street children who roam the Third World’s cities. Kids flee the violence at home and society plays dumb. A blocking appears at the beginning of Los Olvidados:

The great modern cities, New York, Paris and London hide behind their magnificent buildings, homes of misery that house abused children, without hygiene, without schooling: breeding grounds for future delinquents. Society is trying to correct this evil, but the success of its efforts is very limited. Only in the near future can the rights of children and adolescents be vindicated so that they can be useful to society. Mexico, the great modern city, is no exception to this universal rule.

Near future, really? In so-called developing countries, never in history have there been so many destitute children as there are today—much more than in the times when Luis Buñuel made his film. And most cases of child destitution are due to physical or emotional violence in the home.

In a personal letter to Buñuel, Benjamin Viel said that he hadn’t seen a clearer indictment of the supposed maternal instinct than in a dialogue of Los Olvidados. In contrast to the stereotype of the good and loving mother, Buñuel showed the detachment of parents from their children: a transgression that caused great fury in Mexico when the film was released in December 1950. Viewers’ discomfort with unmotherly mothers was so evident that even one of the film’s production staff resigned. Not even Gus van Sant’s Elephant, a Cannes award-winning film of the new century about teenagers with family problems, gets to the core of children’s pain as in Los Olvidados:

Pedro: Why do you hit me, because I’m hungry?
Mother: And I’m going to kill you, you scoundrel.
Pedro: You don’t love me.
Mother: Why should I love you?

The plot of the film can be read in the English Wikipedia article, and anyone who wants to watch the movie can do so on YouTube. In a nutshell, Los Olvidados is a fictionalised documentary featuring disparate characters such as El Jaibo and Pedro: a teenager and a smaller kid of different ilk: the former tends to be a troublemaker and the latter to be well-behaved. Both, however, wander hopelessly through the slums of Mexico City. The film ends in tragedy: the body of the boy Pedro, murdered by Jaibo, ends up in a rubbish dump.