The Most Important Film to Watch to Inspire Resistance to Modern Day Nazism

2010 June 26

by David Swindle

tags: Nazism, News, Politics, Resistance, Sophie Scholl

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll continue to say it: We are in a War with modern-day Nazism. The desire for a second Holocaust is openly proclaimed and defended by so-called “liberals.”  And our country’s leader is on the wrong side in this fight. (See David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s must-read new pamphlet “Obama and the War Against the Jews.”)

And it’s time to stand up in resistance and defiance.

But to do that we need the emotional inspiration. We need to be filled with vigor and energy because if there’s one thing that anti-Semitism is it’s draining. Head immersed in cesspools of totalitarian Jew-hatred (the blogosphere, twitterverse, and mainstream media) it’s natural to grow nauseous.

Thankfully, there’s a film to watch to counter this and a role model to emulate. 

At the encouragement of my friends and allies Chris and Jeanette Pryor the other night April and I watched the 2005 German film “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.” With the tension of a thriller, the Academy Award-nominee chronicles the arrest, interrogation, show trial, and finally execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl, two leaders of the White Rose Society, a Nazi Resistance movement during World War II. They were convicted of High Treason for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.

Here’s the trailer:

The film is so emotionally satisfying because the heart of it is Sophie’s confrontation with two Nazis who berate her for her “treason” — first an investigator who appears to care more about himself than the Third Reich, and second a hysteric Nazi judge. She refuses to apologize for her actions and instead challenges her accusers, intellectually ripping apart the evil of Nazism.

Chris and Jeanette consider the Scholls to be one of their primary inspirations behind their ongoing series on The New Anti-Semitism. I’m following their lead here. We need to begin thinking of ourselves in the same context as the Scholls. The only difference is that unlike the events of “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days” it’s not 1943. It’s more like 1925. Genocidal totalitarians are not in power — not in the United States at least. They’re only on the rise. And it’s up to us to stop them. And the way to do it is through intellectual combat. How would history have been different if the ideas of the Third Reich had been laid bare instead of allowed to fester? The first Holocaust could have been prevented if people had kept their eyes open. We will learn from the mistakes of the past. Never Again.

Click here to Read Posts from the Pryors’ series.