Evil Lives

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Rod Serling: Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare — Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami? Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive.

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Most of the episodes in the original Twilight Zone series were half an hour long.

But the episodes of the 1962–63 season were an hour long. There were only 18 of them (it's a long story); all the episodes in the other four seasons were half an hour in length.

For the most part, I didn't think much of the hour– long episodes. That was really too much for the type of show Twilight Zone was — most of the time.

An exception to that rule was the episode that aired 50 years ago tonight, "He's Alive."

Dennis Hopper played a wannabe fascist, trying to win popular support but failing. He was visited by someone who was always in the shadows but who offered seemingly knowledgeable advice on how to build a political movement.

And Hopper's character followed the advice, apparently never realizing the identity of the source.

But the shadowy figure told the story of the rise of Adolf Hitler. And he told it with authority — for the shadowy figure was Adolf Hitler.

He told Hopper all the things he needed to do to consolidate his base and his power. He knew those things would work because they had already worked for him.

Ultimately, though, Hopper was fatally wounded, and the shadowy figured slinked off, presumably in search of a new protege to mold.

The message was that, no matter how much one may want to imagine otherwise, prejudice and hate will always be with us.

That wasn't an uplifting message, but it is one that is always worth repeating.

Because there are always those naive souls who, like Hopper's character, think hostile movements end because leaders die.

Thoughts of a Snowy Day Long Ago

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The weather can be volatile at this time of the year.

I guess it's that way everywhere, even in the places where it starts snowing in October and doesn't stop until about April.

But it can be pretty extreme even in places like Dallas, Texas — where, I will concede, it tends to be a lot milder than most places.

That — along with the fact that a new, state–of–the–art stadium has been open for business here for nearly a year and a half — is what enticed the NFL to bring its Super Bowl here this year.

But the weather can be hit or miss around here in the winter. If the Super Bowl had been played here last weekend, the players and fans could have enjoyed sunny skies and balmy (for February) temperatures.

As I write this, the temperature is about 20° (wind chill is about 2°) with a light snow and a stout wind. We've been getting rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow for several hours. Businesses and school districts throughout the area are closed down.

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit system, on which the city was counting to handle the transportation needs of the influx of guests for the Super Bowl, is reporting that rail service is currently suspended and "[b]uses are operating but slowly."

Forecasters think the temperature will inch above freezing by the end of the week, possibly rising to the 50s by kickoff on Sunday, but there doesn't seem to be any question that last Sunday would have been the best time to play the game.

Timing is everything.

The two classes I'm teaching at one of the campuses of the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) won't meet today because all DCCCD locations are closed due to the weather.

And I've been sitting here this morning, occasionally gazing out my window at the ice–coated street below and thinking of my college days.

I got my B.A. at the University of Arkansas. While I was there, I lived with my parents. My father had gone back to school to pursue a degree in architecture, and my mother was teaching first grade in the nearby Springdale district.

Unlike the central Arkansas town in which I grew up, we had four distinct seasons in northwest Arkansas. In the winter, we got snow, and sometimes the accumulations were sufficient to cancel Mom's school for the day.

My classes, on the other hand, were seldom canceled — unless my professor simply could not get to the campus. Then he/she would notify someone, who would normally post a notice on the door, but the students had to trudge their way in to see it for themselves.

That wasn't a huge problem for me. Our house was near the campus. I had to walk up hill a little to get to the campus, which did pose problems if it was icy, like it is today — but, generally speaking, what little ice we got usually got covered over rather rapidly with snow, and that is usually more conducive to doing, well, just about anything.

Anyway, I've been thinking about one day when I was in college, and a lot of snow fell overnight.

The next morning, my mother heard on the radio that her school district was closed for the day. I, on the other hand, had to get ready for class and make my way to the campus, where I discovered that my classes were not canceled.

I remember coming home around 1 in the afternoon and discovering my mother in the living room, ironing board out with a basket of clothes sitting next to it. She was pressing shirts and watching a movie on whatever was our equivalent of HBO in those days.

The movie was "The Boys From Brazil," a thriller about a plot to clone Hitler and revive Nazism. It had been fairly popular at the theaters a few years earlier, but I don't know if Mom ever saw it on the big screen.

What I do know is that it was on TV on this particular day, and it had only been on for a few minutes when I got home. I opened a can of ravioli and warmed it up, then came in to the living room and watched the movie.

I only intended to watch it for a few minutes, but I got caught up in the plot. It really is an intriguing one.

Gregory Peck played Josef Mengele, the famous butcher from Auschwitz and the perpetrator of a plot to clone Hitler. James Mason was a co–conspirator and Laurence Olivier was a Nazi hunter (inspired by Simon Wiesenthal) who was alerted to some suspicious activity in South America.

The genetic material that was used in this experiment had been acquired from Hitler himself, according to Mengele. Dozens of baby Hitlers had been created using that material, and they had been dispersed around the globe to carefully selected couples who duplicated, as closely as possible, the parents who raised the original Hitler.

Hitler's father had been a civil servant, more than 20 years older than Hitler's mother and had died while Hitler was in his early teens. For all these young Hitlers to be shaped by the same experiences as the first one, they had to lose their adoptive fathers at about the same point in their lives.

And all those young Hitlers were approaching the time when they had to lose their fathers.

That was the plot. It was engrossing. But, to be honest, it really didn't have much to do with snow, other than the fact that I had been walking through a lot of snow before I came in the house and found my mother watching that movie on that afternoon so many years ago.

Well, actually, there were some wintry scenes in that movie, some segments where the actors were forced to wear winter clothes, even one memorable "execution" scene that involved some snow.

And there was one scene that I find particularly chilling in hindsight.

Remember, this movie was made in the late 1970s. Cable TV was still new, and specialty channels, like The History Channel and The Military Channel were still many years away.

Yet some of what it presented seems almost prophetic to me now, the way much of "Network" seems to be.

Peck, in his role as Mengele, tells Olivier near the end of the movie what he had seen on the TV in his motel room — "Films of Hitler! The movement! People are fascinated! The time is ripe!"

He spoke of a "Hitler tailor–made for the 1980s, '90s, 2000!"

And I think that, if such genetic material had been taken from Hitler while he was alive and had been preserved, it might still exist somewhere today.

For that matter, there may be real boys from Brazil living among us today. Mengele, we are told, died while swimming in Brazil in 1979. He may have drowned accidentally or perhaps he suffered a stroke.

Whatever the reason for his death, he avoided capture for more than three decades, and he appears to have continued his human experimentation in his postwar life. He may well have conducted experiments like the one that was suggested in "The Boys From Brazil."

If he did, those experiments may have been disappointments to him. He may have judged them failures.

Or they may have been in their nascent stage at the time of his death.

If so — and if, as might be implied by the movie, he had a timeline to follow — he could have been "born" several years before Mengele died and still not be the age that Hitler had reached by the time he seized power in Germany.

He could have been an infant when Mengele died — and, consequently, would not yet be as old as Hitler was when he was imprisoned for treason and wrote "Mein Kampf."

In short, if Mengele did conduct such experiments in the last years of his life, we may be on the brink of seeing their outcomes.

Just something to think about on a wintry day.

Luke, I Am Your Fuhrer

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I have a modest proposal for some enterprising broadcaster — for which I will be willing to accept any residual payment.

All it will require is someone with the resources to make it happen so, if you've got the money, honey ...

Recently, while I was channel surfing, I discovered that my cable provider has added The Military Channel to my lineup.

I say I "discovered" that because my cable provider has an infuriating habit of dropping/adding channels without notifying me. Unless it is a channel I watch regularly, I won't miss it right away if it is dropped.

Consequently, when I become aware that I have access to a channel to which I didn't realize I had access — or when I discover that I no longer have access to a certain channel — I wonder how long that has been so.

Not that it would change anything. It wouldn't alter the reality. My channel lineup would still be what it is.

But it makes me wish there was a little more honesty in the world.

Just a little, though. A lot probably would be too much.

Take The Military Channel, for example. It's supposed to be about all kinds of things — weapons, vehicles, wars. Perhaps it is. But every time I've landed there during my surfing, it's been showing something about World War II in general or the Nazis in particular.

I used to run into this with the History Channel. It has grown and evolved and is showing more original programming now (like Ice Road Truckers and the Thanksgiving night competition Chunkin' Punkins, in which contestants apparently flung pumpkins as far as possible using a catapult), but there was a time when I couldn't switch on the History Channel without seeing something on World War II or the Nazis.

Coincidentally, I guess, I stumbled onto the attached clip on YouTube, and I started musing.

TV producers have been tap dancing around this for years, and I think it's time for someone to simply be honest with us. They have figured out that TV viewers have some kind of infatuation with Hitler and the Nazis — they must have reached that conclusion because there are so many programs on TV that explore the Nazis and Hitler and World War II. From every conceivable angle — and some that are so far out in left field they're out of the ball park.

Anyway, the point is that they're giving us what they think we want. With so much money on the line in broadcasting these days — far more than ever before — the proliferation of these programs makes it unlikely, in my view, that this is a gamble.

It's a premeditated strategy.

And that brings me to my proposal. I have concluded that, at some point, someone will launch an All Nazi Channel or an All Hitler Channel. There will be some negative publicity initially, sure, but that doesn't mean it won't be a hit. Nearly 20 years ago, NYPD Blue survived negative publicity and enjoyed a 12–year run.

And a whole network is bound to have the potential to make more money than a single series.

I have a few ideas for this network so if someone wants to have something ready to go ...

First, it needs a logo. A black swastika in a white circle against a red background always got the message across in the past, and I think it will serve the purpose in the 21st century.

Then, you need a theme song. I think it's already written. Take a look at the attached video. Isn't Darth Vader's theme perfect for this?

The swastika might be in the public domain, but you'll need to acquire the rights to the Star Wars music. That might be a little tricky unless you can show some consumer research that demonstrates the size of the network's likely audience and the relevant demographic breakdowns (disposable income, age, etc.) so you might want to get started on that right now.

If we clear all the legal hurdles and acquire the rights to use Vader's theme, it only makes sense to pursue James Earl Jones (or someone who sounds a lot like him) to do a voiceover like the one that Jones does for CNN.

He could say, "Luke, I am your fuhrer."

Well, it's a starting point, anyway.

'Triumph of the Will' Served Propaganda Purposes

During World War II and in the years after the war ended, the Nazis' reputation for comprehending the value of effective propaganda became almost legendary.

But their appreciation for the power of propaganda preceded the war by several years.

On Sept. 5, 2009, it will be 75 years since the Nazis gathered for the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. It was an important event for rallying the faithful in person — but it also served as the basis for filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's influential propaganda documentary, "Triumph of the Will."

Because of the role it played in the development of filmmaking techniques — such as the advanced use of telephoto lenses, aerial photography and moving cameras — "Triumph of the Will" earned a spot in film history.

It also played an important role in the rise of the Nazi Party. Hitler and the Nazis had come to power the year before and were still largely unknown to many Germans — and much of the world.

The film opened with a brief commentary written in German. Translated, it said: "20 years after the outbreak of the world war, 16 years after the beginning of our suffering, 19 months after the beginning of the German renaissance, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers."

From that point, the only written commentaries were merely the surnames of the speakers. That may have been helpful to many viewers, since most of Hitler's subordinates were hardly household names at the time.

Anyway, following the opening commentary, Riefenstahl's camera took the viewer into the clouds, aboard a 1934-era airplane, preparing to descend into Nuremberg.

In the film, Hitler emerged from the clouds, like Thor in his chariot. Once Hitler's airplane was on the ground, Riefenstahl's film crew captured his enthusiastic reception and his ride into the city from every possible angle.

Nuremberg in 1934 had all the zeal and piety of a religious revival.

Indeed, at the closing ceremony, Hitler compared the Nazi Party to a "religious order" while Riefenstahl's camera filmed from below, making Hitler look larger than life, almost godlike.

In the years that followed, Riefenstahl's film attracted full houses to movie theaters across Germany. The mood was altogether different a little more than 10 years later — when Germany had lost the war and the surviving leaders of the Third Reich were brought to Nuremberg to stand trial for "crimes against humanity."

But, in 1934, those days were still in the future.

That four-day gathering in September 1934 was filled with speeches from Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher and others, special rallies for the Labor Service and for the Hitler Youth, torchlight marches and music. It was all filmed in black and white, but it must have been quite a spectacle in color.

Riefenstahl was provided with everything she asked for and given access to anything and anyone she desired — pretty heady stuff for a 31-year-old actress directing her first documentary.

However, the film was lacking in some ways — by modern standards.

As advanced as it was in some of its techniques, the film used no transitional devices to indicate a shift from one day to the next.

For a film that sought to document a four-day event, that's a significant shortcoming. Unless the viewer was familiar with the itinerary, there was no way to tell if you were watching the Hitler Youth rally on the third day or the rally for the Labor Service on the second day — except through excerpts from speeches.

The only way to tell much chronologically was through natural light — or the absence of it. Day faded into night. And then a new day dawned in the film with little, if any, fanfare.

But the pomp and circumstance of the final day was hard to mistake.

The imagery was the most memorable, the music consisted of themes from Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," and Hitler, who shortly before laid a wreath at a World War I memorial, delivered a stirring concluding speech, in which he told the crowd, "All loyal Germans will become National Socialists. Only the best National Socialists are party comrades."

One of the primary propaganda purposes of the film, from Hitler's point of view, was to absolve himself and his associates from any guilt for the "Night of the Long Knives," a series of political executions carried out by the Nazis a couple of months earlier. Ernst Röhm, co-founder of the Nazi stormtroopers, was among those executed because he was perceived to be a rival to Hitler — something the Nazis wanted to obscure from public view.

"Only a lunatic or deliberate liar could think that I, or anybody, would ever intend to dissolve what we ourselves have built up over many long years," Hitler told his listeners.

Hitler must have sensed that the rally had achieved the party's objectives. In his closing speech, he told the crowd that the party "will be unchangeable in its doctrine, hard as steel in its organization, supple and adaptable in its tactics" — stating his intentions as clearly as he did in his book, "Mein Kampf."

After nearly three-quarters of a century, "Triumph of the Will" continues to cast a long shadow, influencing movies, commercials and modern documentaries.

But the questions it raised about the blurring of the line between artistic interpretation and integrity remain unanswered.