We’re getting yet another dumb-as-dirt Christian movie: Torchbearer. It’s made by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s brand new campaign advisor, and it ‘stars’ Phil Robertson, the Talibanesque asshole who is best known for selling duck calls and appearing in a reality TV show. How bad is it? You may not want to watch the trailer.
Firstly, it visually and emotionally assaults the viewer by lingering on gruesome images of violence and death, using reenactments and animation as well as the most graphic historical footage from Auschwitz and more recent images of victims of ISIS and Boko Haram being beaten, shot and burned to death. I would call the movie’s infliction of trauma gratuitous, but it seems a very purposeful act meant to provoke and inflame and generate a rage to war.
This is what this country has come to. And it’s so stupid: Robertson is an ignorant nobody, they’ve just concatenated a collection of horrible, unrelated images, and claimed that only being as fanatical about your fanatical Christianity as this fanatic will save you from those other fanatics. Meanwhile, they obliviously show prolonged scenes of Catholic and Lutheran Nazis committing atrocities under the rule of the Catholic Hitler, while blaming their actions on atheists.
So that’s why that eagle attacked Trump! He didn’t appreciate his likeness being used in “Citizens United Productions” logo without permission.
Hey, that gives me an idea!!! How about a reality TV show called “The Two Minutes Hate”!?
I know what Trump wants to happen. Daisy add from ’68. “Why have nukes if you don’t use them”….
If I were nine years old this would scare me and at the same time incite a deep curiosity. Like a trailer for a new Godzilla or Dracula movie would.
I am not nine years old anymore.
What frightens me is that there are registered voters who are, at least intellectually and emotionally, just about nine years old.
As proof, I submit the makers of Torchbearers.
Most people who aren’t Catholic or Lutheran know this.
The SS was the group that actually ran the death camps and rounded up the Jews. Himmler didn’t like atheists. In fact, most of the SS were German Catholics and Lutherans.
The Holocaust was a xian operation from start to finish. It was first thought up by one of the founders of my natal church. A notorious misogynistic kook named…Martin Luther.
There you go. The percentage of Protestants was over half. The percentage of atheists was…zero.
“Look at the violence of all these not-christians! Everyone except us is wicked and violent! Oh also the overtly christian Nazi movement is on that side, just because, please don’t notice please don’t notice please don’t notice…”
A cut and paste from a comment I wrote elsewhen with no editing:
The reason Himmler gave for his refusal to let atheists into his SS was that without a Bible to swear on and an ever watchful Gott to fear, how could you trust their oaths.
My problem with Trump is that the people that he beat were so much worse.
Oops, wrong thread. Sorry, please ignore my previous comment.
I understand what they are going for with the images of Hitler and various islamic extremists… but what is the deal with Miley Cyrus? They don’t just show her once, but multiple times. Is she the symbol of decadence?
You know you can accuse Isis of many things but I don’t think”denying god” is one of them
mineralfellow #11
You beat me to it. I was just going to say that, I have to admit, I literally laughed out loud the third time they showed Miley Cyrus.
Nazi’s, concentration camps, ISIS, executions, guy ran over by a tank and… Miley Cyrus. Just… lol.
It’s like a parody video where someone was making light of “family value” slut-shaming – but not a parody. They literally lumped Miley Cyrus gyrating in with Nazis, Isis and the atomic bomb.
… Yeah, yeah, droning stupidity… Oh the horrors that await you if you show some brains and ignore the droning stupidity… more droning stupidity…
Wait. There was something vaguely interesting for a moment. Can we go back to that city of man thing? That sounded like it might be worth a visit. Because I’m pretty sure the best way to condemn me to one of the worst versions of hell would be to send me to the duck call yokel’s heaven.
Well, they clearly deny lily-white supply-side Jesus who preached that the world belonged only to the most purely-inbred white dudes.
Forget the ideology, or the theology (which is virtually inexistent when it comes to Daesh’s recruits, according to Daesh’s own internal documents): when it comes to every extremist group, the only thing which matters is: WHO gets to be the progenitors of the next batch of parasitic lords.
Ah yes, the Argumentum ad Goatse.
*shocking picture*
Therefore I’m right.
Hah, that’s great!
Hey, let’s name our production company after one of the worst Supreme Court rulings of all time.
#18
Citizens United v. FEC were the parties in the Supreme Court ruling. Citizens United was a production company at the time and produced an anti-Clinton movie that was at the heart of the ‘Citizens United’ case. Thus it is worse than you imagine they didn’t name their company after the ruling but are the company in the ruling.
Meanwhile, they obliviously show prolonged scenes of Catholic and Lutheran Nazis committing atrocities under the rule of the Catholic Hitler, while blaming their actions on atheists.
Exactly right.
My mother was born in 1933 in a small Prussian city (Schneidemühl) on the Polish border. Her family were long time Lutherans, going back to at least the Thirty Years’ War. Her father, a clerk in the local Reichsbahn office, became a NAZI party member out of frustration with the deteriorating economy under the Weimar Republic. He rose in the local Party hierarchy and strutted around in his uniform, intimidating friends and neighbors alike. He liked to brawl and bust heads after a few beers. To put it mildly, he was not a nice man. By all accounts he was a vicious anti-Semite and used his position at the Reichsbahn to help ‘resettle’ the local Jews in the east. But he, like all of his family, attended church every Sunday. They were the epitome of Prussian Lutherans — god-fearing, devout, stern disciplinarians. Next to the Jews he despised godless Marxists and socialists. As a child I heard many an awful tale from my mother about her father’s activities. She broke off relations with him after the war and would not let him have anything to do with her children.
This is the reason I get so frustrated when I hear fundamentalists equate the Nazis with atheists. Nothing could be further from the truth. They put atheists in the boxcars with just as much enthusiasm as they did the Jews. All the while they sang hymns to Christ and celebrated every religious holiday.
I always assumed the “atheists are like NAZIs” was said to people who only heard the words Atheists, NAZIs. as a dog whistle equating both as equally EVIL. That none of them would fact-check the origin and constituency of the NAZI party. And those who did would play the “no true scotsman” card: that NAZI’s were fauxLutherans who unrightfully claimed to be following Gawd’s words, while actually striving to follow Nietzche’s philosophy of making Man into God.
The trailer makes it look like what Torchbearer is doing. yukkk [sic].
I think it started with “Nazi obviously worshipped their so-called superior bloodlines above all else” (true) “therefore they could be good, sincere Christians” (arguable) “therefore they were self-worshipping Atheists” (bullshit)
You know, few things have I ever considered being fanatical about. My greasegun was one, but alas, these days, cars don’t have many grease fittings.
I guess I’ll stay fanatical about my oil collection pan, for when I change my motor oil. It *is* a nice pan. ;)
As for the film, I’ll go with Jake’s take, #16, the goatse argument.
Let’s call it “Argumentum ad goatseum”.
Phil Robertson is an idiot savant who figured out how to make the best duck calls in the world (my hunter brother-in-law buys them with extreme guilt) yet was destitute for most of his life because he’s way more of the “idiot” part than the the “savant” part.
The only reason anyone has even heard of him or his products is because the one kid of his actually has two brain cells to rub together.
Not watching the trailer, but going by the description.
I find it ‘interesting’ (telling, really), that these right wing fear mongers continually choose to use images of violence from the reasonably distant past that ‘everyone agrees’ were bad. Yet, in the same breath, they deny the modern images of violence that continue to define our society, whether that is cops shooting unarmed black people, or US forces bombing targets with little regard for collateral damage.