> Anyone with half
> a brain who saw the Nuremberg rallies would certainly loose his/her
> faith in people's ability to make rational political choices.
"The problem here is much more general; it goes far beyond Leni Riefenstahl. Let us take the very opposite of Leni, the composer Arnold Schönberg. In the second part of Harmonielehre, his major theoretical manifesto from 1911, he develops his opposition to tonal music in terms which, superficially, anticipatelater Nazi anti- Semitic tracts. Tonal music has become a 'diseased,' 'degenerated' world in need of a cleansing solution; the tonal system has given in to 'inbreeding and incest'; romantic chords such as the diminished seventh are 'hermaphroditic,' 'vagrant' and 'cosmopolitan.' It's easy and tempting to claim that such a messianic-apocalyptic attitude is part of the same 'spiritual situation' that eventually gave birth to the Nazi final solution. This, however, is precisely the conclusion one should avoid: What makes Nazism repulsive is not the rhetoric of final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it.
"Another popular conclusion of this kind of analysis, closer to Leni, is the allegedly fascist character of the mass choreography of disciplined movements of thousands of bodies: parades, mass performances in stadia, etc. If one finds it also in communism, one immediately draws the conclusion about a 'deeper solidarity' between the two 'totalitarianisms.' Such a formulation, the very prototype of ideological liberalism, misses the point. Not only are such mass performances not inherently fascist; they are not even 'neutral,' waiting to be appropriated by left or right. It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement, their original site of birth. None of these 'proto-fascist' elements is per se fascist. What makes them 'fascist' is only their specificarticulation -- or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms, all these elementsare 'ex-apted' by fascism. There is no fascism avant la lettre, because it is the letter itself that composes the bundle (or, in Italian, fascio) of elements that is fascism proper." Zizek Learning to Love Leni Riefenstahl <http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=359_0_4_0_C>