Snopes.com: Urban Legends

Archive of LDS General Confrence talks 1971 on.

No stranger to controversy: Elder Packer

The Protocals of the Elders of Zion (2005)

Lose form documentary by Jewish filmmaker Marc Levin. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is of course a notorious piece of anti-Semitic literature, a forgery that casts its self as the minutes of a late 19th century meeting of a cabal of Jews bent on world domination. While the text first appeared in 1903 its still in wide circulation on the Internet and elsewhere, and despite being debunked numerous times is still held as true by certain white supremest groups, a distressingly large number of Muslims, conspiracy theorist and some people who just don't know any better.

In the film Levin travels around and talks to people about the pamphlet, having interviews with white supremacist, people on the street, and a surprisingly thoughtful group of prison inmates. An interesting film, I'm glad it wasn't just about the tract itself in a narrow sense, but rather a broader portrait of the psychological and cultural worlds in which it is taken as fact.

Grade: B

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner does a heck of an audio commentary, its an art few creative people are good at (film scholars are better). Also Oliver Stone is good because he can just talk and talk and talk, no dead spaces.

The woman who cut my hair today really wasn't into it; only half hearted attempts at chatter, I expect more enthusism. I seldom have much to say to the women who cut my hair, but still I like to be asked.

"Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful."- G. K. Chesterton