Archive of Fire and Blood

“Shoah” filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who died this month, forever changed the world’s understanding of the Holocaust — for better and for worse

We must break with “anti-totalitarian” horizon inherited from the neoconservative restoration of the 1980s.

Much mainstream media coverage of the helicopter attack on Venezuelan government buildings has focused on Oscar Alberto Perez’s bombastic statements about “restoring constitutional order.” But listen closely to the other expressions and terms Perez uses in his video statement. They provide a window into a fascistic form of thought that may come to define the opposition in Venezuela. 

Brecht considered War Primer part of “a satisfactory literary report on my years in exile,” as he wrote in a 1944 journal entry. Since this first English language reception of War Primer on the centenary of Brecht’s birth in 1998, what are we now to make of his poignant modernist epic of four-liner lyrics and scrapbook photos? Today, in our post-crash era, with its renewal of Marxism, Brecht the formalist can be freed from a series of postmodern qualifications. War Primer’s historical intervention can be seen in a new way today. With the far right politically relevant again, Brecht’s image-by-image analysis of social democracy, America, and fascism, which is the veritable heart of War Primer, possesses fresh relevance.