In Lee – Kate Winslet’s new movie about the celebrated Second World War photojournalist Lee Miller – the descent into the heart of darkness is slow but it’s always the destination.
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The film starts with Miller and her young friends watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis marching triumphantly through the streets of Berlin. Miller and her friends shake their heads, disapproving, still unaware the Nazis are marching towards them, too.
War begins. With her Rolleiflex camera, Miller goes on to document London’s Blitz, the fierce battle over Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris. And then, with her photojournalist colleague David E. Sherman, Miller arrives at Buchenwald and Dachau, the concentration camps where tens of thousands of Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Freemasons, Communists, Catholic priests and Roma people were slaughtered. But mainly Jews.
You have perhaps seen the photos Miller took at Buchenwald in April 1945, just after it was liberated by Allied troops. They are famous photographs, now displayed in museums. In them, you see a block for medical experimentation, and other buildings set aside for executions and torture, and a crematorium. Miller described what she saw:
“The six hundred bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death had been washed from the wooden potato masher because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react.”
The movie about Lee Miller arrived around here in the same week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a press conference to announce a tax holiday on pudding and fake Christmas trees. His smirking Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland hovering beside him, Trudeau was asked about the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants against two Jews.
His Liberal government would “abide” by the ICC warrants, Trudeau said.
“This is just who we are as Canadians,” he said.
Is it? Is that who we are now? Or is it the sort of moral abasement Lee Miller and her friends glimpsed in flickering newsreel footage about Nazis? Because it certainly feels like that.
The two Jews Trudeau agreed to arrest, in the unlikely event they ever alight on Canadian soil, are Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its former minister of defence Yoav Gallant. They had committed “war crimes,” the ICC declared in a release, which then went on to say the details of the war crimes are “secret.”
It’s relevant that the details are being kept secret. Disclosing the facts, you see, would swiftly reveal the allegations to be as phony as one of Trudeau’s tax-exempt plastic Christmas trees.
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The facts are these: Palestinians – some in uniform, some not – swept into Israel early on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, and commenced murdering, maming, raping and stealing thousands of Jews. On that day, you might say, it was “just who they are as Palestinians.”
I’ve seen the Hamas footage. It wasn’t accompanied by the stench of rotting corpses, as Lee Miller experienced in Buchenwald in April 1945, but it was no less real for that. Then and now, the objective was the same: kill off the Jews, because they are Jews. The world will “let them get away with it,” as Lee Miller says, later on in the film.
That, really, is what Trudeau has agreed to do: let the killers get away with it. There’s a name for that. It is what academics call Holocaust inversion – that is, falsely transforming the victims of a slaughter into the authors of one. It is the ultimate expression of antisemitism, because it robs Jews of the agony of Oct. 7, and then it magnifies their agony by saying they had it coming. That they brought it on themselves.
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That’s what the ICC arrest warrants do, and did. They impliedly – no, actually, they explicitly – shift the blame. They say to the victims: “You may have had scores of your people killed on Oct. 7, but if you do anything about it, anything at all, we will come after you.”
And that’s what Canada’s erstwhile Prime Minister did, this week. He victimized the victims. He put the victims in the prisoner’s dock, and called it the Canadian way.
It wasn’t. It isn’t. It was the reverse of the Canadian way, and it was reckless and cruel and despicable.
And, we suspect, if Lee Miller was still alive, she’d perhaps snap a photo at Trudeau’s press conference this week, and then she’d tell him what he is.
Which is beneath contempt.