A true documentary is impartial, and seeks to show the true story without bias.
After watching, I was left with the feeling that this was made (and marketed) in the spirit of "Look at these bad guys taking over a town"
Yet my overall impression was that this film sympathized with the racists, while trying not to be obvious about it.
It's debatable is if this flick is pro-Nazi. What isn't debatable is that this flick gave these dudes unnecessary popularity. If the filmmakers ignore these guys they'll die off a lot quicker. But actually giving them popularity might give other supremacists the impetuous to try the same thing, maybe this time in a well-populated town.
shareSpeak up, Speak out, and dispel. Silence is the goal of fear and intimidation.
I think what the filmmakers tried to convey was that the white supremacists were within their rights to do what they were doing. The fact is, even if you find someone's ideas abhorrent, you can't prevent them from buying land and moving on to it. The right of free speech is America's blessing and its curse.
I think what the filmmakers tried to convey was that the white supremacists were within their rights to do what they were doing. The fact is, even if you find someone's ideas abhorrent, you can't prevent them from buying land and moving on to it.
Yet my overall impression was that this film sympathized with the racists, while trying not to be obvious about it.
I thought it did a good job staying impartial. More so than any other documentary I can think of recently. They interviewed both sides pretty equally. You probably felt it sided with the nazis because the people of the town were pretty aggressive with wanting them out of town (rightfully so in my opinion).
shareI thought that Cobb came across as a 5-star a**h***, especially when he brought up that guy's murdered daughter, trying to get a rise out of him. I don't recall the documentary painting him in a good light at all, I think he pretty much made sure through his own actions that he came across as antagonistic and hateful.
Now were the townspeople hostile? Yes, but you'd act hostile as well if a group of people with an extreme belief system came to your small town with the stated intent of taking it over. I'm not saying hostility is pretty in this scenario, but it's a pretty human reaction. And in human history, when one group of humans comes to another place and shows intent of taking over, is the native group living there (if there is one) being as bad by wanting to defend their turf and their way of life.
One thing that the documentary didn't make too clear was what made Leith so attractive to Cobb & Co., except this idea of very cheap property, but how can that be enough? Leith looks like a total dump in the middle of absolute nowhere. I think that's the reason why it was so cheap to buy up land, but was it ever going to be some sort of White Nationlist utopia? Hard to picture. Did the place even have one road with tarmac? I think that Cobb liked the idea of going into a place and taking over, rather than starting totally from scratch on some patch of bare earth.
Just watched the docu and Cobb very clearly says that he was looking for a place where property was cheap to buy AND the people coming out could walk into a job that immiediately start paying 50k/yr (the booming oil industry which is now no longer booming). They also spent a few minutes explaining how the oil industry would just hire on anybody, drifters etc to work.
shareI think the film was more sympathetic to the idea that these people had rights too and the quandary it causes when people like this exercise their rights in order to make other people's lives miserable.
Generally, I would be of the opinion that we don't give these people the oxygen of publicity, but it raised a serious point that had to be addressed, about how democracy can be a two edged sword. We see these people trying to carry out their own version of the "putsch" by trying to marginalise their own version of democracy outside mainstream democracy.
But what does that really tell you about these examples of "The Master Race" when they can't even manage to pull off a coup in a town of 24 people, where there are probably less than 20 voters? Personally, I think as an exercise in trolling, it worked, and that was really all it was. How can we take the "star" of this show seriously when he is having to walk with a stick, but thinks he should have a high paying job at an oil well.
As we have heard, oil country is no country for old men, and less so for disabled old men.
I felt the documentary was pretty even-handed, which is ideally what a documentary should be. It HAD to give Craig Cobb a platform, in order to tell the story. It let him hang himself with his own rope, so to speak. He is a crazy person with crazy eyes and a crazy outlook, but he packages it in being (generally) soft-spoken, articulate, and saying the "right" things to appeal to an uneducated, down on their luck man who just left prison or the military and has no job prospects - blame it all on people of color! So much easier than taking personal accountability OR looking at the larger issue of rehabilitating felons/at-risk youth/veterans with mental illness so they can actually make a life that doesn't involve crime. This is how gangs operate - give a person a sense of belonging, an organization that they feel "protects" them in return for loyalty, an opportunity to make money (which is a joke for low-level drug dealers, but you know what I mean), give them a bunch of slogans and meaningless titles, and they're yours.
Anyways, what this film showed me is that, white supremacists are hiding in plain sight - they outwardly appear to be so pathetic, so lame, their politics are so over-the-top biased and based on manipulation and pseudo-science, that I tend to disdain them. But they are still dangerous, as per the recent MURDERS the documentary listed.
They're coming to get you, Barbara!
Fair comment.
As individuals, they have to be taken seriously because of matters like attacks on Synagogues, and also the willingness to exercise their own civil rights purely to make other people's lives a misery. But the ultimate irony is that when they start working as a group, this is so often when they fail. I thought it was wonderful that they effectively provided all the evidence against themselves for the court case, because the third person, one of their own, filmed it.
I think the most important thing in this film for myself was the reaction of the locals, bearing in mind the current flirtation with Fascism that the US is going through. On the face of it, Leith would appear to be a blue-collar constituency and you would suspect pro-Trump, but it seemed they were unanimous in not wanting the KKK in their town. The cynic in me says that this might be because of the anticipated rise in criminality that this was likely to bring, or maybe they took exception to the threat "We are going to take over your town by using democracy against you and you won't be able to do a thing about it". But perhaps this really was a case of doing the right thing for the sake of it. I'd like to think so, because this was clearly not a town divided by racial strife.
No definately anti Nazi, but also dealt with the shades of grey that come with balancing peoples right and the line between freedom of expression and outright intimidation.
Very thought provoking.
"To err is human...so...errrr..." - Gary King
The first more or less unbiased docus i've seen. And yes cobbs a human even tho his belefs are eccentric to say the least.
my vote history:
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur13767631/ratings