What people say and what people do are not the same thing. Society, when given a recent choice, declared outrage for the children then promptly chose the institution. Any other business with a child abuse record the length of the Catholic church’s would be publicly shunned, closed down, and its assets sold off to compensate its many, many victims. And yet, it’s as strong as ever; a bastion of conservative establishment “do as I say not as I do”.
Look, this is not hard to understand: the increasingly fascistic US Right and its Qanon sturmtrupplers are using their “deep state cannibal pedophiles” narrative (amend as appropriate) as a modern-day blood libel in which to paint all their enemies. Mignonnes is simply one more convenient hook upon which to hang the greater attack. To fixate on the film is just one more layer of misdirection, to keep people angry, active, and blind to the big picture. You cannot understand anything until you understand that.
There is nothing innately anti-pedophile abould US Conservative culture; if anything, it’s proved one of the great hiding places for abusers (51st Speaker of the House, anyone?), precisely because it controls what gets said publicly and what is kept private, cultivating and misdirecting popular rage onto its political enemies, and edging ever closer to repeating the great atrocities of history, from the blood libel-stoked slaughters of first European Jews by Catholics, then of those Catholics by the new Protestants, through to the ethnic executions of the Bosnian war and the wholesale genocide of Rwanda, and everything inbetween.
Now I consider myself European despite being stuck here on reactionary backwards Airstrip One. My granddaddy was Antifa back in Africa and Italy. I also know firsthand how much damage one can do just by choosing a pleasing lie over a painful truth. I have few illusions about how bad things can get, and all it take to get it underway is for enough people to buy into a Big Lie to justify everything that comes next. I have the limitations but also the benefits of an outside perspective on what’s happening in the US right now, and I’m legit worried for the future of our whole damn planet as a large chunk of America charges proudly towards a Russia-like one-party state.
If you don’t wish to repeat humanity’s bloody history (which I can assure you won’t spare the children from anyone else) then you really need to start paying attention to who is spinning the popular narratives and to what goal. Starting in a mirror—because if you can’t be brutally, rigorously honest with yourself about your own understanding and motives, then what makes you think you can defend yourself from others’ deceptions any better?
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/10/watching...
https://www.adl.org/education/resources/glossary-terms/blood...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-26875506
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5eFubO_iLM
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“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.” – William Pannapacker