Allied

What are the duties of love? How does love arise? What are the duties of a human being? These are some of the themes touched in the excellent fictional story “Allied”. “Allied” is happening between Morocco, London, and a bit of France in the period 1942-1944. The movies stars Brad Pitt (excellent) and Marion Cotillard (stupendous, Oscar deserving for her great facial expressions).

The movie is a mix of historical realism and a serious distortion, I should even say, violation thereof. the distortion is essential to the story, but fatal to the understanding of why it is that Britain won the war, and the Nazis lost it. Basically, the British were extremely tough, and even tougher than the Nazis, that’s why they won. The British could be tougher, precisely because they had humanity on their side (the part not just sorely, and erroneously missing from the movies, but even deeply obliterated in the movies).  

This has consequences for the now famous subject of “fake news”. In a sense, the entire “Allied”, although an excellent movies, and precisely because it is an excellent movies,  is fake news writ large. Deep disinformation. Maybe I should give stars to fake news and disinformation. When Hillary and Barack says companies reimbursed TARP, that’s five star disinformation. When US propagandists, so-called “historians”, say from Harvard, claim that the US acted only as liberator and savior in World War One and Two, that’s ten star disinformation. “Allied” is a good eight star disinformation about how smart British Intelligence was, and how deeply democracy connects with civilization.

Two Stars & The Sahara, What Could Go Wrong? Well, Depicting Civilization As It Was Not. And As It Ought Not To Be.

So what is the story told in “Allied“?

All right, all spoilers out, we are landing on the world of real here. Pitt lands in the desert, and goes to Casablanca, where he meets Cotillard. He is a Canadian special agent, she is a top French resistance fighter who has infiltrated Nazis and collaborators in Morocco. He poses as a phosphate industrialist from Paris. He tries not to talk too much, because his Canadian accent is detectable. Together they kill during a reception the Nazi ambassador. It was a quasi-suicide mission, and they get neurohormonally transformed from it (they fall in love) and marry in England.

Next they have a baby, a little girl. Now here comes the maximum spoiler. Even knowing it, the situation is still heart wrenching, though. Cotillard is suspected to be a Nazi spy. Pitt is charged to execute her, should her guilt be confirmed. This is when my heart-strings started to pull hard. He flies to france, and determines, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she is indeed a Nazi double agent.

He confronts her, she admits her guilt. She said she did not believe the Nazis would find her in England. They threatened to kill her baby Anna, so she revealed to the Great Reich what her husband, a high intelligence officer, knew. (Through a little Nazi network of fanatics, one a degenerate smallish woman, the other an apparent Jew resembling Sigmund Freud.)

So far, so good, in the plausibility department. Every single detail of the movie could be correct. Indeed, there were indeed plenty of double, even triple agents (agents known to be double who betrayed those in the know), during World War Two. Many got executed. Many got tortured to death over days, even months.

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Yet “Allied”Establishes Not Just A Fake World, But a Fake Civilization, Vastly Inferior to the Real One:

There were indeed Nazi spies in England. Some even got executed. For example the three idiots who knew nothing, and crossed from the Netherlands by paddling to commit sabotage, in 1940. Why were they executed? Precisely because they were saboteurs rather than informants. And to set-up a nice terror mood among Nazi spies.

Most Nazi spies in Britain who were detected were proposed a deal: work with us, British counter-intelligence, MI5, to disinform your superiors, or die. None of the Nazi spies chose to die whom I know of. And this is what the movies gets completely wrong. Had really Cotillard existed and been found to be spying, her husband would have been ordered to divulge to her only false and carefully manipulated data.  

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This way of having a world had a name: The DOUBLE CROSS SYSTEM XX:

Nazi spies in Great Britain were systematically made into double agents. Not all these spies were detected by MI5. Many, seeing that the war was turning against Nazi Germany, and, thus, or, seeing that Nazism was not their cup of tea (as the very head of army intelligence, the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris decided; Canaris was ultimately discovered, arrested and executed). ALL Nazi agents sent to Great Britain were detected and made to work for the Allied cause (some were from standard military intelligence, Abwehr and some from Nazi intelligence, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)).

All the more in a case as delicate as that exposed in “Allied” were a high officer is married to a spy. As delicate, and as potentially fruitful.

(There were double agents at an even higher level, but they were not detected during World War Two)

Such subtleties are not just about reevaluating history. Nor are they about understanding which way civilizational progress goes, and how to evaluate it. They present immediate interest in appreciating the brouhaha about, say,  Russia having “hacked” (whatever that means) the US elections. If one analyzes deeply and subtly, beyond the headlines, in the claims of “interference”, one realizes that there is nothing there.

“Double Cross XX” was humanly superior:

1. It was human and had more altruism and empathy than the equivalent strategies in the fascist system.
2. It was smarter. Smarts is the essence of humanity. Denying smarts deny humanity. Fascism is intrinsically single-minded: thereupon its strength in combat, and stupidity, long, or even short-term (when combat is not at hand).

Movies such as “Allied” are not innocuous, when they drag the edge of civilization in the mud. By representing allied counterintelligence as cruel, vindictive and stupid, it is extolling these characteristics.

After all, the Allies, who quickly self-described as the “United Nations” won because of superior values. Three years before their formal declaration as an organization in San Francisco. An interesting aside is that the “Declaration of the United Nations” was explicitly founded in its first clause on the Atlantic Charter. This is something Russians ought to want to think about when they view NATO as a fundamental adversary.

Take one example out of millions. A German general of the Wehrmacht (a standard general, not a SS), Anton Dostler, ordered the execution of 15 US soldiers who had been made prisoner when, while wearing the American uniform, they tried to blow-up a tunnel in Italy. The general ordered them executed. Subordinates knew well that this violated the Geneva Convention. They stalled, and asked for confirmation of the order, and again and again. The general insisted, and the US troops were assassinated.

The general was subsequently tried. He argued that he was acting under an order from Hitler. However any member of the Wehrmacht had the right to refuse to obey orders in violation of the Geneva Convention, and the order was not direct and reiterated in the specific situation. The Nazi general was condemned to death, and executed.

Where does the superiority of civilization intervenes here? Simple: the subordinates of the general executed an order they knew was anti-civilizational. At that point they had to decide whether they wanted to risk disobeying a direct order from a maniac, or not. Earlier in the war, they could have said no, and the case would have been considered for prosecution (no such prosecution was ever engaged, because the Nazis were afraid of a judicial precedent going against them!).

However, late in the war, when, clearly the 1,000 year Reich was on its ignominious way out, summary execution for disobeying orders became wanton and frequent. Thus the subordinates could not feel that they were fighting for the right cause, under smart and wise leadership, but under idiotic gangsters. That, in turn, would focus their minds not on winning the war (how could vicious imbeciles win the war?) but on saving their skins.

Whereas, it was exactly the opposite on the Allied side: there the mentality was that the cause was just. Greater than a soldier’s fate, worth dying for.

As Britain was more human, more emphatic, vibrant with a higher civilization, German agents willingly went to the British side. And conversely. After the war, it was discovered that Nikolaus Ritter, the Air intelligence chief under Canaris, had known that the cover for the agents in Britain had been compromised, but due to the fear of repercussions, in the cruel, demented, unpredictable, unlawful, wanton, self-destructive nature of the Nazi regime, Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Ritter was too scared t0 inform Canaris (who was long a devotee of Hitler). Thus we can see directly that the less civilized a regime is, the harder it is to win a war.

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Why To Insult (Britain Or Civilization In General? 

And once again, I will ask the same rhetorical question: why do those with money (like Hollywood movie producers, and investors, Trump just made one his Secretary of the Treasury!) have interest to misrepresent civilization, drag civilization deep in the mud? Because they have had so much money, in recent years, they feel like gods, and their pleasure has become to overlord people with all their taxpayer paid five star travelling around the world, their power talk with other rulers, their philanthropy, prizes, etc.

And their enemy? Civilization. Hence the interest to make us believe that British intelligence during World War Two was so brutish, vicious, stupid, short-sighted and inhuman to exterminate Nazi spies it could have manipulated, and did manipulate, in real history, as it happened.

To believe that British intelligence was so brutish, vicious, stupid, short-sighted and inhuman that it would have insisted to assassinate the beloved wife of one of their most esteemed operatives, a commander of the fully sovereign state of Canada, is well beyond ridiculous. Had such a case occurred, British counter-intelligence would have viewed it as a godsent, a fantastic occasion to make the Nazis believe more fake news, disinformation, misinformation and stupendous lies. (There may have been similar cases, with extremely high level spies, who got doubled-crossed… but they are kept secret to this day.)

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The Double Cross System Double Crossed Adolf Hitler:

In the end, Adolf Hitler and his minions were persuaded, from fake intelligence, mostly from Double Cross XX, that the main D Day was not the one which happened in Normandy, on June 6, 1944, but one which was going to happen in the Pas De Calais (facing Dover, where the Franco-English Channel is narrowest). Double Cross XX had persuaded Hitler that an enormous army led by US General Patton (the most famous tank general of the Allies, professor of all top US generals, well-known for his ferocity), was going to rush across.

Actually that was a complete lie: all the Allied forces were concentrated to land in Normandy. Nazi forces basically held the Allies roughly two months, bottled in Normandy. Had Hitler understood on June 6, 1944, that the real D Day had just happened, in Normandy, the Allies may well have been defeated.

Then Hitler could have sent most of the troops in North West France to fight off the Franco-American Provence landing (where my North African dad fought, after the Italy campaign). Gott knows how this would have turned…

Had the Provence assault failed (that’s a big if) the Allies would not have had a second chance, for years. Moreover, the US strategists had warned that, thanks to new jet fighters and jet bombers, Nazi Germany would recover air supremacy by June 1945.

So Double Cross XX (crucially helped) won the war. The Allies won, because they were more civilized.

Allied is a magnificent movie. However, it is also a magnificent lie. And a vicious, deep lie, construed to make us believe superior civilization, and humanity is not what it is. And make no mistake: human beings are sensitive. I knew all the preceding, while I watched the movie. I knew perfectly well that the threat of executing Cotillard was grotesque, unreal, contrary to all what happened and should happen. I knew it was an attempt to confuse the Allies and the Nazis. Still when I saw the horrible fate of the innocent fictional toddler in that outrageous story, deprived of her fictional mother, I felt horrible.

Now Obama is in danger of insinuating that Russia stole the US election: he asked for a special report. That introduces a pretty horrible emotion. Even if we know that it is a fiction that a Russian is standing behind all US election official, the potential for emotional damage is enormous.

Trash civilization, by making us believe it was not the way it was. Now trash the US election system, by putting it in doubt. It’s the industry of doubt, destroying the foundations of value: a potentially lethal industry.

Patrice Ayme’