COREENNES_KORTRIG STACK014

Text :

So the balance sheet to which most of the texts and images on this disc bear witness is totally disastrous, and
I feel neither the right nor the inclination to ignore that. But I'd like to note two things, which for me have
their importance.

Much has been made of the resemblances between the two totalitarianisms, communism and nazism. They
are undeniable, with this one difference, that the communists committed their crimes in betrayal of the
values on which they founded themselves, and the nazis, in fulfillment of theirs. Maybe that difference is
the wrong question. Or maybe it's the whole question.

And to dose al he despal accumulated a this century end al the shatecialhopes so many victims so
many resignations, all that still doesn't give me an ounce of inclination for even a sketch of indulgence
toward society "as it is." During the Cold War I used to say to my comrades on both sides, "What you call
the errors of socialism is socialism, what you call unbridled capitalism is capitalism." For now only one of
those two behemoths remains on its feet, but the other's defeat has not humanized the survivor, on the
contrary: Interviewed on television shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Claude Lelouch, who is not a
Marxist dog, made a comment full of good sense: "Communism had at least this much going for it, it scared
the money-men-and left to their own devices, the money-men are capable of anything, believe me, I know
what they're like..." I find it fitting to give a filmmaker the last word on the twentieth century, which despite
all its shams had so little real existence-which may after all have been nothing but an immense,
interminable fade-over.
 

Port-Kosinki, mai 1997