Despite its self-serving revisionism, Hollywood took its sweet time deciding that “Nazis are bad, mmkay?” For the whole of the 1930s, Hollywood explicitly refrained from criticising or satirising the Nazi regime in any form. It wasn’t until 1940 that the Three Stooges released You Nazty Spy!, the first film to directly address the Nazi threat.
But Hollywood didn’t stop bowing to genocidal dictators in the 1930s: it’s still licking their boots today. Especially when the dictators are all cashed-up.
The more dutifully woke the Hollywood corporation, the more eager it is to please the worst people in the world — and pocket their money.
Disney’s streaming service has been accused of bowing to Beijing by removing from its Hong Kong service an episode of The Simpsons that ridiculed Chinese censorship over Tiananmen Square.
Disney+ began screening the hit US show in Hong Kong this month.
Remember, this is the same Simpsons that made the excruciatingly cringey West Wing Story, “satirising” Donald Trump; and the same Disney corporation that shot a film in Xinjiang, epicentre of the Chinese Communist Party regime’s current genocide.
They’re both pathetically eager to please the Nazi Germany of the 21st Century.
However, it did not feature episode 12 of series 16, Goo Goo Gai Pan, in which the Simpson family travels to Beijing.
There, they visit the embalmed body of Mao Zedong, described by Homer Simpson as a “little angel that killed 50 million people”, and visit Tiananmen Square, where a sign reads: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”
Any reference to the bloody crackdown on students protesting at Tiananmen is outlawed by Beijing. An entire generation in China has grown up without learning about the event.
Later in the episode, Selma, Marge Simpson’s sister, plays a similar role to Tank Man, the unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a line of tanks rolling down the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
Well, that’s a bit embarrassing for Disney’s new paymasters in Beijing.
So, they’ve resorted to the tried’n’true communist tactic: just Memory Hole the whole thing and pretend it never happened.
“Disney obviously sent out a clear signal to the local audience that it will remove controversial programs in order to please,” Grace Leung, an expert in media regulation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told The New York Times.
“Their credibility will definitely be hurt.”
The Australian
“Credibility” used in the same sentence as “Disney” and The Simpsons is a funnier punch-line than Matt Groening has written in the last 20 years.
Speaking of whom: Groening may be worrying that he’ll be the next high-profile figure “disappeared” by Beijing — but then, they’d have to get him off Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, first.
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