Spotify + Helmuth Hübener

After I canceled my Spotify Premium subscription, I earned the right to encourage other people to boycott platforms that run the racist ICE recruitment ads. I did so in a Reddit post. I acknowledged that boycotting them all completely may be unfeasible; for example, I don't see how I can cut YouTube videos out of my life, but I do feel even less guilty now about using an adblocker. Monica Torres of the Huffington Post then messaged me and asked if I'd be willing to use my real name and talk about my boycott plans for an upcoming story. I agreed, but she never got back to me, apparently because she decided to use someone named Caroline Eddy instead. Oh well. I loved this line: "The company declined to answer questions about how many people have canceled their subscriptions over this ad." That means a lot of people have canceled their subscriptions over this ad, and the company is embarrassed. The article explains why these boycotts are unlikely to be as successful as the Disney boycott that saved Jimmy Kimmel's job, and that sucks, but at least willing collaborators with secret police who kidnap people, shoot priests in the head, and tear-gas children aren't getting my money.

Speaking of fascism, I watched "Truth and Treason" this week. It's an Angel Studios movie about Helmuth Hübener, the Mormon teenager who (spoiler alert) was executed for sharing the truth about Nazi propaganda. Of course, as an ex-Mormon, he's still one of my heroes. The LDS Church deserves very little credit for his heroism. Its strategy in Nazi Germany was to appease the government and avoid drawing attention to itself. Just as Mormons in the US today support the MAGA movement with no cognitive dissonance, some Mormons in Germany then supported the Nazi Party and saw no contradiction with their beliefs. In both cases, I believe this represents an abysmal failure on the part of the church. My current religion, Unitarian Universalism, is also neutral on party politics, but nobody would think for one moment that they could accept its teachings and support Trump or Hitler. As a Mormon, I was supposed to be okay with worshiping alongside racist twats because "people aren't perfect" or some crap like that, but as a UU, it's literally not an issue at all.

So of course, the movie had to include Arthur Zander, Helmuth's fanatical Hitler-loving bishop. His character can even be framed as a powerful lesson for believing Mormons, as long as they lean fully on "people aren't perfect" and ignore their belief that God himself calls every bishop. The movie ends almost immediately after Helmuth's execution, so it doesn't cover the part where Bishop Zander posthumously excommunicated him for his treason against the government. I will say that it annoys me when critics say "the church" excommunicated Helmuth. It was literally just this Nazi bishop acting on his own. After the war, the First Presidency reinstated him. I really think that whole thing should have been mentioned in the credits where, in the typical vein of historical films, we get text blurbs about what became of the main characters. It also wouldn't have hurt to mention that after the war, Zander moved to Utah, coached youth soccer, and hid when historians showed up at his house.

In the movie, Helmuth talks about his hopes that when he shares the truth with people, they'll share it with more people, and eventually everyone will refuse to comply with the Nazi regime. That obviously didn't happen. It's difficult to see if his actions had the slightest effect on the regime. But he fought and paid dearly for his principles, and 83 years later, people are watching a movie about him and getting inspired. He reminds me of my own ambition in resisting my own fascist regime. I can't say whether my individual actions are making a tangible difference in this world  - I certainly hope so - but at least they're ensuring that I can live with myself when I die. Helmuth was also brilliant and full of potential, and I wonder what he would have accomplished if he'd grown up. It's tempting to think he would have deconstructed his way out of the LDS Church, but it's just as likely that he would have rivaled Hugh Nibley as an apologist and been the token German until Dieter Uchtdorf came along.