cruise_nazi_xenu.jpgPoor Tom Cruise — all he wants to do is make movies. Yet his latest film has many Germans in a frenzy, with some now branding him as the Scientologist equivalent of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Valkyrie, due for release in October, tells the story of the ill-fated July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his field headquarters in East Prussia; and Cruise’s depiction of Count Claus Schenk Graff von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic colonel who led the plot, has prompted angry reactions from Germans concerned about his links to the ‘totalitarian’ cult of Scientology. According to German historian Guido Knopf, a recent Scientology seminar given by Cruise ‘calls to mind Goebbels… [and] will remind any German with an interest in history of Goebbels’ infamous Sports Palace speech [of February 18, 1943]’. Thomas Gandow, chief spokesman on religious cults for the German Protestant Church, claims similarly that Valkyrie ‘will have the same propaganda advantages for Scientology as the 1936 Olympics had for the Nazis’.

For Germans, who have 5.8 million plus reasons to be wary of tyranny, there is cause to suspect the mouth-breathers and incompetents who are attracted to Scientology. They could plausibly resemble, at a certain extreme of paranoia, the young men who flocked to Hitler’s SA in the 1920s, and the publicity photos of Cruise in a Wehrmacht uniform — complete with sinister eye-patch and eagle insignia — are chillingly congruent. But comparisons involving the Nazis are always fraught. Godwin’s Law states that:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

A corollary of this — that anyone who makes a Nazi/Hitler comparison automatically discredits their own argument — also applies in the case of Scientology. Every sensible person knows that Scientology is a fraudulent, incoherent cult that pedals lies and exploits the vulnerabilities of individuals for its own financial gain — but does that make Cruise a full-blown National Socialist? My line on Scientologists has always been that they should be left to monitor their Thetan-levels in peace, assuming they act within the limits of the law. Stupidity, as with many things in life, is the final arbiter: anyone gullible enough to hand over their cheque-book to a bunch of pie-in-the-sky Scientology pastors doesn’t, in my opinion, deserve the protection of the state. And so with Cruise: you can criticise the guy without falling back on the old canard of branding him a Nazi. German Defense Ministry spokesman Harald Kammerbauer: ‘a sincere and respectable depiction of [Stauffenberg] is very much in Germany’s interest. Tom Cruise, with his Scientology background, is not the right person for this’. Fine. Let das boycott begin.

As much of a douche as he is, Cruise is a spitting image of Stauffenberg, and I’ll be keen to see how he brings the character to the screen. This being Hollywood (and a product of director Bryan ‘X-Men‘ Singer) there’s bound to be a shallow love interest to get in the way of all the kick-ass action sequences, and Stauffenberg will inevitably be spun, against all available historical evidence, as an upright freedom fighter. (This fits comfortably into the standard WWII narrative, which pits the evil of Nazi Germany against the noble alliance of stiff-upper-lip Anglo-Americans, bumbling French and dour Red Army conscripts).

But the real Stauffenberg was a morally ambiguous figure. His plot to unseat Hitler was born of a conviction (accurate, as it turns out) that Germany was headed for a comprehensive military defeat under the Führer’s leadership, and expressed little concern about either the Holocaust or the millions of innocent civilians sacrificed in the pursuit of Hitler’s imperial pipe-dreams. As a career officer steeped in the Prussian military tradition, Stauffenberg’s moral framework was firmly defined in terms of Reich and Wehrmacht. He may not have shared the Nazi views on race and eugenics, but was nonetheless part of an institution that eagerly embraced the invasions of Poland and France as recompense for the ‘betrayal’ of Versailles. (A true anti-Nazi resistance ‘hero’ would have taken a crack at Hitler in, say, 1935, when the anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws were introduced, or after the 1938 pogroms of Kristallnacht. Stauffenberg, of course, did neither). I’m expecting Valkyrie to be a flight from historical reality — but a flight less, hopefully, than Cruise’s own daft doctrine.