Latest news with #Nazism
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Was Ingmar Bergman Really a Nazi? Stellan Skarsgård Saying the Director ‘Cried When Hitler Died' Reopens the Issue
Few actors today can toggle between massive blockbusters, like 'Dune,' and small-scale auteurist works, such as Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value,' with the ease of Stellan Skarsgård. And few are quite as candid when they open up. As reported by Variety from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, where the actor was promoting 'Sentimental Value' and on hand for a tribute, Skarsgård made some startling comments about Ingmar Bergman, whom the Swedish actor worked for on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's 'A Dream Play.' More from IndieWire Neon and The Future of Film Is Female Announce Winners of Spring Short Film Fund Competition Harris Dickinson's Directing Debut 'Urchin' Acquired by 1-2 Special - It's One of Cannes 2025's Very Best Films The actor talked about his personal dislike of Bergman, whom he found to be tyrannical and manipulative. Skarsgård links Bergman's attitude as a director to the fact that Bergman was a Nazi supporter during World War II. This may be new information to more casual cinephiles now, but Bergman's Nazi sympathies are widely known. Bergman never hid this, and admitted his affinity for Nazism was not just a teenage infatuation — it was only when the Holocaust's atrocities were revealed at World War II's end that he completely disavowed Hitler and Nazism. 'Bergman was manipulative,' Skarsgård said. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.' Most admirers of Bergman have accepted the director's disavowal of Nazism following the war. But Bergman was 26 when Hitler took his own life in 1945, and Bergman had already been a prolific stage director and had even written his first movie, 'Torment,' for the director Alf Sjöberg, by that point. Sweden had been officially neutral during the war, though various figures in its government were sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazi regime. Bergman himself went to great lengths not to excuse, ignore, or explain away his Nazi sympathies. Bergman acknowledged seeing Hitler in person on a family trip to Weimar, Germany, in 1934 when he was 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' Bergman told author Maria Pia-Boethius (as reported by the BBC), who wrote a book about what Sweden's neutrality really meant during the war. And he noted that his family put a photo of Hitler by the future director's bed afterward. 'The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.' The director also acknowledged his support for Nazism in his own 1987 memoir, 'The Magic Lantern,' where he wrote, 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' And he admitted to Pia-Boethius that 'when the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open … I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' This is not a portrait of an unrepentant Nazi. And any cinephile can see Bergman's anguish over the horrors of war in 'Winter Light,' 'The Silence,' and 'Shame.' Much of Skarsgård's distaste for Bergman seems to be personal. At Karlovy Vary, he also said, 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy. He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.' This follows comments he made in 2012 to The Guardian's Xan Brooks, where Skarsgård spoke similarly, including of Bergman that 'I didn't want him near my life.' To his credit, Skarsgård is almost certainly not saying that Bergman's body of work should be dismissed the way that Cannes tried to dismiss his own longtime collaborator Lars von Trier — in 2011, Cannes officially declared von Trier 'persona non grata' for calling himself a Nazi in an instantly infamous press conference promoting his film 'Melancholia.' Skarsgård expressed an aversion to language-policing in his talk. 'Everyone in that room knew he was not a Nazi, that he was the opposite, and yet they all used it as a headline. And then people who only read headlines thought he was a Nazi. He just told a bad joke. Lars grew up with a Jewish father, and when his mother was dying, she told him he wasn't his real father. It was her boss, who was a German,' the Swedish actor said in defense of von Trier. 'When I meet people, especially in the U.S., they still [ask about von Trier's Nazi comment at Cannes]. You have so many banned words over there. My kids can say any words they want – it depends on what their intention is.' However, that Skarsgård's comments about Bergman came up in the context of von Trier, it almost seems like the actor is saying, 'Why is one director persona non grata and another not?' And it's also important to recognize the full context that Bergman's Nazi sympathies in his youth are something he strongly turned against. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fox News' Greg Gutfeld sparks backlash after reclaiming ‘Nazi' as his own ‘n-word': ‘Beneath contempt'
Fox News' resident 'comedian' Greg Gutfeld declared on Tuesday that conservatives 'need to learn from the Blacks' and 'remove the power from the n-word' by referring to themselves as Nazis, prompting critics to call the host 'beneath contempt' for his 'normalization of Nazism.' During a segment on Fox News' top-rated panel show The Five, Gutfeld and his fellow co-hosts discussed the recent immigration raid at a California cannabis farm that featured protesters confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, griping about Democrats' 'violent anti-ICE rhetoric,' which has become a significant talking point on the right-wing network. The frenzied raid, which saw authorities nab roughly 300 farm workers, resulted in the death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís, described as a 'hard-working, innocent farmer' and the sole provider for his family. Mocking a California professor who was arrested for allegedly throwing a tear gas canister back at ICE agents during the protest, co-host Lisa Montgomery – better known as Kennedy – called for demonstrators to be sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz,' the migrant detention camp located in the Florida swamps. Gutfeld, meanwhile, insisted the professor's actions – the educator claims he was moving the canister out from under a wheelchair when he was tackled by ICE agents – are why progressives' criticism of Republicans and the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts don't hold any water. Fox News host Greg Gutfeld told viewers that "we need to learn from the Blacks" and "remove the power from the n-word," claiming that conservatives should now refer to themselves as Nazis. (Fox News) And to make his point, he said that right-wingers should deflect the accusations that they're veering towards fascism by reclaiming the word 'Nazi' for themselves. 'This is why the criticism doesn't matter to us when you call us Nazis. Nazi this and Nazi that. You know, I'm beginning to think they don't like us,' he sneered. 'You know what? I've said this before. We need to learn from the Blacks.' Gutfeld continued: 'The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So, from now on, it's, 'What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?'' 'Nazi, please,' a gleeful Kennedy interjected while co-host Jesse Watters giggled in the background. 'Thank God you did a hard 'i' there,' Gutfeld quipped. It didn't take long for this Fox News segment to make waves and draw an intense amount of backlash and outrage over Gutfeld's pained analogy. 'These quotes, even if said in jest, would destroy the careers of any other journalist on any other mainstream national media platform,' Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan noted. 'But Fox doesn't employ journalists and doesn't have any journalistic (or decency) standards.' Leftist streamer Hasan Piker bluntly observed that 'we've officially gotten to the point where fox news commentators are comfortable calling themselves nazis,' while conservative writer Cathy Young said these 'people are really beneath contempt.' With others pointing out that the segment represented the 'normalization of Nazism' in real-time, several commentators and journalists noted the parallels between Gutfeld's call for conservatives to ironically embrace their own 'n-word' and cartoonist Matt Bors' famous 2018 strip about right-wingers blaming progressives for becoming Nazis. Oscar-winning filmmaker Travon Free recalled his time as a writer on The Daily Show, saying it was 'crazy' that it was just a decade ago when Fox News hosts used to actually TRY to pretend not to be racist.' Fox News host Kennedy jokingly replied, "Nazi, please," when Greg Gutfeld said right-wingers need to reclaim their own n-word. (Fox News) 'If it's possible for a Nazi to jump the shark- this Nazi has jumped the shark,' actor John Cusack chimed in. 'Never forget or forgive Rupert Murdoch for turning conservative corporate news into a raw sewage Nazi circle jerk.' Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of conservative outlet The Dispatch and a one-time Fox News colleague of Gutfeld's, pointed out that while he understood the Fox host was 'joking,' he doesn't think 'he's thought this through.' 'And that's the best defense I can offer,' Goldberg added. In recent years, and especially as the former Trump critic has grown increasingly sycophantic towards the president, Gutfeld's rhetoric has become increasingly extreme and unhinged. Two years ago, for instance, the acerbic 'comic' took on a fully fascist position when he floated the idea of an American civil war because, in his view, 'elections don't work' and the nation is in 'peril and chaos.' At the same time, it is at least a tad ironic that Gutfeld wants his fellow conservatives to probably reclaim Nazi as their own personal 'n-word,' considering how he's used the moniker to pillory those he's deemed evil. For example, he claimed last year that transgender health care providers 'will be seen as no different than the Nazi doctors who experimented on Jews in the Holocaust,' and he 'cannot wait' for that reckoning.
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The Independent
a day ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Fox News' Greg Gutfeld sparks backlash after reclaiming ‘Nazi' as his own ‘n-word': ‘Beneath contempt'
Fox News' resident 'comedian' Greg Gutfeld declared on Tuesday that conservatives 'need to learn from the Blacks' and 'remove the power from the n-word' by referring to themselves as Nazis, prompting critics to call the host 'beneath contempt' for his 'normalization of Nazism.' During a segment on Fox News' top-rated panel show The Five, Gutfeld and his fellow co-hosts discussed the recent immigration raid at a California cannabis farm that featured protesters confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, griping about Democrats' 'violent anti-ICE rhetoric,' which has become a significant talking point on the right-wing network. The frenzied raid, which saw authorities nab roughly 300 farm workers, resulted in the death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís, described as a 'hard-working, innocent farmer' and the sole provider for his family. Mocking a California professor who was arrested for allegedly throwing a tear gas canister back at ICE agents during the protest, co-host Lisa Montgomery – better known as Kennedy – called for demonstrators to be sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz,' the migrant detention camp located in the Florida swamps. Gutfeld, meanwhile, insisted the professor's actions – the educator claims he was moving the canister out from under a wheelchair when he was tackled by ICE agents – are why progressives' criticism of Republicans and the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts don't hold any water. And to make his point, he said that right-wingers should deflect the accusations that they're veering towards fascism by reclaiming the word 'Nazi' for themselves. 'This is why the criticism doesn't matter to us when you call us Nazis. Nazi this and Nazi that. You know, I'm beginning to think they don't like us,' he sneered. 'You know what? I've said this before. We need to learn from the Blacks.' Gutfeld continued: 'The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So, from now on, it's, 'What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?'' 'Nazi, please,' a gleeful Kennedy interjected while co-host Jesse Watters giggled in the background. 'Thank God you did a hard 'i' there,' Gutfeld quipped. It didn't take long for this Fox News segment to make waves and draw an intense amount of backlash and outrage over Gutfeld's pained analogy. 'These quotes, even if said in jest, would destroy the careers of any other journalist on any other mainstream national media platform,' Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan noted. 'But Fox doesn't employ journalists and doesn't have any journalistic (or decency) standards.' Leftist streamer Hasan Piker bluntly observed that 'we've officially gotten to the point where fox news commentators are comfortable calling themselves nazis,' while conservative writer Cathy Young said these 'people are really beneath contempt.' With others pointing out that the segment represented the 'normalization of Nazism' in real-time, several commentators and journalists noted the parallels between Gutfeld's call for conservatives to ironically embrace their own 'n-word' and cartoonist Matt Bors' famous 2018 strip about right-wingers blaming progressives for becoming Nazis. Oscar-winning filmmaker Travon Free recalled his time as a writer on The Daily Show, saying it was 'crazy' that it was just a decade ago when Fox News hosts used to actually TRY to pretend not to be racist.' 'If it's possible for a Nazi to jump the shark- this Nazi has jumped the shark,' actor John Cusack chimed in. 'Never forget or forgive Rupert Murdoch for turning conservative corporate news into a raw sewage Nazi circle jerk.' Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of conservative outlet The Dispatch and a one-time Fox News colleague of Gutfeld's, pointed out that while he understood the Fox host was 'joking,' he doesn't think 'he's thought this through.' 'And that's the best defense I can offer,' Goldberg added. In recent years, and especially as the former Trump critic has grown increasingly sycophantic towards the president, Gutfeld's rhetoric has become increasingly extreme and unhinged. Two years ago, for instance, the acerbic 'comic' took on a fully fascist position when he floated the idea of an American civil war because, in his view, 'elections don't work' and the nation is in 'peril and chaos.' At the same time, it is at least a tad ironic that Gutfeld wants his fellow conservatives to probably reclaim Nazi as their own personal 'n-word,' considering how he's used the moniker to pillory those he's deemed evil. For example, he claimed last year that transgender health care providers 'will be seen as no different than the Nazi doctors who experimented on Jews in the Holocaust,' and he 'cannot wait' for that reckoning.
CBS News
2 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
How do you stop an AI model from turning Nazi? What the Grok drama reveals about AI training.
Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot embedded in X (formerly Twitter) and built by Elon Musk's company xAI, is back in the headlines after calling itself "MechaHitler" and producing pro-Nazi remarks. The developers have apologized for the "inappropriate posts" and "taken action to ban hate speech" from Grok's posts on X. Debates about AI bias have been revived, too. But the latest Grok controversy is revealing not for the extremist outputs, but for how it exposes a fundamental dishonesty in AI development. Musk claims to be building a "truth-seeking" AI free from bias, yet the technical implementation reveals systemic ideological programming. This amounts to an accidental case study in how AI systems embed their creators' values, with Musk's unfiltered public presence making visible what other companies typically obscure. Grok is an AI chatbot with "a twist of humor and a dash of rebellion" developed by xAI, which also owns the X social media platform. The first version of Grok launched in 2023. Independent evaluations suggest the latest model, Grok 4, outpaces competitors on "intelligence" tests. The chatbot is available standalone and on X. xAI states "AI's knowledge should be all-encompassing and as far-reaching as possible." Musk has previously positioned Grok as a truth-telling alternative to chatbots accused of being "woke" by right-wing commentators. But beyond the latest Nazism scandal, Grok has made headlines for generating threats of sexual violence, bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa, and making insulting statements about politicians. The latter led to its ban in Turkey. So how do developers imbue an AI with such values and shape chatbot behaviour? Today's chatbots are built using large language models (LLMs), which offer several levers developers can lean on. Pre-training First, developers curate the data used during pre-training – the first step in building a chatbot. This involves not just filtering unwanted content, but also emphasising desired material. GPT-3 was shown Wikipedia up to six times more than other datasets as OpenAI considered it higher quality. Grok is trained on various sources, including posts from X, which might explain why Grok has been reported to check Elon Musk's opinion on controversial topics. Musk has shared that xAI curates Grok's training data, for example to improve legal knowledge and to remove LLM-generated content for quality control. He also appealed to the X community for difficult "galaxy brain" problems and facts that are "politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true". We don't know if these data were used, or what quality-control measures were applied. Fine-tuning The second step, fine-tuning, adjusts LLM behaviour using feedback. Developers create detailed manuals outlining their preferred ethical stances, which either human reviewers or AI systems then use as a rubric to evaluate and improve the chatbot's responses, effectively coding these values into the machine. A Business Insider investigation revealed xAI's instructions to human "AI tutors" instructed them to look for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture". While the onboarding documents said Grok shouldn't "impose an opinion that confirms or denies a user's bias", they also stated it should avoid responses that claim both sides of a debate have merit when they do not. System prompts The system prompt – instructions provided before every conversation – guides behaviour once the model is deployed. To its credit, xAI publishes Grok's system prompts. Its instructions to "assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased" and "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated" were likely key factors in the latest controversy. These prompts are being updated daily at the time of writing, and their evolution is a fascinating case study in itself. Guardrails Finally, developers can also add guardrails – filters that block certain requests or responses. OpenAI claims it doesn't permit ChatGPT "to generate hateful, harassing, violent or adult content". Meanwhile, the Chinese model DeepSeek censors discussion of Tianamen Square. Ad-hoc testing when writing this article suggests Grok is much less restrained in this regard than competitor products. Grok's Nazi controversy highlights a deeper ethical issue: Would we prefer AI companies to be explicitly ideological and honest about it, or maintain the fiction of neutrality while secretly embedding their values? Every major AI system reflects its creator's worldview – from Microsoft Copilot's risk-averse corporate perspective to Anthropic Claude's safety-focused ethos. The difference is transparency. Musk's public statements make it easy to trace Grok's behaviours back to Musk's stated beliefs about "woke ideology" and media bias. Meanwhile, when other platforms misfire spectacularly, we're left guessing whether this reflects leadership views, corporate risk aversion, regulatory pressure, or accident. This feels familiar. Grok resembles Microsoft's 2016 hate-speech-spouting Tay chatbot, also trained on Twitter data and set loose on Twitter before being shut down. But there's a crucial difference. Tay's racism emerged from user manipulation and poor safeguards – an unintended consequence. Grok's behaviour appears to stem at least partially from its design. The real lesson from Grok is about honesty in AI development. As these systems become more powerful and widespread (Grok support in Tesla vehicles was just announced), the question isn't whether AI will reflect human values. It's whether companies will be transparent about whose values they're encoding and why. Musk's approach is simultaneously more honest (we can see his influence) and more deceptive (claiming objectivity while programming subjectivity) than his competitors. In an industry built on the myth of neutral algorithms, Grok reveals what's been true all along: there's no such thing as unbiased AI – only AI whose biases we can see with varying degrees of clarity. Aaron J. Snoswell, Senior Research Fellow in AI Accountability, Queensland University of Technology This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Mint
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Stellan Skarsgard shocks film festival with Nazi claims about Ingmar Bergman
At the Karlovy Vary film festival, Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard (74) made explosive comments about legendary director Ingmar Bergman. While accepting a Crystal Globe award, Skarsgard called Bergman "a Nazi during the war" and claimed he was 'the only person I know who cried when Hitler died'. He described Bergman as deeply "manipulative" with a "very weird outlook" that treated some people as 'not worthy'. These remarks reference Bergman's own admissions: In his 1987 memoir, Bergman wrote he was "on Hitler's side" for years and kept Hitler's photo by his bed as a teen after seeing him speak in 1934. Skarsgard worked with Bergman on a 1986 stage play, but called their relationship "complicated" due to Bergman's harsh personality. He clarified: 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an {a*******}" Though Bergman renounced Nazism after WWII's horrors, calling the Holocaust a 'hideous shock', Skarsgard implied his earlier beliefs shaped his cruel behavior. The actor contrasted this with director Lars von Trier (who faced controversy for Nazi jokes), defending him as fundamentally "the opposite" of a Nazi despite flawed humor. Skarsgard's comments came while promoting *Sentimental Value*—a new film where he plays a flawed director-father. He reflected on artistic legacies, noting fame is "short-lived" and admitting, 'I'll be dead soon'. The festival honored his 50+ year career, from child actor in Bombi Bott to Dune and Mamma Mia!, where he joked about being objectified as one of three "cute and stupid" male 'bimbos'. Despite recent health struggles affecting his memory, he vowed to keep acting: 'Is there something I'd still like to try? Certainly'.
