Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
Instead of making people victims of people who are successful, we should be telling people, 'Look, you are having a hard time, I feel bad for you. Let's look at what you're doing, let's teach you how to succeed. Let's give you the tools to succeed as opposed to turning everybody into victims.
Teaching is mostly listening, and learning is mostly telling.
It's the first thing liberals notice about people is what group are you in! "What group do I put you in? Are you a woman? Are you lesbian? Are you straight? Are you Native American? Are you African-American? Are you a mix? What are you?" That's how they see people, because that then identifies the victim status they hold. Victims of what? Victims of America! All these people are victims of America, "the white, patriarchal majority." They're all victims of America, as the left sees them.
Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.
I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.
Climate change is not about climate change. It's about the people in it getting rich off of an ever-expanding, growing, controlling government. It's all about expanding the government and government control over people. It's about creating victims. When you successfully turn somebody into a victim, you have automatically made them a dependent on you. You are essentially telling them they have lost the power necessary to solve their own problems. And you create within them a mentality that they can't overcome their own problem because they're victims.
People in the West tend to identify with western victims. So even when they think about the Holocaust, they really think about the German or French victims; they're not thinking about the Polish, Hungarian, or Soviet victims.
The movie not only about what story you're telling and who you're looking at. It's mostly about how you're telling it and how you're looking at it. And people who don't like it, who say, "Oh, it's not 'true' because you're looking at it in a stylized way" - it's a movie and it's fiction, so it's also a lot in the artistic direction that it is political.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
People who consider themselves victims of their circumstances will always remain victims unless they develop a greater vision for their lives.
I don't see black people as victims even though we are exploited. Victims are flat, one- dimensional characters, someone rolled over by a steamroller so you have a cardboard person. We are far more resilient and more rounded than that. I will go on showing there's more to us than our being victimized. Victims are dead.
Though people are more important than money, I'm not convinced these large sums of money paid out to victims is the best. Listening to the some of the victims, I think we could have avoided a lot of this if the Church had humbly apologized to them, but we tried to bully some of them. I pray the victims are healed.
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
I love New Zealand. Every time I'm in New Zealand someone makes a joke about it being mostly sheep, which I think is unfair, because it's mostly nice people. It's mostly nice people and really wonderful scenery.