5/30/2023 0 Comments Ken burns narrator![]() It is tragic that in this, which Burns himself calls his most important work, he is stuck in a narrowness that so contradicts what has made the rest of his work beautiful and great. The quality of his work, the depth of his insight, the great heart of it, and the love for America that he has set down so compellingly and consistently in the rest of his body of work rises far above partisanship. I think she has done just that and has lived up to my trust. I admire people who admit and correct errors and then do not repeat them. I dismissed a rather partisan remark she made as not indicative of how she would work, a remark for which she apologized sincerely. Yet when she faced some conservative opposition to her appointment as our national point person on anti-Semitism, I supported her. I disagree with her on many political points. She is a courageous academic, a deservedly famous historian, and one who has earned a large measure of moral authority. It contaminates and poisons the moral message.ĭeborah Lipstadt is featured prominently throughout this series. Can one really make a moral equation? Is assuring that we can weed out the drug runners, human traffickers, and gang members from those seeking political asylum equivalent to denying shelter to Jews fleeing the gas chambers? Is it moral to conflate the two? This is mere political propaganda, an imposture of moral authority rather than the real thing. Where was a showing of Jewish campus groups’ meetings being broken up, Nazi-style, by organized groups dedicated to the destruction of the country where the world’s largest Jewish population lives? Where is a clip of powerful Democrat politicians, publicly embraced by Democrat leadership, spouting anti-Semitic tropes on the House floor and in speeches - Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, and other lesser lights? Where is the focus on the leftist ideologies that identify Jews as a class to be colonialists and white supremacists, and therefore worthy objects of mobbing, exclusion, and even violence?įurthermore, Burns willingly and powerfully equates the denial of asylum to European Jews facing Hitler’s annihilation machine to today’s attempt to any organized control of America’s borders. Why was he not featured? The best guess is that Burns’ politics obscured his vision here. If this doesn’t concern every conservative, then we are in trouble.īut where was a focus on Louis Farrakhan, in one of any number of obscene, Jew-baiting moments? Here is a powerful leader who is unabashedly anti-Semitic and who is powerful enough to subvert politicians to his purposes - that is, he’s effective and dangerous. And here is where Burns has failed.įair enough. It is only that it runs the risk of exposing political bias in such a way that the moral lesson becomes muddled, compromised, and made subservient to a political vision that is not the same as the moral vision it likes to claim it is. It is not that any attempt to directly and forthrightly connect a moral lesson learned from history to the politics of the day must fail. That show trusted its viewers and their conscience. As mentioned, America and the Holocaust succeeded in drawing a searing moral lesson by its even-handed presentation of the faults of the actors of that day and allowed the viewers to connect that and apply that to the politics of the moment as they would be moved. Not that such a lesson could not or should not be made. As far as that goes, it was excellent.īut Burns stumbled badly in trying to preach a moral lesson at the end. It was unsparing of liberals and conservatives alike, and thereby established its moral credentials.īurns retells that story, though with a lighter hand on FDR. Spurred by the scholarship of historian David Wyman, that show was unsparing of Franklin Roosevelt, of official American complacency, and of the ineffectuality of the establishment American Jewish organizations. That earlier show, if anything, was more pointed and unsparing than Burns is in portraying America’s role in denying shelter and protection to Europe’s Jews as the horror of the Nazi genocide fell upon them, step by step. The 1994 PBS program America and the Holocaust, part of The American Experience series, already went over much of the ground covered here, having learned from many of the innovations Burns had introduced into documentary film and video. The story of America and the Holocaust has been told well before.
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