Burns reminds me of the adage that history isn't so much written by the winners as it is taught by the winners. Or at least taught by those who want to keep in the good graces of the winners. Saying in 2025 that we need to focus more on the negative of America's history is like saying McCarthy should have spent more time focused on Communism. At this stage, the negative is all that most, especially the young, ever hear. From our schools and their curriculums, the media and press, Hollywood, and even churches. After all, a growing number of such venues as Evangelical churches are led by younger and younger leaders who have, for most of their lives, heard that there is scant difference between the Swastika and the Stars and Stripes.
As my sons said from their time in public school, and that was in the 2000s: Pretty much everything America was a negative. And what heroism, or 'glorious' chapters as Burns says, was mentioned at all was wrapped in the assumption of malice, bigotry, and ulterior motives. In other words, we might have beaten the Nazis, but it had nothing to do with anything other than our own lust for power, empire, money for arms manufacturers, or other nefarious reasons. And that was going on 20 years ago.
For those who spent years wondering what they would do if a force of tyranny ever rose and sought to destroy our nation, our heritage, our values and our freedoms, now we can see. Someone like Burns either knows what he is doing, or is so oblivious to his own place in our historical context that it’s no longer profitable to care what he says.
There was a controversy in 2006-07 when three young man at Duke University were accused of raping a stripper. They were eventually cleared by the state attorney-general, but their families were out several hundred thousand dollars each in legal fees and they'd endured a campaign of vilification that lasted for months and included national media, local media, the local prosecutor, and Duke faculty. Even after they were cleared, they were subject to vitriolic denunciations by the world's scolds for having been present at a four minute strip show. (Julie Ponzi of the Claremont Institute was one of these).
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Ken Burns referred to their legal ordeal as 'an inconvenience'. Here is Prof. KC Johnson's critique of Burns' public remarks. (https://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2012/12/ken-burns-history-lesson.html)
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The man doesn't know justice from tiddlywinks. (It's also been remarked that its rather pretentious for Burns to lecture the rest of the country on race matters while living in Vermont).
That was early when the Left was making its move to insist only white people can be racist or particularly evil for that matter. That it blew up in their face was merely a hiccup, as the press embarked on a weeks long crusade to find out anything those Duke Players might have done wrong. It was also when watching a Duke professor say that all white American boys are hardwired to want to assault black women, my second oldest quipped that 'apparently we can always tell a racist by the color of his skin.' It had more punch then than now, where now we are told we're racists if we're not prepared to judge and discriminate based on ethnic identity.
DeleteHe could have replaced "American" with "human" and spoken more true.
ReplyDeleteUnless there is some group he has in mind who's history is clean which.... I haven't found any yet.
By now the Left is openly at a post-human era where only the demographic identity matters, and when it matters may vary. The point is to insist there was nothing in history more wretched and villainous than white people in the Christian West and its bastard child America. That is something almost everyone must confess and some, like Deacon Greydanus, have learned to confess it with gusto, using the requisite tactic of simply looking away if any suffering can't be used to serve that template.
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