As was inevitable.
I’ll have an article on Ken Burns exploiting the Holocaust to call for open borders and bash Republicans while covering up FDR’s role in the Holocaust later this week, but the sheer awfulness of it can be summed up in this paragraph from the equally antisemitic Guardian which never stops calling for the destruction of the Jewish State or justifying the murder of Jews.
It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at a church in South Carolina; white supremacists marching with flaming torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!”; the killing of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.
“Provocatively” in this case means shamelessly exploiting the Holocaust for a leftist agenda.
Only two, at best three, if you count Camp Auschwitz guy and Hitler guy, have anything to do with Jews and the Holocaust. But, most notably, they pretend that antisemitism is a phenomenon that wholly exists on one side, just shortly after the New York Times pushed the false claim that Jewish critics of Linda Sarsour’s antisemitism were Russian trolls.
“We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with antisemitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and nativism and eugenics,” he explains. “We’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.”
The slave trade?
“But I am also talking about Britain. I am also talking about the rise of the right in France. I’m talking about Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil and a tendency.”
Curiously, not about Iran, Hamas or any of the Jihadists who actually want to perpetrate another Holocaust.
The slave trade is part of the conversation, but Hitler’s Mufti and a regime whose motto is “Death to America, Death to Israel” isn’t.
“Roosevelt had to combat an isolationist America First committee. We meet characters like Breckinridge Long, this implacable antisemite and assistant secretary of state in the Roosevelt administration’s state department who does everything he can to obscure or bury news about the coming Holocaust and make it increasingly more difficult for refugees who are fulfilling the requirements.
“He’s always changing the requirements, raising the bar, moving the goalposts. He reminds me a little bit of Stephen Miller [a senior adviser to Trump] in the previous administration.”
Burns is deep in whitewashing FDR here who was violently antisemitic. The State Department was doing his bidding by keeping Jews from coming to America.
And then Burns tops it all by bringing in Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish.
The Republicans are the Nazis and Jewish conservatives are their enablers, in Burns’ world, and illegal aliens and BLM are the new Jews.
This is classic supersessionism and typical of the Left which appropriates Jewish history, dejudaizes it and then uses it to attack Jews.
Dr. Rafael Medoff : Ken Burns Distorts FDR’s Policy On Jewish Refugees – The numbers show that Burns is seriously mistaken
Medoff and the Wyman Institute are excellent resources.
http://new.wymaninstitute.org/
Thank you for the information Daniel.
Medoff is an excellent source. I often reference his articles.
Thanks for link, Very interesting, Especially here in FDR worship- land, I am grateful for even more information about this topic.
Thanks for link, Very interesting, Especially here in FDR worship- land, I am grateful for even more information about this topic.
“it may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at a church in South Carolina; white supremacists marching with flaming torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!”; the killing of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.”
No doubt there was no mention of the Orlando gay bar massacre (by a Muslim), the San Bernardino shootings (by Muslims) the Scalise shooting, the murder of five Dallas cops by BLM supporters, the Waukesha massacre, the orgy of BLM rioting in 2020, the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh, the arson attacks on Catholic churches and pregnancy crisis centers, and the daily carnage by black thugs in deep blue cities.
Oddly missing.
Also the two murderous attacks on a synagogue and a Kosher store by black nationalists.
Great points.
Anyone such as Burns who publishes material so one-sided and exclusive to a single political paradigm cannot possibly be considered as a historian in any credible sense….they are merely partisan hacks pushing the propaganda du jour.
The looming problem here is that Burns had at least some credibility in the past…so any more casual or gullible readers who read his current BS may be deceived.
Ken Burns most likely just doesn’t want to get disinvited and canceled from his social circle and career. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
I must admit, Mr. Greenfield, that on the very rare occasion when you post a reply to one of my comments I leave it alone if I disagree with it, not wanting the possibility of getting into an argument with an owner of this website and possibly getting banned.
I’m not the owner of this website. And no one is banning you for disagreeing with me or anyone else.
You’ve been told what the issue is numerous times.
Please stop the victimhood posturing.
Would you like some cheese with that whine or just a baby bottle?
My insight this morning was that he is like a trained parrot, always repeating the same lines he has memorized.
Another one: the four Muslim men in the Southwest who were murdered, and the press suspected it was a right wing Islamophobe, until the cops nabbed another Muslim from another branch of Islam. Haven’t heard any more about that one since.
And you won’t – at least not in the mainstream media – doesn’t fit the narrative.
I had an article on it, but yeah, not in the msm
I first realized Burns was a leftist fraud decades ago, watching his Civil War series.
I actually bought my mother the huge coffee table book version of that series without having watched it. Oh, well. She’s a lefty anyway so I didn’t hurt her any.
Some of the battle descriptions were good. I was a big fan of the Civil War when I was a kid, thought I knew a lot about it. Later I did some reading by experts and realized I hardly knew anything about it.
FDR could not have cared less about the Holocaust . Yes, there was anti Semitism in America in the 1940s and beforehand but the historical evidence is that FDR cared more about winning the war than in stopping the Holocaust and Hitler viewed himself as victorious if he rendered Europe Judenrein and lost to the Allies on the battlefield
Burns seems to have genuine mental health issues. I know lefties ignore reality on a regular basis and project their own vices on normal people, but Burns’s views on Nazis, the Holocaust and who today’s anti Semites are is deranged. He seems to actually believe the nonsense he asserts.
And he looks like a tranny.
The most interesting thing to me was the issue of bombing German railways. Medoff wrote some on that. Allied bombers that weren’t able to drop their bombs on their target and were flying back home with a load of bombs could have dropped them on the German railways. Even if that didn’t directly hamper the German war effort, it would have diverted German resources from fixing railways used to transport troops and such. German strategy was based in part on the advantage of interior lines, shifting troops from one front to another via the railways, etc.
Someone I know who was a very well-read amateur Civil War scholar (who periodically lectured on the Civil War) thought Burns’s Civil series was terrible. Another friend who was a big baseball history fan thought his Baseball series sucked. I am a big blues fan, and where his Jazz series discussed the blues, it was done in the same way a sixth grader might cover the topic, plus it had a political POV. Another friend who fought in Vietnam, and has done a lot of reading and research about the war, thought his Vietnam series was awful.
His research tends to be not particularly in-depth, and there is always a political point of view interjected at some point. They are always through his lens of contemporary left-leaning interpretation. These are not really documentaries in the sense of providing in-depth information on the topic. These are political reinterpretations of the topics he explores.
Probably his least political documentary was his first on the Shakers. And even it wasn’t very good.
Needless to I had a low expectations for the Holocaust documentary.
So I am not surprised by what I have read.
Upvote.
I have lost all respect for Ken Burns. I enjoyed his baseball series very much but he has allowed himself to be deeply partisan and bitterly hyper-critical.
It’s Ken Burns. Is anyone really surprised at how he would handle a documentary about the Holocaust?
PBS. Rick Steves did a one-hour special ‘Fascism in Europe.’ I’m waiting for a follow up ‘Communism in Europe.’
When pigs fly.
I’ll be honest when I say that this is disgusting. To use the tragedy of the Holocaust to get Americans to agree to illegal immigration is just abhorrent. I can’t believe this isn’t being called out more. This show wasn’t made to educate a sad moment in American history. It was made to shame Americans into buying into an open borders agenda. To simply use those who died in the Holocaust as political props in current debates should be condemned. Ken Burns should be ashamed of himself for doing something like this.
I watched the series and was deeply moved and horrified at the murdering of Jews by Hitler and his henchman and could only think that the Biden regime is a danger to Americans. In the most totalitarian speech ever given by an American president, Biden singled out white Republicans as a danger to the country as Hitler singled out the Jews.
Biden is in the beginning stages of the incitement of his own “Kristallnacht”. Be prepared for “false flag” events nearer to the election so that Biden can call out his BLM and Antifa henchmen and blame the destruction on Republican.
His evil has no bounds.