THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Ken Burns Is Not Worthy of His Own Best Vision.
Sadly and tragically, Burns stumbles by leaving us confused as to whether the moral peril is confined only to those who are identifiably on the right.
This is most pronounced in the final episode of his series, when he directly preaches his lesson. He shows vivid and affective images in the screen of neo-Nazi types doing their thing in all its squalid ugliness. Here they are in Charlottesville, Virginia, wearing Nazi tattoos and screaming in full paranoiac breakdown mode about not being replaced. Here they are among the crowds on Jan. 6, waving violently anti-Semitic signs.
Fair enough. If this doesn’t concern every conservative, then we are in trouble.
But 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. Why was he not featured? The best guess is that Burns’ politics obscured his vision here.
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?
Furthermore, 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. 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. It contaminates and poisons the moral message.
Just think of Burns as a Democratic Party operative with director’s credit, and his “no enemies to the left” attitude makes perfect sense.
Earlier: Ken Burns’ Angry New Film.