Ken Burns Explains It All

That is, just another annoying blip in the noisy static.  Apparently he produced a docuseries called The United States and the Holocaust.  If the interview in this article is any indicator, it is the same old same old for many, especially young, Americans.

That is, he’s gracious enough to say the United States wasn’t exactly responsible for the Holocaust per se, but then proceeds to explain how the United States and Nazi Germany were practically salt and pepper.  He trots out the Jim Crow era, genocide, Native Americans, slavery and antisemitism charges, applied to one country as easily as to the other.  

Apparently at least one episode focuses on the rift between FDR and antisemite Charles Lindberg.  I asked my son, who recently graduated college, about that.  He told me that those of his peers who even had heard of Lindberg, only knew him as some Nazi hero in our Nazi country, vaguely aware that he did something with flying. 

In keeping with our era of hyper-judgmentalism, the series seems wrapped in the context of ‘sure we beat the Nazis, liberated the camps, and allowed thousands to come into our country … but we didn’t do it perfectly enough.’  Not like it would have been if our generation was there!  When you have the track record we have, I suppose arrogance is all that’s left. 

The funny part of this interview is that one of the producers seems to think they’ve really blown the lid off of something.  The person talks about how ‘uncomfortable’ the real truth of our nation and its role in those events makes people in the audience feel, once they see the production. Really?  That’s like saying people will be uncomfortable when they learn the secret that slavery existed in America’s past.  That’s as much a lack of awareness as you can get.

Years ago, when I used to comment on the Huffington Post, I ran into people who believed that the whole of the Holocaust was an American conspiracy, as was the entire war.  By then (c. 2004ish), it wasn’t uncommon to run into people online who believed the Nazis were lifted up by the American Military Industrial complex for the sole purpose of inciting a war that the US could then exploit, and use to subjugate the world to our racist, imperialist ways. Compared to them, the saner ones back then dismissed such thinking, being content with the notion that America was no better than the Nazis, and didn’t really lift them up as much as inspire them (the old ‘the Nazis became racist when they studied the Confederacy’ storyline).  

That was almost 20 years ago.  Does Mr. Burns really think people like that have gone away as opposed to multiplied exponentially?  Does he really believe they will be uncomfortable with his documentary?  About the only thing that will make them uncomfortable is his insistence that the US isn’t solely responsible for the Holocaust.  That might bother them a bit. 

I don’t think we realize just how post-Western, and by extension post-American, we already are.  Harkening back to my oldest son, he said a cool 1/3 of his classmates can barely distinguish between the Swastika and the Stars and Stripes.  Had I not seen examples myself of such thinking over the years, I’d almost be inclined to think he exaggerates.  But I have.  

And we have those useful fools like Burns, a historian I’ve traditionally enjoyed, to thank.  Because instead of seeing the bleeding obvious, they think they are bravely facing the fan club by exclusively focusing on the negative, endlessly criticizing, and so blurring the line between Nazis and America.  

BTW, all of this is made possible by the Left effectively elevating Western-based racism as the only, all defining, most evil, unpardonable sin in the world. And that goes for anything we thought we did well, like win the Second World War.  This is aided by the fact that by now, about 75% of our recollection of WWII is focused on the Holocaust, primarily as it effected Jewish (and sometimes homosexual) victims; about 10% focused on the Japanese interment camps* in the US, another 10% recalling the use of the Atomic Bombs, over 4% (but growing) the segregation in the US military in WWII, and a shrinking less than 1% on D-Day.   

For most youngsters today, that was WWII. The tens of millions of others killed barely make a drop in the bucket where focus is concerned.  The soldiers?  Except for some minority groups, they are barely mentioned at this point.  I subscribe the the National Veterans Memorial and Museum updates.  It’s been many moons since a white male veteran was showcased.   You could be forgiven for not knowing white men ever served in our military if you got your info from that museum.  

But then, when mentioned at all, it’s increasingly the fact that they were likely racists in their own white supremacist army.  Hence Burns can acknowledge ‘a little heroism’ from that time, but those were mere specks of light in the overall darkness that is, and always has been, America.  When that’s your narrative, it’s not hard for young people to conclude the Soviets might have been the good guys all along. 

*In December 2021, I saw on the news that some Asian American activists are wanting ‘Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day’ to be replaced by the anniversary of the Japanese Internment camps.  Sort of how Juneteenth will assuredly never be used to replace July 4th.  Again, we’re seeing the utter destruction of the West and America, and it’s likely a bit too late to stop it.  Thanks go brilliant thinkers like Burns. 

Go here to comment.  Burns of course is not an historian.  He is the maker of fairly tedious documentaries, the type only PBS would run, who got very lucky with The Civil War (1991) because the late Shelby Foote saved him from his own instincts.

Too many students have imbibed a hate America first attitude from their Leftist teachers.  The saving grace is that most contemporary instruction is so ineffective that I doubt if the students who suffered through the indoctrination will recall it after a few years.  That it is a packet of lies goes without saying.  Always bet on the truth in the long run.