From the JTA: Kirk Douglas, 94, is honored for breaking the Hollywood blacklist 50 years ago by hiring the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for his film Spartacus. Trumbo had been blacklisted.
While Trumbo was not Jewish, six of the other Hollywood Ten were, and among many politicians and compilers of “suspect” lists, charges of being a New York or Hollywood “commie symp” served as the code word for Jew.
Along with Douglas, “Spartacus” also featured two other prominent Jews: director Stanley Kubrick and Howard Fast, also blacklisted, who wrote the original book. It was based on the life and death of the Thracian slave whose followers nearly overthrew the mighty Roman Republic in the Third Servile War of the first century BCE.
So, Douglas was asked, was the campaign against “politically unreliable” artists fueled, at least in part, by anti-Semitism? Of course, he answered.
“Listen, all my life I’ve always assumed that everybody I met was an anti-Semite unless he could prove otherwise,” he said....
That boldface line is the nut of the problem. My dad, who was blacklisted writer and friends of all the Hollywood Ten and who was a defiant witness before HUAC in 1951, was nine years older than Douglas but didn't feel that way and, fortunately, didn't educate his kids to feel that way either. One of the depressing things about this article is that it reminded me that Dalton Trumbo who wasn't Jewish and who I also knew and greatly respected, wrote the screenplay for Exodus which is yet further evidence how taken the communist left was with Israel. So it went and so it goes.
By the way, here Douglas expresses his love for Israel, mentions that he has made four movies there and that Israel was in need of support from Americans...
Not just the Communist left, almost the whole left. Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party condemned Truman all the way up to the 1948 election for not supporting the nascent Israel enough.
I’ve sometimes thought that the world might have been better off if FDR had died a year earlier, so that he was succeeded as President by Wallace, rather than Truman. Well, there might never have been a Cold War then, and I suppose that would have been a good thing. But there would still have been an Israel, and the U.S. under Wallace would probably have supported it even more.
Yes, it was with a few honorable exceptions the whole left: from Marxists, Social Democrats, intellectuals known for their fierce independence such as Bertrand Russell and Sartre–although they changed their mind near the end of their lives–all the way to the freewheeling anarchists:
That quote was from David Hacohen, the director of the Histadrut’s construction company, which I published in the Middle East Labor Bulletin in the late 80s or early 90s.
It is important because it demonstrates the racist and chauvinist attitudes toward Palestinians and Palestinian workers that persists to this day.
It was because the Palestine Solidarity Committee in the SF Bay Area, which was heavily mal-influenced by the Marxist Line of March (whose leadership was predominantly Jewish and believed that the Democrats could be moved to the left) and which produced Phyllis Bennis, was totally against targeting either the Histadrut or the AFL-CIO for its slavish pro-Israel policies, that Steve Zeltzer and I started the Labor Committee on the Middle East in August 1987.
Our first action was to picket the annual dinner that the SF Labor Council threw for the Histadrut every year at a time when it was being attacked in Israel for its collaboration with apartheid South Africa. It even had an office at one of the union locals.
Although we received no support from the PSC or any of the Marxist, Trotskyist or Maoist groups, the picket drew a lot of publicity because of the anti-apartheid connection. As a result, the Histadrut closed its office and there were no more such dinners.
“‘Listen, all my life I’ve always assumed that everybody I met was an anti-Semite unless he could prove otherwise,’”
Wow. What a pathetic way to live a life. And a self-fulfilling outlook, as well, as he no doubt had people be put off by his attitude that he chose to believe was on account of his religion/ethnicity, when it was really because he was an a-hole.
Your sentiments are on the money, Mr. Blankfort. It is truly horrific to raise people with the belief that everyone around them wants to hurt them.
Back in the day, many blacklisted people were Jews. Today, many people doing the blacklisting are Jews.
Communist left? As an agnostic communist(I want to believe), Communism has always been consonant with Internationalism. Obviously, we are one people who share one planet. Any self-described communist who would upset a sensible outcome of simple arithmetic and call for “special” States for an elect is nothing of the sort.
I’m not that far to the Left – still, I can imagine myself thinking admiringly of the Zionist project in the confusing aftermath of war. Not everyone would have managed to identify Jewish people with the vanguard of the international working class, though many did – thus producing a Marxist version of the ‘light to the nations’ theme. But British people in general would have virtuously remembered rejecting Oswald Moseley and his ‘Perish Judah’ slogan in the prewar years. And of course Hitler had been against the Jews, so we should be for them. I can see how it would have been easy to think like Henry Wallace.
Anglicans in the UK who thought themselves progressive but non-pacifist would have remembered the example of Archbishop Temple who in wartime had co-founded the Council of Christians and Jews and given voice to numbers of Jewish civilian casualties of an order of magnitude comparable to those later reached by Hilberg. What better way to make a Christian contribution to a better world than to support the idealistic Israel project?
Sometimes it’s difficult not to go wrong.
My love for Israel peaked at Entebbe. My boss, my crew, myself all acclaimed “Death to the cowardly terrorists!” But I had heard of the Palestinians, whether or not I wanted or expected to. All things considered, it’s the irony, not fate or fairies or even wise philosophers.
AN INTERESTING DOCUMENTARY
Trumbo, 2007, PG-13, 95 minutes
After failing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, successful screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted in Hollywood. This documentary details Trumbo’s life through personal letters, interviews and archival footage. Well-known actors such as Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn, Donald Sutherland and others lend their voices to readings of Dalton Trumbo’s personal letters.
Netflix Availability: Streaming and DVD
NETFLIX LISTING – link to movies.netflix.com
TRUMBO Trailer (VIDEO, 02:25) – link to youtube.com
I can judge a persons art apart from his personal life or political ideology. Some of my favorite movies are:
Lonely are the Brave
Ace in the Hole
Paths of Glory
What Woody Allen did to Mia Farrow and her family was disgusting but Midnight in Paris is brilliant.
So what do you think of the film contributions of Leni Riefenstahl and Roman Polanski?
Both made very significant contributions to the art of film, but there is no way to excuse Riefenstahl’s using her talents (unlike Fritz Lang) to benefit the National Socialists.
Polanski’s behavior back in the ’70s was quite dissimilar, but nonetheless inexcusable.
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl 1993 NR 188 minutes
By directing propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, Leni Riefenstahl became one of the most controversial filmmakers of all time. This engrossing documentary explores her legacy and association with Hitler…
Language: German
Netflix Availability: DVD
NETFLIX LISTING – link to movies.netflix.com
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired 2008 NR 99 minutes
This penetrating documentary explores the tumultuous events of director Roman Polanski’s personal life, including the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and the controversial sex scandal that prompted him to flee the U.S. for France…
Netflix Availability: Streaming and DVD
NETFLIX LISTING – link to movies.netflix.com
P.S. Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (Harlan: Im Schatten von Jud Süss) 2008 NR 99 minutes
Documentarian Felix Moeller profiles one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious — yet largely forgotten — filmmakers in this penetrating biographical portrait of Veit Harlan, best known for directing the anti-Semitic 1940 propaganda film Jew Süss…
Availability: Streaming and DVD
NETFLIX LISTING – link to movies.netflix.com
I first studied “Triumph of the Will” in film school because it is still considered one of the best propaganda films ever made, in fact Leni Riefenstahl perfected the psychological grammar of film. Without her we might not have had “Citizen Kane” or modern cinema. That is hyperbole, someone else would have understood the psychology of camera angles but she was the first to use them for such strong effect. Leni Riefenstahl was either an evil genius or completely amoral and willing to work for whoever had the power. “Birth of a Nation” is another breakthrough film using innovative film technique, older and more primitive, but still important to the evolution of film.
D. W. Griffith and Leni Riefenstahl made films which glorified racism and fascism but their technical contributions to film narrative are invaluable. As such I condemn their content. The documentary about Riefenstahl Dickerson mentions above shows her to be dictitorial: she tries to take control of the crew filming the documentary.
Polanski is brilliant. He liked drugs and young girls at one time–fairly common for Hollywood.
I would not compare Griffith with Riefenstahl. Griffith’s film was a vicious piece of racist fiction based on a novel by a KKK member which was largely responsible for creating the racist stereotypes that persisted in the cinema and throughout American culture until at least the end of the last century and still linger today.
Riefenstahl, on the other hand, was hired to make a documentary of the Nazi Congress in 1934, just after Hitler came into power, four years before Kristallnacht, and like the majority of Germans whose country had been unfairly treated at the Versailles conference embraced Hitler and the Nazi Party as symbolizing a resurgence of the German identity.
While we can question her judgment, we cannot hold her to the crimes committed by the Nazis in the years afterward whereas we can and should identify and excoriate Griffith for being one of the great contributors to white America’s crimes against black America.
I have the original souvenir pamphlet that accompanied the film, replete with quotes from leading public figures who claimed that the film represented “history, as it was.” Even President Wilson had a private screening in the White House.
I have seen Birth of a Nation several times over the years and my opinion of it and Griffith has not changed. As a piece of cinema it has been overrated but whether or not one agrees with that opinion, we need to ask the question, is the protection of a so-called “work of art” more important than the lives of the millions who have been indirectly victimized by it? My answer is a resounding, “No!”
Blaming Griffith as being ” one of the great contributors to white America’s crimes against black America” is an overstatement. Griffith wasn’t that important nor was his film universally accepted. His next film, Intolerance, was intended as a grand rebuke of the criticism that Birth of a Nation received.
The level of hatred of black Americans by white Americans, especially Southern whites, needed nothing from Griffith to keep it going. He was a reflection of his society’s hateful racism more than he was a cause of it.
So was Riefenstahl a reflection of German courage and aspirations in the wake of the unjust Versailles Treaty toll?
I would never think of it as courage although it is obvious that Hitler, who looks ridiculous to those of us today who have watched his speeches, did inspire the majority of the German people, including Reifenstahl, to believe that he could restore Germany, if not to greatness, then at least to overcoming the humiliations foisted upon them by the Allies at Versailles. It was that treaty that produced Hitler and paved the way for WW2.
I must confess that I have become more charitable in my opinions of Reifenstahl over the years as I have learned more about the history of WW 1. My reaction upon first watching Triumph of the Will as part of an extraordinary double bill with Alain Renais’s brilliant Night and Fog was anything but sympathetic. Outrage would have been a better description of my feelings, but that’s the one I have felt every time I have seen Birth of a Nation and in that case it is more than warranted.
I remember about 20 years back approaching the owner of a wonderful book store in SF that specialized in the cinema and expressing my opinion about Birth of a Nation and the unbelievably smarmy description of it on the back cover of a book about it that was very much what I have written here. He became so upset with me challenging this “masterpiece” that his hands began to shake.
Woody, anti-black racism was not a problem restricted to the South. Every city and town in the US was segregated and I don’t know where you got your information about the lack of acceptance of the film to the degree that I suggested it was, but it’s wrong. That Griffith was a reflection of society more than an active player I would argue with. I would say that he was clearly both.
Whereas I agree that white Southerners didn’t need instructions in how to be racist, what BOAN did was to give it legitimacy. That he later made Intolerance did not erase its corrosive effects. In truth, the US has never come to grips with the crimes that have committed against not only African-Americans and Native Americans and the latter, too, have suffered at the hands of Hollywood to this day.
Jeffrey, I’m neither saying that the problem was restricted to the South nor am I sayin that the film wasn’t accepted. What I’m saying is that while the film was accepted, that acceptance was not universal, and the voices of condemnation were strong enough to propel Griffith to respond to them in his next film, which is a signficant fact.
But I am also saying that while the film did reinforce the feelings of racism in the country, it wasn’t a cause of that racism, nor, in my opinion, was the film terribly important in giving legitimacy to that racism. The culture at large, itself, and the law of the land, especically (but, again, not exclusively, in the South) gave that legitimacy, at that time. The film was an important cultural event, but I believe that it was a reflection of its time.
And you are, of course, absolutely correct in the US having never come to grips with its crimes against not only African-Americans and Native Americans, but also Asians and Asian-Americans, native Hawaiians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans and South Americans, and the list goes on and on.
“The film was an important cultural event, but I believe that it was a reflection of its time. ”
By this I mean, of course, that it reflected what was occurring in the society at large, but was not, itself, a cause of that racism.
I agree with you completely in terms of how all those who do not fit the white skinned European mold have been depicted in the US cinema and in the media, in general, for decades. It was complaining about that and the predominant role of Jews in Hollywood in perpetuating those racist and negative stereotypes in a conversation with Larry King that brought charges of “antisemitism” against Marlon Brando and forced him to tearfully apologize to the Jewish lords of Hollywood.
But I will disagree with you that Griffith’s film merely reflected public opinion at the time more than influencing it. Any investigation of the uses of propaganda would prove otherwise. Bernays was the expert on that, from getting Americans opposed to WW 1 to beating the war drums to getting women to smoke.
For those white Americans whose interactions with black Americans was limited and whose lives were largely segregated, the disgusting images of black Americans in that film could not but have encouraged a greater degree of racist attitudes on their part than existed before they viewed it.
I agree with JB here. Films operate on the subconscious, as do the better stand up comics. And the same for Larry David’s work. Goebbels was the best, that is, the most effective student of Bernays to date. Of course, he had a captive audience. The Nazi radios were free, but so was the monopolistic content. TPTB are more sophisticated today because they have to be. Today, it’s all about what is not allowed easy access to the public as compared to what is.
Query:
Should snuff movies be banned? Why or why not?
Should pornography be banned? Why or why not?
Should art works favoring pedophilia be banned? How about NAMBLA? Why or why not?
Should Solzitzen’s 200 years be banned in English as a practical matter? Why or why not?
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Outside of European countries who ban all things Nazi, what should and should not be banned? The Germans once banned all Jewish works and art. Now they ban all Nazi works and art. Is this the way to go?
Thing is, if you control the levers of power in art and entertainment, do you really need to burn books? No.
That’s where we are at now in America.
Lastly, I’m reminded of the adage that our civil right of free speech protection is not needed for anything popular.
Still, there is also the adage that no man is an island; each is part of the main. If you have to opt to protect the individual over the collective, does that make you civilized? Or, conversely, if you opt to protect the collective over the individual, what governing tyranny does not like that?
all my life I’ve always assumed that everybody I met was an anti-Semite unless he could prove otherwise
that’s a crazy way to live your life. i didn’t even know douglas was jewish. what difference would it make, or does it make to me? nothing. this assumes everyone goes thru life with these filters on their eyes whereby everything is judged thru the prisms of prejudice and fear. literally everything. it’s just crazy.
annie, i bet most Americans don’t know the background of the ragpicker’s son; OTOH, I bet nearly all Jewish Americans do. KD’s prejudice against all Gentiles is a problem when it its wedded to big dollars and network influence.
But KD’s first wife wasn’t Jewish, was she? He married rich Bermudian British.
Jeffrey Blankfort, thank you for this article.
Back in the 1940′s, 50′s and 60′s, the Israelis had a near-monopoly on information. Their narrative was the only narrative most Americans heard. The Palestinians had little success in getting their side of the story out until the 1970′s. I think the PLO didn’t even have an English-speaking press representative until the 1970′s.
Edward Said’s 1978 publication, Orientalism, was a turning point, for at least some part of the public. But until the establishment of the Electronic Intifada in 2002, it was hard to find out what was really happening in I/P on a day-to-day basis.
It’s quite different now: the Palestinians are getting their side of the story out.
Jeffrey Blankfort’s piece is a welcome reminder that, decades ago, grotesque portraits of the I/P conflict were common even in liberal/left circles. Norman Finkelstein’s recent book, “This Time We Went Too Far”, about the 2008 Gaza massacre, documents the recent big decline in support for Israel among non-Jewish liberals.
I believe the first book in English to present the Palestinian side of the conflict was, “Palestine: The Arab-Israeli Conflict,” edited by Russ Stetler with my photos published in 1972 by Ramparts Press which contained articles on Fatah, the PFLP, and the DFLP, interviews with Leila Khaled and Arafat, and articles by Israeli anti-zionists. There has never been anything since quite like it. Once in a while a copy becomes available on the internet at a reasonable price but there doesn’t seem to be one at the moment.
Hitler had already showed his hand by the time Triumph of the Will was filmed. Night of the Long Knives, dispersal of the Reichstag and elimination of all rival political parties had already happened. I don’t buy your whitewash of Riefenstahl because Germany had by this time become a fascist state. Promoting the Nazi Party contributed to more deaths than Birth of a Nation.
We can argue art vs. morality but my bottom line is I don’t need some Grand Inquisitor censoring the world for me.
“Promoting the Nazi Party contributed to more deaths than Birth of a Nation.”
Do you really think so? Do you think had not her documentary been made, there would have been one less victim of Hitler? Was that film the extent of the Third Reich’s propaganda designed to get its citizenry ready for a war of conquest? Hardly.
Judging from your post, you would have opposed any attempt to censor the anti-semitic posters and cartoons produced by the Nazis that depicted Jews as some subhuman species because those, too, in their way, could be classified as “art” as were the works of those inside and outside of Germany that made fun of the Nazis.
Some years back there was a movie, a comedy, in fact, made by a South African racist called, “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” which was very popular in the US, and depicted black as Africans as either stupid or venal, who needed a blond white man and woman to come to their rescue (to put it simply). The film was clearly a well-made pro-apartheid propaganda piece which was strongly denounced by black South African activists and correctly so for what it was.
When I learned it was coming to the SF Bay Area I organized a picket line of its showings in Berkeley and San Francisco, and because apartheid in South Africa was a more acceptable subject to deal with than apartheid in Israel/Palestine it received a lot of press and I had equal TV time with the director Jamie Uys who, when asked by a local columnist about the protests, suggested that we had “too much democracy” here.
I am generally opposed to all forms of censorship, Optimax, but I think being an artist does not absolve one from being responsible to one’s fellow humans and I do not consider any work of art more important than a human life and certainly not when we are talking about tens or hundreds of thousands.
So sorry, I would have put some serious restrictions on the showing of Griffith’s film which was nothing less than an unambiguous call for the lynching of blacks in the South.
How many were murdered because of that film we will never know, but it set the tone for making white racism acceptable across the land until the 60s and not only in the South. .
You don’t think portraying Hitler and his party as the savior of the German people influenced them and the trajectory of history? Then why was it so popular with the German public? I can’t say one way or the other what course Germany would have taken if the film had never been made, but neither can you. The two main tools of an authoritarian government has of controling a people are fear and propaganda, and “Triumph of the Will” is still one of the most successful pieces of propaganda ever made.
You’ve seen “Birth of a Nation” several times but want to restrict others from seeing it. What gives you the right to deny others the ability to judge for themselves? Nazi Germany was a highly censored society that did not allow dissension of anti-semetic or pro-Nazi propaganda. The White Rose was an underground group of German activists that distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets. They were hunted down, imprisoned and killed. To the contrary, in the US a Black film industry was able to produce films that countered White racism and, though those films were seen mostly by Blacks, today they survive on television and other venues while “Birth of a Nation” is relegated to mostly to the technical analysis of film historians.
Today we allow the Nazi Party to organize marches in our cities. Have you ever seen videos of their attempts to recreate Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies? The Nazi’s get maybe 50 troopers from around the nation to march and thousands of protesters line the streets shouting down, spitting on and throwing eggs at the uniformed marchers.
The power of the Nazi Party in Germany did not stem from freedom of speech but from censorship.
I have no doubt that Triumph of the Will played an important role in revving up the German people to support the Third Reich and its need for lebensraum, but she did not create that Nuremberg rally, she skillfully recorded it. It was part, albeit a pervasive one, of the Nazi propaganda war against the communists, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone who did not fit into the Nazi’s Aryan standards. But in the end, it was an historical piece and had no influence beyond those moments in time.
One cannot say the same about Griffith and what you say about the Black film industry is a joke and a bad one in this context. Based on Thomas Dixon’s novel, “The Clansman,” (it’s original title), from its first showing in 1915 Birth of a Nation set the tone for black-white relations for decades (as well as depictions of blacks in the movies), legitimizing Jim Crow not only in the South but also among most Northern whites.
I am old enough to remember that there was no outrage when columnist Westbrook Pegler, a Glenn Beck of his day, wrote that “Lynching is as American as ice cream sodas,” when on the streets of nearby Glendale, when I was a kid, blacks had to be off the streets by sundown, when I was a teenager going to meeting to protest the burning of a cross on a black family’s lawn a few miles from where I lived when they had the temerity to move into a white neighborhood (and the FBI was there, keeping an eye on the protesters, not trying to find who did it), of while attending college and working at a newspaper in downtown LA, watching the LA cops systematically harassing black men and stopping black, as well as Latino couples, who dared to leave their ghettos and barrios on a Saturday night to venture into Hollywood, putting the man up against the wall and humiliating him in front of his wife or girl friend.
I remember a talented writer, Carlton Moss, a friend of my parents, who couldn’t get hired to write a screenplay in Hollywood, but who ghosted the autobiographies of Lena Horne and a few other black celebrities, having to build his own house in Hollywood with his own hands because he had a white wife and interracial marriage was not only illegal in California until 1951, even an unmarried couple could not find a place to rent.
And as for being hunted down and killed, that was the black American experience, not for less than a decade, but for centuries. When they were looking for the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman near Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, they drained a local pond and found the bodies of 23 black men. The story merited a one and a half inch article in the SF Chronicle.
So please don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t think about that racist, Griffith and his racist film. If it was a choice of showing it, without restrictions to the public today and burning it, I would burn it. If that upsets you, so be it. And I wouldn’t burn it because I don’t like it but because it would still appeal to a substantial segment of our fellow citizens who cannot accept a black man as the US president and whose racism was more than confirmed by the rush to buy guns after Obama’s election.
Is there any film or book that honestly records/reflects that first decade (or two) in the South after the Civil war?
I mean the Reconstruction Era from 1865 to the early 1890s: link to en.wikipedia.org
The first book to tell the truth was Black Reconstruction by WEB DuBois, a major work published in 1935,. which was considered “revisionist” because it exposed the lies that been spread by the mainly white Southern historians whose textbooks were still in use when I attended UCLA in the 50s.
In fact. my senior paper in US history was a critique of three of those text books which not only lied about the reconstruction period, they also lied about the evils of slavery, and like the Zionist apologists for Israeli occupation, they wanted their readers to believe that the lives of slaves were relatively pleasant and that it was only when agitators and abolitionists appeared were there problems.
Their argument was that since slaves were property their owners generally treated them well to protect their investments and inferred they were better off under slavery than during the reconstruction period when they were taken advantage of by Yankee “carpertbaggers” and their own politicians who were venal and corrupt. That’s where Griffith’s influence clearly manifested itself.
I’m not telling you what to think. I just don’t believe in burning films or books I consider dangerous. If I did I would destroy 50% of the current television, film and art. I have a theory that many people would support an authoritarian, even totalitarian, government if they agreed with its ideology.
I also think it’s emotionally comforting to get worked up about past wrongs, like slavery and Jim Crow, than confront the present debt-slavery the financial system is imposing on America and the world, the sex-slaves imported from the third world or the various forms of present day slavery. It’s important to understand history but you must live in the present. That you don’t trust people to make their own judgements concerning “Birth of a Nation”, tells me more about you than the people whose minds you believe you must control.
There are not many works of art or what is considered a work of art that I would destroy or keep from public viewing. In fact, I can’t think of another one besides Birth of a Nation, and I oppose censorship because once one starts there is no telling where it will end. But for me, there’s an exception and this film is it.
That I am aware and recall past wrongs does not mean I am not very much engaged in the present but this discussion does not revolve around the present so such criticism at this point is irrelevant.
If you wish to know the truth I do not trust the people’s judgments and that is based on long experience. People’s judgments, everywhere, are invariably influenced by the information or rather disinformation they get in their schools and what they hear from the politicians and from the mainstream media, and I can speak, as a former high school teacher for the serious mis-education of American kids in the field of history a mis-education that seems to be a requirement to get a sufficient number of them willing to go to war when the government requires it, even if the people they are going to kill have never done them any harm. Do I trust their judgment? No. Do you?
Were it not for the courts and primarily the Warren Court, we might still be living in a segregated Jim Crow nation since what evidence that is available indicates that blacks would never have been de jure (if not de facto) lifted from their second-class status, in school and otherwise, if the decision had been left to the voters.
In California, where I have lived most of my life, every single ballot proposition that has dealt with race and, I should now add, sexual gender, has been won by the intolerant majority. Should their judgment be trusted?
Why should I trust your judgement? or the government’s? or the Priests’ or Rabbis’ or Immans’? the scholar, the rich, the working class or the poor? or someone else’s god? Who, Jeffery, judges for you?
Burning films, books or men and women with subversive ideas is a place I will not go.”Show with restrictions.” I’m sure your motives are pure and noble and you only want to help create a world that reflects your goodness. It has been tried many times before and these monsters knew they were right.
I’m sure you are a good person (this time I”m not being ironic) but censorship as a tactic of public control is based on the assumption of the infallibility of the censor. I can admire your morals and at the same time disagree with your tactics.
Where do you see me asking you or anyone else to trust my judgment? But we live in a world in which nothing is black and white and those who participate in it with both hands learn that very quickly.
Try this hypothetical example: We went to war in Iraq, a country that never attacked or threatened us, killing hundreds of thousands of its people, setting one segment of its population against the other, destroyed much of its infrastructure and caused four million of its inhabitants to flee outside of its borders and did so with the support of the majority of the American people who had been lied to not only by the president and those around him but by a number of nationally syndicated columnist and faux historians who insisted that Saddam was a threat to our national interest and needed to be destroyed? Those, whose voices and opinions challenged that opinion were ignored by the national media as were the protests against you. Without the steady stream of pro-war propaganda, that war wouldn’t have happened.
Now, my question to you is, “Is maintaining the right to free speech and freedom of the press, as exercised in the United States, more important than the preserving the lives of the people of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Pakistan, and before that, of Panama, of Vietnam, of Laos, of the Philippines, of Nicaragua, of El Salvador, and on and on, who, I will argue, were the victims of our free press and free speech?
Now you see that the world is not so simple is your comment indicates.
Some modifications of free speech in moments of crisis do seem permissible in theory, as even John Stuart Mill would agree.
But I don’t quite see how the fact that we savaged Iraq because we believed the lies of the powerful (perhaps there were also other and deeper, I don’t say creditable, reasons) is a reason for restricting free speech or freedom of artistic expression. If there are restrictions on free speech those restrictions will be operated Thrasymachus-style by the powerful, who else? If there is to be a counterweight to the lies of the powerful it has to come from free speech among those with less power, where else? I’m sorry we believed George Bush and Tony Blair and not the Dixie Chicks (I think I remember the name correctly) or Scott Ritter – but at least it was possible for someone to tell the truth and for opinion to swing their way after a while.
But even with political speech, when one moves to censor it, there eventually comes a point when it gets out of control, or rather under too much control. We have seen that in countries that have experienced revolutions in which those who have been tortured and or forced to spend years in prisons for their beliefs and/or their activities, become the torturers and jailers when the tables have been turned and, sadly,.this transformation usually seems to present no problems for their supporters in the West who are quick to justify it. But that’s a separate topic for another time.
Well, I hope we’ll see your latest thoughts on this further topic sometime very soon!
What a great discussion. Thank you for taking the time here.
The only thing I wanted to add, which I wanted to point out two feet ago after Dickerson and Optimax started naming films, is that the difference between Riefenstahl and Griffith is the difference between a documentary with sound, and a novel with subtitles.The novel with subtitles (1) played in white movie houses, and (2) required the audience to read.
[I always had a thing against anti-black racism, even as a four/five-year-old and unschooled. I never bought the whole anti-black thing. I despised blackploitation movies as well; I found them racist, small-minded. I remember arguing with an artist friend in New York who railed against Bill Cosby's sitcom with Phylicia Rashad. She claimed it was so phony because no blacks would live like that (middle-class house, non-ebonics doctor and teacher, regular teenage problems). She thought ghetto movies/TV shows were the norm, and that Cosby was racist and an Uncle Tom trying to live in a white world. I found her position racist.]
I don’t call the monopolized press’ refusal to air the opinions and facts of the anti-war side freedom of the press. That’s self-censorship. The problem with most people is they don’t dig deeper than the MSM to get the real facts or contrary opinions. The ownership of the MSM in a few, self-serving hands directs the flow of propaganda.
I know people have their heads buried in the sand. I talk to a lot of people and most aren’t interested in discussing politics inteligently. If I bring up Israel, their eyes glaze over. I had one woman tell me I was depressing her by talking about current events. This from someone who is the most boring storyteller I’ve ever heard. Most people just say there is nothing they can do about it.
Maybe Plato’s Philosopher King is the only way out our political, financial and environmental mess, but I’ll go down voting. And it won’t be for a Republican or Obama. I’ve come to the conclusion Obama is a conman. He’s thrown everybody that helped him politically off the boat when push comes to shove–that includes the progressives, dems and indies who voted for him.
Well, there, Optimax, I am in complete agreement with you although I suspected he was a conman well before he was nominated. But no matter, as Clinton was the one who could get away with gutting welfare (although that system’s inherent problems were designed to make it addicting), it seems that Obama will be the one to puts the knife into the back of Social Security/
As for people who don’t want to hear the bad news, on the radio station where I have a twice a month program and deliver it by the bucketfuls (which causes one listener, now friend, to refer to me as “the dentist,”and, fortunately, am one of the station’s more successful fun-raisers, after hearingcomplaints from a number of listeners that Democracy Now! which came on an hour earlier was too much of a downer to take in the morning, it was switched to 4PM..
Jeffrey
Are there podcasts of your program? Send me a link if there are. I would like to hear some.
They are broken up into a news and opinion segment and the day’s interview and you can find most of them on: link to radio4all.net
Thanks, JB. Kudos to you for your efforts to inform Americans with news and commentary not part of the mainstream media. Do we need any special equipment or software to download and hear your shows?
You just need to click on the Podcast bar. Internet Explorer is preferred because on some PC’s for some reason there is no Podcast bar when using Mozilla, mine for instance, although it does work with Mozilla at the station/
Thank you.