VIDEO: "The Birth of a Nation" (full) - a lesson for our times?

Just about 100% of the reviews you'll read for D.W. Griffiths' masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation focus on the racism, pro-South bias, "glorification" of the Ku Klux Klan, yada yada yada. There is no dbout about the bias, but there is also no doubt that the events depicted are real, a cautionary tale about what happens when you turn society on its head.

In another masterpiece, The Civil War, film-maker Ken Burns quotes a freed slave as telling his master "Bottom rail on top now!" As the film shows, the aim of many radical abolitionists before, during and after the Civil War was nothing less than to make downtrodden black Americans rulers over the privileged whites. To do so, they used rigged elections (in which whites were disenfranchised), mob violence, and occupation of southern cities and states by the federal army.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The KKK was undeniably racist, but would not have come into being were it not for the necessity of defending southern society and, dare we say it, civilization, in a country which had descended into chaos. Watching The Birth of a Nation may make some people uncomfortable, but it would be foolish to let the political incorrectness blind us to the realities of the culture war which America experienced then... and now.

 

President Woodrow Wilson is famously rumored to have responded to the film with the remark: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." His published works as a historian are closely aligned with the film's negative portrayal of Reconstruction. Some of his writings are even quoted onscreen in certain prints of the film.

Also worth watching (and free of bias!) Mississippi's War: Slavery and Secession, a production of Mississippi Public Broadcasting, 2014.

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. (George Santayana)