Movies are the most powerful tools of propaganda the world has ever known. They have the ability to mold public opinion, in ways both overt and covert, on every topic from fashion to war.
Think about it. America has never won a modern war without Hollywood’s support. And when Hollywood turns against a war, as it did with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, America loses the will to fight and ignobly surrenders.
The same thing happens when movies retell history.
A friend of mine who loves movies asked my opinion of Inglorious Basterds (2009).
I replied: “An entire generation of moviegoers now believes that Hitler was killed by a group of Jewish GIs. For that reason alone, I hate the film.”
My friend had a hard time believing that anyone could be that historically ignorant… which only goes to show how naïve he is.
This brings us to the recent movie, Selma, which purports to tell the story of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and the historic march to Selma, Alabama.
One of Dr. King’s greatest supporters was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who, along with most American Jews, was active in the civil rights movement. A prominent scholar and theologian, Rabbi Heschel, like Dr. King, saw the civil rights movement not only as a political struggle, but as a religious one as well.
As you can see from the 1965 picture above, Rabbi Heschel is standing in the front line of the march.
But in Selma, the movie currently in release, Rabbi Heschel is not there. His very existence has been erased, written out of history.
And of course, the movie reframes the subtext of the civil rights struggle primarily as a political battle.
Selma rewrites history to suit the postmodern sensibilities of Hollywood’s secular, left-wing troopers.
One of the great ironies and tragedies of modern history is that American Jew-hatred is endemic among American blacks. There was a time when blacks and Jews were closely aligned: two despised minorities struggling for a slice of the American dream. But as American politics have become increasingly Balkanized, with the Democrat party and American blacks shifting ever further to the left, Jew-hatred and anti-Israel fervor have become routine.
Leftism and Jew-hatred are a contiguous ideology, after all.
Selma is Judenrein, and a whole new generation of Americans is being ushered into an abyss of ignorance.
Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, has written a moving op-ed about this insult to her father, to American Jews, and to history.
Rabbi Heschel’s daughter Susannah, wrote a moving op-ed about this insult to history.
My father felt that the prophetic tradition of Judaism had come alive at Selma. He said that King told him it was the greatest day in his life, and my father said that he was reminded at Selma of walking with Hasidic rebbes in Europe. Such was the spiritual atmosphere of the day.
When he returned, he famously said, “For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”
Imagine: My father arrived in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Europe, where all too many Christian theologians were declaring Jesus an Aryan, not a Jew, and throwing the Old Testament out of the Christian Bible because it was a Jewish book. It seemed miraculous for him to discover Martin Luther King, Jr., placing the Exodus and the prophets of Israel at the center of the civil rights movement.
Read more: http://www.jta.org/2015/01/18/news-opinion/opinion/op-ed-what-selma-meant-to-the-jews#ixzz3PHtQDcY1
“My father arrived in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Europe, where all too many Christian theologians were declaring Jesus an Aryan,”
I suppose even one is all too many, so from that perspective this statement is certainly not untrue.
But it seems a little ungenerous towards men like Bonhoeffer and Niemoller who were killed, or nearly killed, for opposing Nazism in Germany. They shouldn’t be written out of the history.
Susannah Heschel:
“Of course, the dream that Pharaoh might join the Israelites was not realized. Racism in America remains tenacious, and its slipperiness means that while the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress and signed by the president following the Selma march, the disenfranchisement of black America continues with insidious new forms of legislation.”
By “insidious new forms of legislation,” I assume she means laws requiring that people registering and voting actually *identify themselves*, as is the practice in just about every other democracy in the world, and that the people conducting this “disenfranchisement” are *republicans.” Sounds like she is strongly under the influence of the “progressive” worldview.
Good point.
According to Debbie Schlussel’s review, the film even leaves out the murders of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, may the Al-mighty avenge their blood. Nauseating.
My father felt that the prophetic tradition of Judaism had come alive at Selma. He said that King told him it was the greatest day in his life, and my father said that he was reminded at Selma of walking with Hasidic rebbes in Europe. Such was the spiritual atmosphere of the day.
It was not the first false messianic movement to move Jews. Far from it.
If you rely on others to tell the tale they will tell their tale not yours.
I have thought about your statement today and yes, screenwriters all have their own perceptions. And I have thought of CJReott’s experience, where the black customer told her that he thought Selma was the best movie.
Maybe he was ignorant of the omissions and misrepresentations (most likely as the average American’s knowledge of history is pretty pathetic). As Robert maintains if that person doesn’t know any different (likely) this movie is now his knowledge of ” history” in Selma.
I would think though as a screenwriter if you have any pride in your craft you would want to get as much relevant things as you know and have diligently researched.
Let your passions guide you as to what you wish to emphasize but don’t change history.
But I’m not a screenwriter, so what do I know 🙂
The question with Selma were these omissions deliberate or from ignorance? I would argue that the screenwriter had an obligation to do some diligent research so the omissions were either deliberate or through laziness.
Bill,
I agree with all of your points but it is, after all, just a movie, albeit on powerful subject matter. Even a cursory examination of the film industry, and its ‘historical’ product, will show clearly and irrevocably that absolutely nothing is to be trusted, from swashbucklers (especially those evolving from Dumas, most of which are not even faithful to that master manipulator’s vision of history), to westerns of any political story telling stripe, to political thrillers, often paranoid and left wing, but not always. Bill, it all comes down to cinematography, good actors and baloney.
Today at a photo shop, as I walked in, a black customer was discussing how great the movie “American Sniper” was. As my husband and I saw the movie this weekend and thought it was one of the best movies we had seen for a long, long time I joined the conversation and said I agreed with his assessment. Next words out of his mouth were “Well, it is the best movie with the exception of “Selma”. Curious why he felt he had to correct himself. Claudia
I just saw American Sniper – a wonderful move. Theater packed, many showtimes. Then I read that Seth Rogan calles it a “Nazi Propaganda Film”.
Nothing untrue about it, and I read that the SEALs who trained Bradley Cooper thought he was so like Chris Kyle that they saw Kyle.
Then you have Selma, which distorts history.
Leni Reifenstahl would no doubt consider this a masterpiece.
The Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement is not the only subtext that Selma rewrites. It also writes out the Republican involvement in the civil rights movement — which were often one and the same with Jewish involvement. Just as a reminder, the NAACP was started by three white Jewish Republicans.
I haven’t seen Selma and I don’t intend to. But, as I understand it, the movie portrays LBJ as an evil opponent of black civil rights, in line with the current fantasy of the left that southern democrats were racists who then moved en masse to the Republican Party post 1964. The truth is the Democrats like LBJ never stopped being racists, they merely saw the benefits of capturing the black vote. As LBJ said, when he tested the political winds and, after years of staunch opposition, decided to champion the civil rights movement, he would “have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Somehow, I doubt that quote made it into the dialogue of the movie.
It seems as if Selma was written to be a piece of fiction designed to keep alive the canard that 1950’s racism is still part and parcel of 2015 America, at least among conservatives and Jews. Accurately portraying the history of Selma would no doubt raise troubling questions that would only muddle the message.
My introduction to anti-Jewish beliefs were from my otherwise totally benign black nursemaid who raised my sister and me in the 1940s. Black anti-Semitism goes way back. I don’t know why but it may have been a consequence of the same thing that causes blacks to hate Koreans in Los Angles. The poor shopkeepers who serve the black population, that seems not to have the entrepreneur gene, were resented.
Indians in east Africa and Chinese in Malaya and Indonesia meet similar resentment. Two of the three boys murdered in Mississippi in 1964 were Jewish.
It has been my observation that we are all “predisposed” to something. Russians are predisposed to accepting tyranny. Americans are predisposed towards being “rugged individualists.” Arabs are predisposed to rage against each other. And, American blacks are predisposed towards friendliness. IMHO.
If I may offer an observation:
Negroes in America are different from **every other group in America** in one largely consistent quality, and it puts them at a substantial disadvantage — All the rest of America is descended from ancestors that were aggressive risk-takers — that is at the heart of why America is what it is — think about it. We’re a melting pot of people from everywhere who said “Wow, this place SUCKS. I hear THAT place is better. Screw it, I’m leaving behind friends and family to see if it’s true.” Since it WAS true, they were all rewarded for their risk taking.
Negroes for the most part, are not so connected. They are descended (mostly) from people who were not only NOT particularly aggressive or risk-taking, in fact they were culled for a number of decades under/by slavery, which almost certainly acted to destroy the aggressiveness of any of them.
The only black group really associated with any aggressive risk-taking any more is pretty much Jamaicans, who are noted for having a hand in any number of pies attempting to find the one with the blackbirds in it.
The above is not a claim to truth, just a speculation about why it is — perhaps — that Negroes have such a hard time compared to other immigrant groups in the nation, and have fared so much more poorly than, say, Orientals**, many of whom suffered the same kind of predations, in terms of societal disdain, lynchings, and outright segregation (there are plenty of photos of “whites only” fountains in California from many decades ago. It wasn’t about segregating blacks there, but those from the Orient). There’s a reason why the Nisei were rounded up during WWII but not the German-Americans.
All the modern Orientals are still descended from aggressive risk-takers.
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**Sorry — I refuse to replace the inherently non-pejorative term for a region: “The Orient”, to refer to peoples from that area with a larger regional term (“Asians”) which is inappropriate for excluding more than half the residents of said region, or inappropriate for including a large group not part of that referenced…
Yes.
And – Black Americans today are descended from immigrants and those several generations removed from slavery.
However – your point is well taken. I just have a slightly different take on it.
We learn that the Jews were slaves in Egypt for a long time. G-d Himself freed us from slavery and led us to His Promised Land. Nonetheless, it took 40 years in the desert and an entire generation of Jews to die out before we were able to truly be free.
Americans fought a bitter war, which also destroyed parts of our country, which ultimately freed the slaves.
And, for the next 100 years, Americans, by and large, attempted to keep their black citizens “in their place.”
It has now been a little more than 40 years since black Americans were “freed” in terms of human dignity.
And, all this was done by the hand of Man in all of our imperfections.
I would humbly suggest that the majority of black Americans have, indeed, reached the “Promised Land” but, there are still a few stubborn, self aggrandizing; lying; weeping and wailing black Americans who live to complain about their bitter bondage and will not get beyond it. They believe that they are still “dying in the desert.”
It is the curse of modernity and our acquiescence to giving “the media” the ability to define the memes of society that enables these pathetic whiners to lead other black Americans into their own self destruction.