Adam Johnston of The Federalist tells me all I need to know about The American Revolution by Ken Burns. Well, not all I need to know. His full review is at the link, plus some excellent comments by others.
But this tells me I'm not missing anything
Less than 3 minutes into the Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution, and we get:
1. White people are bad.
2. Native Americans had a democracy that had flourished for centuries before British colonists arrived.
3. Benjamin Franklin copied the Native American blueprint.
This is propaganda disguised as history, built around lies, half truths and truth, all carefully interwoven to reinforce a progressive narrative.
Propaganda works by controlling the lens through which we see things.
For Ken Burns to frame the American Revolution in this way, right from the start, sets the stage for how the viewer interprets everything that comes after.
So for example, the smallest amount of truth, like “the Iroquois had a confederacy” morphs into “it was used as a model for America” while leaving out the more important structural influences, including the very system of government used by Britain at the time.
Or “Ben Franklin referenced the Iroquois in his writings” becomes “influenced,” while leaving out the far more influential thinkers that had an impact on all the founders.
This combination of lies, half truths, truth, along with deliberate omissions, especially at the start of the documentary, are what make this propaganda.
4 comments:
The Iroquois were a proud warrior culture if my memory serves me right.
The Five, later Six Nations were a military confederacy that had a council for resolving disputes, dating to about 150 years before the arrival of the British, Dutch, and French to the Northeast. Claims of earlier alliance are modern and tainted with wishfulness. They ruled what is now New York and up to the St Lawrence in Canada, spilling out a bit to the south and west. They were egalitarian, but "democratic" would be a bit of a stretch. They generally had hereditary chiefs.
Ken Burns committed the unpardonable sins of centering his 'Civil War' series around a Southern writer and treating Confederate soldiers as human beings, and he's been trying to expunge that black mark ever since.
Similar to Tom Friedman who liked to flirt with but never date conservative ideas for his NYT readers and wrote "Well, we had to hit somebody" after 9-11. He was duly punished and became even more liberal thereafter.
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