TV Note: Ken Burns Against The Tikvah Fund: "The U.S. and the Holocaust" on PBS
David Shasha
Putting Anti-Semitism into its Proper Universal Context: Ken Burns’ “The U.S. and the Holocaust” Against the Trumpscum Dara Horn Jabotinsky Fascist Tikvah Fund
Ours is a solemn moment. We stand at a crisis – the supreme crisis of the ages… If white civilization goes down, it will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption.
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), cited in David Levering Lewis’ introduction to his edition of W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater, 2004, p. vi
Here is a civilization that has boasted much. Neither Roman nor Arab, Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mongol ever took himself and his own perfections as seriously as the modern white man. We whose shame, humiliation, and deep insult his aggrandizement so often involved were never deceived. We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920, Levering Lewis edition, 2004), p. 25
PBS is often viewed as a Leftist institution by the doctrinaire Right:
https://knightfoundation.org/public-media-white-paper-2017-gonzalez/
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/30/news/conservatives-call-for-pbs-to-go-private-or-go-dark.html
The government funding issue continues to dog PBS, as its on-air fundraising marathons have become more and more ubiquitous, compared to the limited pledge-break intrusions when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s.
Sadly, PBS has taken the criticism to heart, and has sought to neutralize its historical documentaries from brilliant minds like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Ken Burns.
I addressed the Gates squishiness in the following article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TyRH24P_e0Qp7EG9hbh93CW6e7VOwc6PJFRaFobUXo8/edit
But more recently, under the pressure of Trump and the racist Alt-Right, Gates produced what is inarguably his most bracing PBS documentary, a no-hold’s-barred take on the failure of Reconstruction and its traumatic impact on America, determinative of our compromised democracy to this very day:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sPfI7cErS-77CXOxoMyHT5d_AvuGAdjvvXodl5lp0hQ/edit
There is no question that Gates was reacting to contemporary events, the attempt by Trumpworld to bring us back to White Supremacy and Jim Crow, what they call “Make America Great Again,” by deploying many of the tactics traditionally used by the Southern racists: Voter Suppression, Police Violence against minorities, looking for new ways to expunge the Other from our midst.
The Gates Reconstruction documentary was a brilliant success.
So too can we point to the ubiquitous PBS fixture Ken Burns, whose documentaries on the Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, the Vietnam War, and more recently Country Music, have set the PBS bland neutered standard.
While Burns is quite punctilious when it comes to presenting information in a comprehensive and detailed way, there is too often in his work a flattening out of the political, even as he maintains a genteel Liberalism, and seeks to offer a comfortingly PC understanding of controversial subject matter.
We should note that the Radical Left attacked Burns for his portrayal of Vietnam:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/10/the-tragic-failure-of-ken-burnss-the-vietnam-war/
And when it comes to the Right Wing Jews, PBS has had issues when it comes to discussions on Israel and Palestine:
https://www.pbs.org/publiceditor/blogs/ombudsman/the-mailbag-smiley-and-guest-draw-strong-criticism/
It is thus critical to note that PBS aired a Tikvah Fund-based Neo-Con version of Anti-Semitism produced by Andrew Goldberg:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GRObunZBnMD5tOWeQ7v6bQwEDiJo1a_jzUZZDmeZ8eE/edit
This is the larger context in which to process Burns’ outstanding new documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust”:
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/
It is mandatory viewing.
Here is Joseph Berger’s New York Times review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/arts/television/ken-burns-the-us-and-the-holocaust.html
And a relevant note from The New Republic’s editor Michael Tomasky:
The complete articles follow this note.
Burns emphatically links Nazi Anti-Semitism to the depredations of Slavery, Jim Crow, the Native American genocide, and the racist Eugenics crusade of the early 20th century, in a way that connects to current concerns over Race, as it seeks to integrate the Jewish issue into current debates over Immigration and attacks on the Other by the Trumpists.
The viewer of “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is overwhelmed and well-nigh traumatized by the “Build the Wall” nativist jingoism of an isolationist “America First” Congress in the 1930s, demanding an end to Immigration.
As we just saw with the DEATH SENTENCE illegal Martha’s Vineyard stunt, which exploited vulnerable migrants seeking political asylum:
Indeed, an actual criminal investigation has been opened to investigate the disgusting and inhuman malfeasance:
That 1930s version of Trumpism is described in the following article from The Holocaust Encyclopedia, which provides some frightening parallels to the current situation:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-united-states-isolation-intervention
As it states there:
The largest and most influential non-interventionist group was the America First Committee, founded in September 1940 by a group of Yale University law students. The students, led by R. Douglas Stuart Jr., gathered prominent Americans to serve on the organization’s board, including: the president of the American Olympic Committee Avery Brundage; Hormel Foods chief executive Jay Hormel; Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford; late President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth; and General Hugh Johnson, who had been the director of the National Recovery Act, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal programs. Democratic senator Burton Wheeler (Montana), and Republican senators Gerald Nye (North Dakota) and Robert Taft (Ohio) also served as important spokesmen for the organization.
The America First Committee (AFC), which may have had some 800,000 members and at least 450 local chapters, encouraged civic engagement, such as letter-writing campaigns to elected officials, and sponsored rallies and speeches throughout the country. Charles Lindbergh, who achieved international fame in 1927 for piloting the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, became the committee’s most prominent speaker. Even before AFC’s founding, Lindbergh had given radio speeches opposing US involvement in the war and warning of Germany’s military superiority. During a September 11, 1941, speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh warned listeners that “the Jewish people” had too much influence on American media and government and were “war agitators.” Newspapers throughout the country denounced Lindbergh’s speech as antisemitic. Even though the America First Committee did not officially promote antisemitism, the organization tolerated these sentiments among its members.
And let us never forget the degenerate Catholic Fascist Father Coughlin and his Anti-Semitic tirades, which reached millions of impressionable Americans over the radio:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/charles-e-coughlin
What is old is new again!
Watching the Burns documentary, it is impossible not to think about the ways in which the Trump Fascists have united with Right Wing Jews, such as those of The Tikvah Fund.
I scoured the usual Tikvah Fund Neo-Con suspects, and found the following three articles:
https://jewishinsider.com/2022/08/ken-burns-documentary-us-holocaust/
The complete Dara Horn article follows this note.
As we will soon see, her article is deeply delusional, as it reflects the most debased elements of the Tikvah Fund radicalism.
The Jewish Insider piece does an excellent job in relating Burns’ current concerns and how they impact the history:
But the film itself seems more than willing to impart a political message. It ends with a harrowing montage of recent events: the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Jan. 6 insurrection, with a zoomed-in close-up of the man who wore a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt to storm the Capitol. Interspersed in this sequence is a news chyron about former President Donald Trump “surg[ing] in the polls,” and a quote from a Trump campaign rally in which he says, about undocumented immigrants, “My first hour in office those people are gone.”
The Tikvah Tablet article takes a cue from the documentary, as it relates a personal family story which focuses on the deplorable state of American nativist antagonism towards refugees and immigration during the Nazi period, recalling the infamous Johnson-Reed Act:
Not only that, but under the new law, immigration oversight was handed to the State Department, the federal government’s stodgiest and most antisemitic branch, described by the congressman and immigration advocate Emanuel Celler as having a “heartbeat muffled in the protocol.” Led by notorious antisemites Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, the State Department set up a long list of seemingly impossible requirements. Immigrants needed to procure multiple copies of their birth certificates and letters vouching for their good citizenship—a near impossibility, historian Deborah Lipstadt explains in the film, correct for people escaping countries where they were hated.
But the article remains fixated on the Jews at the exclusion of others, like Native Americans and African-Americans, that the documentary connects to the American callousness on the Holocaust, and the country’s refusal to help the Jews:
Coming from antisemitic Europe, my mother loved the U.S. It had given her a home where she could live in freedom and comfort. But a generation later, I am still angry: I believe that American immigration policies contributed to the murder of my grandmother.
This is very justified righteous anger, but author Carol Unger is utterly silent on Trump and the Alt-Right, as she completely ignores Burns’ main point in the documentary:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/19/ken-burns-interview-holocaust-docuseries
As that article clearly states:
It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at a church in South Carolina; white supremacists marching with flaming torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!”; the killing of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.
“We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with antisemitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and nativism and eugenics,” he explains. “We’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.”
Burns has been sounding the alarm about the threat to American democracy since a commencement address at Stanford University in California in June 2016. Six years and one Trump presidency later, he is more worried than ever.
“After three previous great crises, I think we’re in the fourth and perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America. The three being the civil war, the great depression and the second world war, the institutions were not under assault as they are today and that makes the fragility of Benjamin Franklin’s statement, ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ all the more relevant.
“But I am also talking about Britain. I am also talking about the rise of the right in France. I’m talking about Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil and a tendency.”
Burns adds: “The story of the Holocaust reminds us of the fragility of democracies but how, as frustrating as they can be, there is nothing more important than maintaining those democracies – constitutional, parliamentary, whatever they might be – in the world because we see from human history that the authoritarian regimes have killed by a multitude of 100 more of their own citizens than democracies have. Not that democracies haven’t done bad things and will continue to do bad things, but they don’t do them on the scale of autocracies.”
This is the very thing that The Tikvah Fund machers are avoiding like the plague. And Ms. Ungar is either completely blind to Burns’ main point, or she is following the Tikvah Tablet marching orders.
Either way, it is antithetical to the essential spirit of the documentary.
We must remember how Hitler took inspiration from America’s mistreatment of Native Americans and African-Americans, and deployed his debased genocidal strategies and racial separatism, brutally imposed on the Jews, on those very models:
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow
It is historically impossible to decouple that homegrown American racism from the Holocaust.
And that homegrown American racism is central to Trump’s Fascist program today.
But, as I have said repeatedly, The Tikvah Fund has no interest in discussing Trump or his Fascist program, a point that is made eminently clear by Tikvah Dara Horn, close ally of Alana Newhouse and Bari Weiss; the three making a perfect Neo-Con reactionary triumvirate.
In her Atlantic article, re-posted by Mosaic magazine with the revealing title “In Trying to Highlight American Failures, Ken Burns Offers Apologetics for the President Most Responsible for Them,” Horn not only ignores Trump and the New Fascism and its relation to the New Racial Consciousness of BLM and its allied movements, she decided to make it about Burns being soft on FDR:
The question of Roosevelt’s role in all of this has been fertile ground for historians for decades. Burns has a soft spot for Franklin and Eleanor, the subjects of one of his prior films, and here he treats them with kid gloves, blaming most of the missteps on State Department antagonists. The series makes a point of establishing the bigoted, racist atmosphere of the U.S. at the time, showing Nazi rallies in New York, clips of the popular anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, and colorized footage of a Nazi-themed summer camp in New Jersey. But the film goes out of its way to outline the pros and cons of Roosevelt’s decisions, leaving his reputation intact. To be clear, Roosevelt is an American icon and deserves to remain one. The problem with this approach is less about Roosevelt (there are plenty of convincing arguments in his favor, not least that he won the war) than about how it contradicts the rest of the film’s premise. The goal of the series is seemingly to reset America’s moral compass, using hindsight to expose the costs of being a bystander. But every bystander, including Roosevelt, can explain his choices. The film’s refusal to judge the commander in chief plays into a larger political pattern: offering generosity only toward those we admire.
There is much wrong with this analysis, not the least being that FDR is shown in throughout the documentary as missing in action on the refugee issue, and is ultimately excoriated in no uncertain terms for doing nothing to save the Jews.
Burns makes it quite clear that a very weak-kneed Roosevelt could certainly have done more, even as he had private concern for the Jews being slaughtered. Indeed, the Anti-Semites of the State Department, led by the odious Cordell Hull and his underling Breckinridge Long, were a critical part of the FDR team, meaning that he is ultimately responsible for their heinous actions, actions that are detailed in the documentary as redounding to the president’s shameful legacy on the Destruction of European Jewry.
Which includes his refusal to bomb Auschwitz, or the train tracks leading to the Death Camp:
And, of course, it was not only Jews who were victimized by this manifestly unfair policy rooted in racism and bigotry, but also Japanese-American citizens who found themselves placed in Internment Camps by the FDR administration, a detail that Burns, unlike Horn, does not overlook:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-signs-executive-order-9066
The documentary also makes it quite clear that FDR initially resisted Treasury’s Henry Morgenthau Jr. and John Pehle’s attempts to change the State Department stonewall on Jewish Refugees with the War Refugee Board:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-war-refugee-board
The Board did do some positive work at a very late point in the Holocaust, but even here Burns shows us how FDR did not do much to help the process, as he continued to cower in the face of his State Department.
It can thus be stated without hesitation that Burns does not in any way serve as an FDR apologist, as Horn and her Tikvah allies falsely assert.
She sees in the documentary what she wants to see, because it fits her larger Tikvah narrative.
What she is doing is reprehensibly demonizing American Democracy in the most offensively Straussian way, not to raise the issue of how American public sentiment then, as now, was White Christian Nationalist, but to offer a HASBARAH alternative:
Not Idly By, an hour-long work by the filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, addresses a similar subject as The U.S. and the Holocaust, but with a very different style. It’s about, and almost entirely narrated by, Peter Bergson, a Jewish activist from British-occupied Palestine who came to the U.S. during World War II to shout himself hoarse about the Holocaust. The U.S. and the Holocaust includes Bergson’s story too—his dozens of full-page ads in major newspapers highlighting massacres that those papers buried in inside pages; his star-studded, stadium-filling pageants; his 400-rabbi march on Washington. But The U.S. and the Holocaust is sad, whereas Not Idly By is angry. Bergson, interviewed in 1978, rages with a Hebrew prophet’s fury. Nobody rages in The U.S. and the Holocaust, because nobody rages on PBS. A subtle condescension is built into melancholic discussions of what might have been done to save more Jews, because in the final analysis, America saving more Jews was an optional, high-minded choice that would have been made only out of charity.
Central to her argument here is someone called Peter Bergson, who also appears in The Holocaust Encyclopedia:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/peter-bergson
Who was he?
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hillel-kook-aka-peter-bergson
Just as we might have expected:
Hillel Kook (1915–2001) was born in Lithuania in 1915 and moved with his family to Palestine in 1925. He became a militant Zionist and adopted the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson to avoid embarrassing his family, which included a prominent rabbi.
Bergson joined the Revisionist Zionist movement’s military arm, known as the National Military Organization (Irgun Zvai Leumi; IZL), in the early 1930s. The Revisionist Zionist movement aimed to force Britain (which controlled Palestine under the British Mandate) to grant Jewish statehood on both banks of the Jordan River and to allow unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine. The IZL conducted violent reprisals for Arab attacks on Jews and also attacked the British. Consequently, the British government considered the IZL to be a terrorist organization. British government representatives later warned the State Department about Bergson’s connection to the IZL, calling him a “bomb-thrower.”
In 1938 and 1939, Bergson worked for IZL in Poland, organizing the smuggling of Polish Jews to Palestine. He then accompanied Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky to the United States in 1940 as a representative of the IZL. After Jabotinsky died in August 1940, Bergson remained in the US to continue his activities.
Bergson's primary assignment in the United States was to mobilize support for the IZL, facilitate creation of Jewish military units to fight against Nazi Germany, and gather support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Bergson founded a series of interlocking organizations, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the American League for a Free Palestine, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation. Many prominent figures participated in these organizations’ conferences and publicity campaigns, including Congressman Will Rogers Jr., writer Dorothy Parker, US Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, dramatist Ben Hecht, and artist Arthur Szyk.
Bergson used direct—and often bombastic—appeals to the American public and to members of Congress to demand the creation of a Jewish army, to rescue Jews from Nazi terror by any means , and finally for the creation of a Hebrew state. He worked outside the more conservative channels used by the leaders of American Jewish organizations to influence government action. These leaders often supported Bergson’s overall goals, but opposed his brash tactics as counterproductive and resented his public criticism of their organizations.
Indeed, Kook/Bergson, Kook being a name of some renown in Messianic Settler Zionist circles, was a Right Wing Jewish radical, whose membership in the Jabotinsky wing of the nascent Zionist movement represents the very “Jewish First” racism that mirrors “America First” racism, and helps to explain Tikvahworld’s love for Trump and the Alt-Right – in spite of the Anti-Semitism:
That’s right, in order to attack American Democracy and FDR – and there is certainly much blame to go around on that account, as W.E.B. Du Bois knew so well – Horn decided to promote the Revisionist Party of Jabotinsky and Begin!
Indeed, what many are not aware of is that, during their formative years, Zionist and Fascist ideologies, had similar intellectual roots and numerous overlappings in terms of their philosophical and political structures. Some of the founding fathers of Zionism, especially revisionist Zionists, regarded themselves as ideological fascists, and their progression from Fascism to Zionism was a logical one, necessitated by political expediency only.
Before the opportunistic alliance between Germany's Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, and Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in 1936, resulting in Italy's infamous racial laws, a degree of affinity existed between Zionist and Fascist leaders in Rome.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, of which Israel's current Likud party and other right and far-right groups are the offspring, saw in Italy "a spiritual homeland".
"All my views on nationalism, the state, and society were developed during those years under Italian influence," Jabotinsky wrote in his autobiography, referring to his ideological formation years in Italy.
In return, Mussolini had expressly spoken in support of Zionism and of Jabotinsky in particular: "For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky," Mussolini said during a private conversation with Nahum Goldman, founder of the World Jewish Congress, in November 1934, as reported by Lenni Brenner in his volume 'Zionism in the Age of Dictators'.
Il Duce – the fascist reference to Mussolini, which translates to "The Leader" – had already allied with Jabotinsky's Betar youth movement, which modelled itself around fascist ideas and symbols.
"By 1934, Jabotinsky and his Betar youth movement had allied with Il Duce, when the Betar established a naval base north of Rome," Steven Meyer wrote in his article 'Will Israel outlive its fascists?', published in the Executive Intelligence Review in 2002.
Meyer elaborates: 'L'Idea Sionistica, Betar's Italian-language magazine, described the dedication ceremonies which launched the academy: 'The order-'Attention!' A triple chant ordered by the squad's commanding officer – 'Viva l'Italia, Viva Il Re! Viva Il Duce!', resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi Aldo Lattes invoked in Italian and in Hebrew for God, for the King and for Il Duce… 'Giovinezza' [the fascist party's anthem] was sung with much enthusiasm by the Betarim.'
This account is confirmed in other sources, including by Italian historian, Furio Biagini's Mussolini e il Sionismo – "Mussolini and Zionism". Biagini argues that "in principle, Mussolini wasn't against Jews' aspiration to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine."
It is clear that Jabotinsky was quite comfortable in the Il Duce Fascist camp, which once again reminds us of Tikvah support for Trump and Alt-Right violence.
Horn makes the point clear at her article’s conclusion:
Humanitarian impulses are unreliable because they depend not on dignity but on pity. Preventing genocide requires more than feeling sorry for others: We have to value people who are not us precisely because they are not us.
The failure to honor actual differences, the failure to recognize that not everyone has to be “just like us” for us to respect them, the failure to admit that the majority may not always be right—these failures are at the root of anti-Semitism, a mental virus that continues to plague our world. A sense of benevolence is necessary but insufficient to destroy it. Defeating it would demand an entirely different level of moral imagination, a collective commitment to replacing pity with respect.
That level of imagination, if we ever attain it, could actually overcome the weak points of democracy. It would open the door to honoring not just people in danger and people in need, but people, both at home and abroad, who aren’t just like us. It might even bring new meaning to “Never again.”
This complex conclusion to Horn’s anti-democratic argument, itself rooted in the Jewish Fascism of Jabotinsky, leads ultimately to racist ethnocentrism and violent resolution of conflict which are then connected to anti-humanitarian impulses.
We can only ever trust in the Gun!
Humanitarianism is for Suckers!
For the record, Burns does in fact include two substantial segments of the final episode of the documentary devoted to Kook/Bergson: One dealing with his massive rallies at Madison Square Garden in New York and in other American cities, which featured movie stars Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, and John Garfield, the other on his Orthodox Rabbi march to the U.S. Capitol.
It is not that Burns ignores Kook/Bergson, it is that he does not present him in the way that Horn’s Tikvah Irgun radicalism demands.
Burns highlights the role of Rabbi Stephen Wise as a foil to Kook/Bergson, in a way that does indeed make clear the difference between the two men, and the way that the latter excoriated the former, calling him out as not being an authentic “Hebrew”!
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/stephen-s-wise-18741949
Pointedly, Horn’s Jewish Fascist argument reifies radical HASBARAH by implicitly rejecting any form of universalism, which is ultimately the difference between the Tikvah imperative and what Burns is doing by contextualizing American racism from the Native American genocide to Slavery to Jim Crow and the detritus of immigration policy during the Holocaust.
It is obvious that Horn sees Shtetl Jewish separatism in the Jabotinsky manner as triumphant, and Jewish Humanism as ineffective, if not outright dangerous. And that is what we would expect from a Tikvah Fund adherent; a White Jewish Supremacist who sees the world as alien and threatening, and Jews being separate and different than any other group on the planet.
It opens the door to ignoring the depredations and persecutions of all other groups, and extols hermetic group identity in a racist manner. This allows Horn to keep silent on the matter of Trumpism and to elevate Jewish Fascism, as the two movements are largely in sync with one another.
The contrast with Burns and what he is saying in the documentary could not be clearer.
Burns is standing heroically against those who remain silent in the face of the truly existential danger that Trumpworld and the New Fascism presents to American Democracy and our way of life.
And it is this threat which has become actualized in Tikvah Rufo Bari Weiss and her Substack cabal, inspired by Tikvah Jewish Leadership macher DEATH SENTENCE, as they are resolutely silent on Trump and his many crimes, but committed in a serious way to attack WOKE and Cancel Culture.
They are particularly fixated on BLM and the current concern for Police Brutality in the context of Alt-Right racism and the New Racial Consciousness.
This monomania is intent on humiliating the Left, as it follows through on her Troll the Libs mandate.
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/EKgXDauF5KQ
Here are recent examples of the Rufo-Weiss-DEATH SENTENCE Trumptrend, which Burns demands we read in light of the Holocaust:
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/gop-campaign-to-block-teaching-for-social-justice/
https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/racial-justice-our-classrooms-and-the-right-wing-attacks/
The New Christian Fascism has a pronounced violent aspect, as many in the Trumpworld crosshairs are being threatened, some fatally falling victim to this murderous fury:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/08/15/we-need-to-take-political-violence-seriously/
Weiss, like so many in Tikvahworld, including New York Times power Neo-Con columnists Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, and David Brooks – writers who always have what to say about religious issues and America, have remained abjectly silent on Burns’ seminal contribution to our understanding of America and the Holocaust.
Burns’ view can be productively contrasted with the Neo-Con racist ideology that has led Right Wing Jews and Christians in the New Convivencia to find common ground with the Alt-Right.
So, whether or not these Tikvah Fund Neo-Cons praise Trump by name, as is the case with Yoram Hazony, David Horowitz, and Dennis Prager, their ideological priorities – as we saw in Stephens’ recent column attacking Biden and Douthat’s columns supporting the Trumpscum SCOTUS and DEATH SENTENCE – remain implacably opposed to what Burns is at pains to show in his documentary.
The conclusion of “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is guaranteed to antagonize the Trumpscum Tikvah Jews, as it presents a montage of the current New Fascist horrors: rapid fire images of Ann Coulter appearing on FOX News, Donald Trump at one of his incendiary rallies, the Charlottesville Alt-Right march, and ending with the violence of the 1/6 Insurrection.
None of that will likely sit well with the reactionary Bari Weisses and Dara Horns, as they see the current situation out of very different lenses; a view that seeks to attack Liberalism and blithely ignore the threats of Trumpism.
Burns is heroically standing against the regnant feeling in Tikvahworld, and his excellent documentary serves to oppose Andrew Goldberg’s Tikvah take on Anti-Semitism.
“The U.S. and the Holocaust” is one of the most important contributions in the battle against the Neo-Con Jews and their callous indifference to the intractable problems we are now facing in our Democracy, as Trump continues to beat the QAnon drum on his way to obliterate our Civil Rights and our Constitutional system.
Silence still equals death.
The documentary rightly links the desperate plight of the Jews at the time of Hitler to the current precarious situation of African-Americans, immigrants, and other vulnerable Trumpworld “undesirables.”
As embodied in the deranged Trumpscum Jew Stephen Miller, who has his own White Nationalist connections:
The Tikvah Fund has maintained, like so many Americans during the Holocaust, a strategic silence on the matter of White Christian Nationalism; largely because so many of their funders are very much in the thrall of Trump and Trumpism, which can be seen in the current rush to get that Barre Seid Leonard Leo Federalist Society cash:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/j7n5mUmMYgM
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/PF5XWFC2CoM
In more than a half-century since the defeat of Nazi Germany, there are many American Jews who have come to think that they are White Christians, and have adopted the racist mien that Burns brilliantly shows was an integral part of the Holocaust in America, closing the door to Jewish Refugees and their chance to survive Hitler.
Indeed, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
David Shasha
Ken Burns Explores America’s Inaction During the Holocaust
By: Joseph Berger
A new documentary about the Holocaust opens with photos of perhaps the most familiar faces from that dark chapter of history: those of Anne Frank and her family, whose story has been read or seen by millions around the world.
So why would a six-hour film that offers fresh illuminations about America’s response to the Holocaust begin with such well-worn images? The answer is likely to surprise even those who know all about the arrest and eventual deaths of Anne, her sister and their mother. Their deaths, the documentary argues, were also a stain on the United States and the foundational myth of its benevolent open door for “huddled masses” of immigrants and refugees.
As recounted in “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” Ken Burns’s latest deep dive into America’s past, Otto Frank tried desperately to seek sanctuary in the U.S. for his family “only to find,” the narration says, “like countless others fleeing Nazism, that Americans did not want to let them in.” Seeing no other recourse, he arranged for the construction of the Franks’ ill-fated hide-out in Amsterdam.
Premiering on Sept. 18 and airing over three nights on PBS, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” aims to upend other longstanding historical assumptions as well, and also draw a thematic line connecting past tragedies and current struggles.
It highlights the racism and antisemitism that was laced through the nation’s purportedly democratic institutions and led to their inaction in response to Germany’s persecution of Jews. Modern footage points up how these failings stubbornly endure. This includes clips from the 2017 white-supremacist rallies at Charlottesville, Va., where marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, where rioters sported pro-Nazi emblems like a much-discussed Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt.
“It’s been very eerie to see the past echoing louder and louder throughout the time that we made the film,” said Lynn Novick, who co-directed and produced the film with Burns and Sarah Botstein.
The film also foregrounds parallels between America’s past and present hostilities toward immigrants and refugees.
“We remind people that it’s important that these impulses are not relegated to a past historical event,” Burns said in a telephone interview. “It’s important to understand the fragility of our institutions and the fragility of our civilized impulses.”
True, as the documentary chronicles, for a good portion of its history the U.S. took in millions of Irish fleeing famine, Jews fleeing pogroms and Italians fleeing poverty. But a fierce backlash against unrestricted immigration arose in the late 19th century abetted by a specious eugenics movement that downgraded entire nationalities and racial groups as potential pollutants of the American gene pool.
Lady Liberty’s golden door shut to Chinese laborers in 1882, then, with the watershed 1924 immigration act, to people from Eastern and Southern Europe and virtually all Asians. (A telling statistic: While 120,000 Jews immigrated in 1921, five years later the number dwindled to 10,000.) During World War II, first European refugees seeking to escape the murderous Nazi juggernaut were denied entry, then the skeletal survivors of the concentration camps.
Pieces of this story have been told in books, including David S. Wyman’s “The Abandonment of the Jews,” about the American government’s failure to rescue imperiled refugees; Daniel Okrent’s “The Guarded Gate,” about the genesis and impact of the 1924 immigration law; and David Nasaw’s “The Last Million,” about the treatment of displaced persons after the war. Burns and his team weave those threads into a seamless whole.
The story is enhanced by many trademarks of the Ken Burns aesthetic: haunting and substantiating film clips and photographs, plaintive music, lucid reflections from scholars, testimonies from engaging witnesses, personal letters read by actors like Meryl Streep. The erudite script was written by Geoffrey C. Ward.
The stories by survivors who were children in the 1930s are particularly poignant, told with an air of lingering disbelief that such horrors could happen in the 20th century.
Guy Stern, a 100-year-old scholar of German literature, recounts how, as a teenager, he was sent by his desperate German-Jewish parents to St. Louis, where he lived with an aunt and uncle while he searched for someone willing to sponsor the family’s entry into the country, a requirement of immigration laws at the time. The one person who agreed to put up the necessary $5,000 was a gambler, so immigration authorities rejected him as financially unstable. At the war’s end, Stern learned that his parents, brother and sister were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto and died there.
The filmmakers sought to emphasize the story’s ambiguities and complications, Burns said. For one thing, the U.S. let in more Jewish refugees than any other country — roughly 200,000 between 1933 and 1945 — the result partly of efforts by rule-benders like the journalist Varian Fry and the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whose clandestine dealings were financed by the War Refugee Board, under the direction of John W. Pehle.
The documentary, which was inspired by an exhibition on the same topic at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, also softens somewhat the unfavorable portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt drawn by many historians for having done little to rescue Jews and stop the slaughter.
Focusing on two of the better known critiques, it suggests Roosevelt was restrained from admitting the over 900 Jewish refugees on the passenger ship the MS St. Louis because of the quotas legislated by an immigration-resistant Congress. And drawing up plans to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz would have been wasteful, one featured historian contends, because bombing was highly inaccurate and the Germans were able to replace damaged tracks overnight.
Despite pleas from his wife, Eleanor, and from Jewish leaders, Roosevelt chose to devote his attention to defeating the Axis.
“The U.S. and the Holocaust” undermines the frequently heard rationale that Americans in the 1930s did not know how ugly the persecution of Jews had become. It offers newsreels and newspaper headlines that trace how Americans saw or read about random attacks by Nazi thugs and punitive laws that targeted Jewish-owned business and denied Jewish citizens access to parks and theaters. It notes that the restrictions emulated Jim Crow race laws in the American South.
But the majority of Americans, encouraged by antisemitic voices like those of the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, the automobile magnate Henry Ford and the lionized aviator Charles Lindbergh, scarcely altered their views, even after Kristallnacht — the brutal “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938 — during which 1,400 synagogues were torched, hundreds of Jewish businesses ransacked and at least 91 were killed.
State Department mandarins, particularly Breckenridge Long, devised or rigorously enforced immigration hurdles that required letters from sponsors, exit visas and transit visas and payments of thousands of dollars. Even well-connected people like Otto Frank could not assemble all the paperwork in time.
In a video interview, Botstein noted that the survival of those who made it to America validated a well-known quote by the journalist Dorothy Thompson: “For thousands and thousands of people, a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.”
Americans continued to oppose loosening immigration even as Hitler overran Europe and herded Jews into ghettos, then turned to systematic murder with so-called Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing squads — and human slaughterhouses like Treblinka.
The film includes a radio dispatch by Edward R. Murrow, from December 1942, that described the campaign in plain language. “What is happening is this,” he said. “Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.”
But such revelations failed to sway most Americans or their government. Two of every three of Europe’s estimated 9 million Jews would perish.
Even after the war ended and newsreels showcased American liberators stunned at encountering walking skeletons and piles of corpses, antisemites in the State Department and Congress continued to resist. As a result, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors idled in spartan displaced persons camps into the 1950s even as Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were admitted because they were considered dependably anti-Communist.
Making the film left its creators with feelings of both anger and sadness. Burns reflected on “all the symphonies that weren’t written, all the great literature that wasn’t written, all the children that weren’t raised right with love.”
Botstein is the daughter of Leon Botstein, the orchestral conductor and president of Bard College, whose parents lost most of their relatives in the war. She was surprised by “how little I knew or understood of the family history until I made this film.”
For the writer Daniel Mendelsohn, who appears in the film, the feelings were even more intimate. He tells the story of his great-uncle Shmiel Jager, a butcher who in 1912 left his village of Bolechow, then in eastern Poland, for America along with Mendelsohn’s grandfather and other siblings. Disenchanted with the squalor of the Lower East Side, Jager returned within a year. With the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s, Jager sought to move back to the U.S. but there was by then a 10-year waiting list of Poles seeking visas, and Jager, his wife, Ester, and four daughters got snared in the Nazi extermination maw.
“All those people you just saw,” Mendelsohn says in the documentary, referring to photos of his relatives, “I would have known those people. Some of them would have been alive today. And the reason they’re not alive is because the United States basically did its absolute utmost to make it as difficult as possible for Jewish refugees to escape the maelstrom that was engulfing them.”
From The New York Times, September 1, 2022
“We Did Know”: Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on The U.S. and the Holocaust
By: Michael Tomasky
A good documentary about a well-known historical epoch reaffirms what we knew. A great one reaffirms what we knew but, through relentless and surprising detail, makes the history new and relevant. The U.S. and the Holocaust, the new three-part documentary from Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, makes the story of American reluctance to help the Jews bracingly new—and chillingly relevant.
The film, which debuts Sunday night on PBS, was born as part of a joint project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It gives not only an honest assessment of the ways that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could have done more—but a frankly brutal look at a country that was deeply and relentlessly racist, jingoistic, and antisemitic. And it could not plead ignorance.
“We did know what was going on,” Burns says, noting that in 1933 alone, there were 30,000 newspaper articles sounding various alarms about what the Nazis were doing in Germany. But the American public of this documentary was not merely indifferent to Jewish suffering; it mostly thought they brought it upon themselves. “This is part of who we are too,” says Novick.
The U.S. and the Holocaust is also, in part, a positive story. There are heroes like John Pehle, the lawyer whom FDR named in 1944 to head the War Refugee Board, which Burns described as “the single most important entity in saving human lives as the Holocaust is unfolding.” The documentary uncovers the less-known history of the board and the way it used back channels to help the Jews more indirectly—for example by getting American laws changed so that border officials in countries like Spain could be bribed to accept Jewish refugees there. Pehle saved many thousands of lives—but by the time the board he headed was created, five million Jews were already dead.
And just in case you thought the filmmakers view all this as ancient history, the film concludes with a sound-bite from Donald J. Trump and a montage of footage from Charlottesville and the insurrection of January 6, 2021. “It’s been frightening … to be working [on] this film and be immersed in that time period while these things were happening around us,” said Novick. We will all find out soon enough just how much history we’ve learned.
From The New Republic, September 19, 2022
Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ Reveals the Limits of Democracy
By: Dara Horn
Many works of history are much less about the past than they are about the present. People contemplate past events to understand current problems, and in today’s fractured America, the Civil War would surely be a resonant topic for an eminent documentarian to explore. But Ken Burns has been there and done that. Instead, in our bifurcated country, where the past is relitigated daily in state legislatures and school-board meetings, Burns and his longtime co-producers, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, will return to PBS this Sunday with a six-hour, three-part miniseries. They’re taking on the one history lesson that all but the most repugnant Americans can still agree on: Nazis are bad.
It’s rather dismal that this lesson bears repeating, but apparently it does—especially now, when fascist-leaning rhetoric from both everyday losers and world leaders is often treated as just another edgy meme. Burns and his colleagues, however, remind us of the true stakes of that discourse. Their excellent project, which should be required viewing for all Americans, is about not just the Holocaust, but the U.S. and the Holocaust—an apt title for a series that looks squarely at this country’s record of apathy at best, and malevolence at worst, toward the victims of genocide. It confronts a topic that many Americans of every political stripe prefer to avoid: responsibility.
The question of American bystanderism during the Holocaust is well-trod territory among historians, dating at least to Arthur Morse’s 1968 book, While Six Million Died, and likely heartily debated even earlier. What’s new in recent years is the death of several baseline public assumptions that once guided postwar American life: that America is invariably a force for good, that anti-Semitism died in the Holocaust, and that democracy always wins. With the erosion of those ideas, The U.S. and the Holocaust reveals a dark perspective on democracy’s limits—perhaps even darker than the producers intended.
The series presents extensive footage of corpses, juxtaposing those heaps with the Statue of Liberty—a monument that becomes the MacGuffin for the group of Jewish refugees the documentary discusses over its six-hour stretch. Most of those individuals were German Jews who had resources and robust networks, and who were therefore atypical Holocaust victims. Perhaps that’s the point: 1930s America did not want more Jews, and even fancy, rich ones could barely buy their way in through the golden door blocked by red tape. Among them was Anne Frank’s father. He begged for help from a personal connection—a Macy’s co-owner, Nathan Straus—but was defeated by draconian American visa limits. We also meet several living refugees who, in recent interviews, relate their harrowing journeys to the U.S. as children, during which many of them were separated from their parents. I spoil nothing by sharing that there are few happy endings here.
Is it America’s responsibility to welcome all immigrants, or at least those in obvious danger? This moral question animates the series until it abruptly becomes irrelevant. After detailing how the outbreak of war shut down U.S. embassies and consulates in Nazi-controlled territory, the film moves on to other failures: the failure of the government to publicize the massacres (which were rigorously verified by late 1942), the failure to support underground rescue operations (the State Department even recalled the American journalist Varian Fry when his mission became diplomatically inconvenient), and later, the failure to bomb Auschwitz or otherwise directly target the Nazi murder apparatus. The series summons several American villains to account, in particular Assistant Secretary of State Samuel Breckinridge Long, a notorious anti-Semite who fought hard against Jewish immigration, tightened immigration restrictions, buried reports on the killings, shelved approvals for rescue plans, and blocked funding to relief groups, all while publicly denying those actions. This obstruction mattered: The U.S. had established important connections with people in Europe who could covertly extricate Jews from behind enemy lines, and those contacts were simply waiting for federal support for their work.
The film’s hero in that situation is a young Treasury Department lawyer and whistleblower named John Pehle, along with his Jewish boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., who authorized a scathing report that painted the State Department as an accessory to mass murder. Morgenthau’s father had been the ambassador to the Ottoman empire during the Armenian genocide, and had tried and failed to get President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. Morgenthau reminded President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this, making early use of the phrase “Never again.” His efforts, we’re told, led Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in 1944, which provided material support to partisan fighters and European rescuers. This arc plays on-screen as a redemptive Hollywood moment, the fulfillment of what could have happened three years earlier, when the large-scale violence first started. Unfortunately, this underfunded effort began only after nearly 5 million Jews were already dead.
The question of Roosevelt’s role in all of this has been fertile ground for historians for decades. Burns has a soft spot for Franklin and Eleanor, the subjects of one of his prior films, and here he treats them with kid gloves, blaming most of the missteps on State Department antagonists. The series makes a point of establishing the bigoted, racist atmosphere of the U.S. at the time, showing Nazi rallies in New York, clips of the popular anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, and colorized footage of a Nazi-themed summer camp in New Jersey. But the film goes out of its way to outline the pros and cons of Roosevelt’s decisions, leaving his reputation intact. To be clear, Roosevelt is an American icon and deserves to remain one. The problem with this approach is less about Roosevelt (there are plenty of convincing arguments in his favor, not least that he won the war) than about how it contradicts the rest of the film’s premise. The goal of the series is seemingly to reset America’s moral compass, using hindsight to expose the costs of being a bystander. But every bystander, including Roosevelt, can explain his choices. The film’s refusal to judge the commander in chief plays into a larger political pattern: offering generosity only toward those we admire.
The series covers one event in particular that illustrates the outcome of this sort of equivocation. In July 1938, delegates from 32 countries met at Évian-les-Bains, in France, to discuss what to do about the hundreds of thousands of Jews attempting to leave Germany and Austria. The conference was Roosevelt’s idea, to his credit. But in lieu of a real government delegation, he sent a single “special envoy,” one of his businessman friends. The event was meant to display the world’s humanitarianism. Instead, nearly every country, including the U.S., proclaimed how sad they were about the Jews—and then explained why they wouldn’t take any more refugees. One could interpret this as diplomats balancing competing interests, but the Nazis discerned no ambiguity: The Évian Conference was carte blanche to kill. They couldn’t have asked for a clearer announcement that the world did not care what happened to the Jews.
Watching the rapid collapse of democracies in Adolf Hitler’s path on-screen in 2022 is hard to stomach, given the shellacking that democratic norms have endured in recent years both in the U.S. and elsewhere. What’s even more disturbing, though, is a realization that I arrived at only around the fourth hour of this slow-burn series, and which the filmmakers, whose patriotic optimism is obvious here, probably didn’t have in mind: Democracies, for all their strengths, are ill-equipped for identifying and responding to evil.
Democracies are designed to encourage debate and to ensure that the public’s wishes are expressed and enacted. Decisions are made only after information is vetted, different perspectives are weighed, and compromises are reached. As Winston Churchill put it, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. The reluctance of the U.S. to confront Nazi atrocity may have been a moral abdication, but that reluctance actually demonstrated the values of American democracy at work. The electorate thoroughly discussed immigration, with all sides having their say and no one’s views repressed, and decided that a country barely emerging from the worst economic crisis in modern history could not absorb penniless Jews whose assets had been seized. When information emerged about genocide, elected officials took time to confirm that it was not, to use a latter-day term, “fake news.” Later, military strategies to avoid bombing Auschwitz were made exactly as dictatorships would not make them—with concern for soldiers’ lives.
That’s the nice version of this story, and it’s already not pretty. But a much darker side of democracy was also at work. Tyranny of the majority, while preferable to other types of tyranny, is nonetheless consequential. Immigration restrictions, for instance, were not a democratic failure; on the contrary, they were what voters wanted. Once war broke out, saving Jews in Europe, even in the limited ways possible, wasn’t merely a low priority; it was not what voters wanted. As one historian in the film notes, “The War Department doesn’t want the soldiers to know much about the persecution of the Jews, because they’re worried they won’t fight hard if they think they’re secretly being sent to save the Jews.” That omission was not a delicate balancing of policy goals. It was an elected government respecting majority sentiment. The failure to even try to save more Jews wasn’t because of some memo concealed by the State Department (despite Breckinridge Long’s efforts, everyone knew) or because it would have derailed the war effort (it wouldn’t have). It was, very clearly, because no one wanted to. None of this means that democracy isn’t our absolute best hope. It is. But something big is missing from the way our democracy envisions responsibility and respect—namely, to whom we think those values apply.
Not Idly By, an hour-long work by the filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, addresses a similar subject as The U.S. and the Holocaust, but with a very different style. It’s about, and almost entirely narrated by, Peter Bergson, a Jewish activist from British-occupied Palestine who came to the U.S. during World War II to shout himself hoarse about the Holocaust. The U.S. and the Holocaust includes Bergson’s story too—his dozens of full-page ads in major newspapers highlighting massacres that those papers buried in inside pages; his star-studded, stadium-filling pageants; his 400-rabbi march on Washington. But The U.S. and the Holocaust is sad, whereas Not Idly By is angry. Bergson, interviewed in 1978, rages with a Hebrew prophet’s fury. Nobody rages in The U.S. and the Holocaust, because nobody rages on PBS. A subtle condescension is built into melancholic discussions of what might have been done to save more Jews, because in the final analysis, America saving more Jews was an optional, high-minded choice that would have been made only out of charity.
The Allies’ defeat of Hitler supposedly lets us off the moral hook for all this. One of the reasons that World War II films have such broad appeal is because many follow a Hollywood trajectory: Good triumphs over evil. Unfortunately, this version of events is false. As one of the historians in Burns’s series puts it, “We do rally as a nation to defeat fascism. We just don’t rally as a nation to rescue the victims of fascism.” The Nazis lost their war against the Allies, but they won their war against the Jews.
As unfathomable as 6 million murders are, the murder of that many human beings is a grotesquely inadequate description of the losses of the Holocaust. Imagine, for instance, the deliberate murders of 6 million French civilians, including 1.5 million French children—not merely killed in war, but slaughtered in mass executions, elderly people and babies gassed to death or burned alive. If this had happened, it would have been horrific. But out of tens of millions of French people, survivors would have outnumbered victims, and with them, France itself would have endured. In effect, the story would have been the grim-but-triumphant one we tell about the Allied victory. The same cannot be said of European Jews, who once populated up to a third of many European towns and cities, and whose ancient and complex civilization within Europe predated Christianity by centuries. This civilization, which included its own languages, school systems, libraries, theaters, and publishing and film industries, was all but burned out of the world. Judaism survived Nazism, just as it outlived its many other oppressors. But Jewish life in Europe never recovered and almost certainly never will. That is the meaning of genocide.
Humanitarian impulses are unreliable because they depend not on dignity but on pity. Preventing genocide requires more than feeling sorry for others: We have to value people who are not us precisely because they are not us.
The failure to honor actual differences, the failure to recognize that not everyone has to be “just like us” for us to respect them, the failure to admit that the majority may not always be right—these failures are at the root of anti-Semitism, a mental virus that continues to plague our world. A sense of benevolence is necessary but insufficient to destroy it. Defeating it would demand an entirely different level of moral imagination, a collective commitment to replacing pity with respect.
That level of imagination, if we ever attain it, could actually overcome the weak points of democracy. It would open the door to honoring not just people in danger and people in need, but people, both at home and abroad, who aren’t just like us. It might even bring new meaning to “Never again.”
From The Atlantic, September 16, 2022, re-posted to Mosaic magazine with the title “In Trying to Highlight American Failures, Ken Burns Offers Apologetics for the President Most Responsible for Them”