Akin to Jonathan Tobin’s critique of Ken Burns’ recent three-part PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, Shmuel Klatzkin, writing at The American Spectator, lauds the series in terms of Burns talent in conveying a story in a visual format. He particularly takes note of Burns’ skill use of narration (by Peter Coyote), and, through the incorporation of the actual voices of witnesses and participants.
But, also like Tobin, Klatzkin notes that the documentary, deliberately soft on President Theodore Roosevelt, by its end veers from an exploration of history to the exploitation of contemporary social issues on behalf of a distinct political and ideological agenda.
Excerpts from Klatzkin’s essay follow, with some key sentences italicized for emphasis. My sole disagreement with Mr. Klatzkin lies in his statement, “Mr. Burns, be worthy of your own best vision. Don’t let this moral failure define your contribution. It is clear you are much better than this.”
Perhaps, after all, this documentary actually is Mr. Burns’ best vision?
The full essay is available at the link.
Ken Burns Is Not Worthy of His Own Best Vision
But where was a focus on Louis Farrakhan, in one of any number of obscene, Jew-baiting moments?
Here is a powerful leader who is unabashedly anti-Semitic
and who is powerful enough to subvert politicians to his purposes
— that is, he’s effective and dangerous.
Why was he not featured?
The best guess is that Burns’ politics obscured his vision here.
Where was a showing of Jewish campus groups’ meetings being broken up,
Nazi-style,
by organized groups dedicated to the destruction of the country
where the world’s largest Jewish population lives?
Where is a clip of powerful Democrat politicians,
publicly embraced by Democrat leadership,
spouting anti-Semitic tropes on the House floor and in speeches
— Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, and other lesser lights?
Where is the focus on the leftist ideologies that identify Jews as a class
to be colonialists and white supremacists,
and therefore worthy objects of mobbing, exclusion, and even violence?
Furthermore,
Burns willingly and powerfully equates the denial of asylum to European Jews
facing Hitler’s annihilation machine
to today’s attempt to any organized control of America’s borders.
Can one really make a moral equation?
Is assuring that we can weed out the drug runners,
human traffickers,
and gang members from those seeking political asylum
equivalent to denying shelter to Jews fleeing the gas chambers?
Is it moral to conflate the two?
This is mere political propaganda,
an imposture of moral authority rather than the real thing.
It contaminates and poisons the moral message.
But until he makes a correction,
he is now on record as giving a pass to the whole spectrum of anti-Semitism that is alive on the left.
And by his reckless association of everything Trump with Nazism,
he overlooks the terrible complicity of those
who are strengthening the hands of a foreign national regime in Iran
that publicly denies the Holocaust,
has publicly pledged to destroy Israel,
and which is making every effort to obtain the nuclear weaponry
by which it can obliterate as many Jews as Hitler.
That is a large omission to make and still claim the moral weight of the Holocaust behind you.
Mr. Burns, be worthy of your own best vision.
Don’t let this moral failure define your contribution.
It is clear you are much better than this.
Please live up to it.