And so 2020 - notable mostly for being IDSG's second year - comes to an end. This time, in a change to the advertised program, and with apologies for our absence throughout most of this last month, we return with another of our period movie discussion episodes, this time looking at D. W. Griffith's epic, lauded, infamous, three-hour, silent-era blockbuster of hate, prejudice, and bigotry, Birth of a Nation. Content warnings very much apply. The promised Part 2 of our coverage of Tom Metzger should be along as the first IDSG of the new year. Thank you all for sticking with us through thick and thin, sending us words of encouragement... and special thanks to those of you who helped us out financially. Let's hope we all have a better one in 2021. We have plans for the show in the new year, so stay tuned and stay safe. Links/Notes: Notes: Birth of a Nation (1915) Full Movie on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQaAddwjxg The Clansman (1905) Full Text: https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/dixonclan/menu.html Birth of a Nation at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation Dan Olson "Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation at Millennium Park (6/20/16): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNp-VHAueE Within Our Gates (1920) Library of Congress (no score): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtwrCto9az0 Within Our Gates (1920) (lower quality, but with a score): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1E0NrcnwAE Movies Silently debunks myths about Birth of a Nation: https://moviessilently.com/2015/09/07/silent-movie-myth-the-birth-of-a-nation-was-the-first-feature-and-the-first-film-shown-at-the-white-house/ Wikipedia, Timeline of Highest-Grossing Films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#Timeline_of_highest-grossing_films Behind the Mask of Chivalry, Nancy Maclean: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Behind_the_Mask_of_Chivalry/xOamVVhPQ6UC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=mask+of+chivalry+nancy+maclean&printsec=frontcover
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And we're back after an unscheduled Christmas break.
It's episode 76 of I Don't Speak German.
Welcome back after the, well, I won't say Merry Christmas because we're firm believers in the war on Christmas here.
So happy holidays.
Don't lie, Jack.
We really just had to, as one of our commenters said, we had to take the time off for Hanukkah.
That was the reason.
Oh yes, yes, that's right.
One of our loyal commenters pointed out, yeah, that we're both Jewish and gay, which is devastating.
Which neither one of which are in any way a negative thing personally.
No, no.
No, I mean, yes, but it is.
It's a devastating critique, and he's penetrated to the heart of our perfidy.
Well done, that man.
Definitely.
Yeah.
What a dickhead.
I don't know for a fact that this is the Nazi who calls himself Billy Cornpop, but I know that he uses similar language to the Nazi who calls himself Billy Corn Pop and the same avatar as the Nazi who calls himself Billy Corn Pop.
And calls himself Corn Pop.
And calls himself Corn Pop.
We can read between the lines here.
Well, he's a loyal listener and commenter, so good for you.
That's how it goes.
Corn Pop.
I don't read any of this.
Jack just DMs it to me sometimes and goes, like, what the fuck is he on about?
It's Billy Corn Pop.
He's a Nazi, hangs out with siege pillars.
Last I heard he was hanging out with Heimbach.
I don't know, it's been a little while since he popped his head into my purview, but we'll see.
Not really worth a full episode, he's just a little dipshit, but that's how it goes.
Anyway, yeah, so what I'm trying to say is apologies for our long break.
Over the Christmas period.
It wasn't intended, but you know, life just did its thing.
And yeah, so we are delayed getting back to you with part two of our two-part episode on Tom Metzger, but that part two is coming.
Still in the pipeline.
Part one got quite a few good notes, at least in my mentions.
I had quite a few people say that was one of our best, which I'm happy about.
I never know which ones people are really going to like.
But yeah, no, it's fine.
I have been working on part two, but I'd rather, I don't know, for whatever reason, I just kind of got distracted from Metzger and I didn't want to do it without you because we kind of missed our recording schedules.
And then when we came back, I'm just kind of like, let's just do a movie instead.
We'll get back to Tom Metzger next year.
It's fine.
He's still riding in the earth.
He's not doing anything that's worth, you know, really putting myself out there for.
But I've got something really special planned for part two, so look forward to that.
Yeah, you can probably hear that it's been a while for me as well because I'm rusty, but I'm trying my best to get back into the whole podcasting groove.
So yeah, as Daniel said, it's a movie episode and you already know what the movie is because you've seen the title of the episode from the page you clicked on, presumably, to download this or listen to it.
Yeah, it's both of them.
Yeah, it's um, let's take it easy.
Let's have an easy time of it and just do a movie episode Oh God, there's fucking movie three hours and 15 minutes of silent racism You know, I've seen this movie about five times now Yeah, I've seen it three times.
We did actually try to do a podcast about this before, didn't we?
Several years ago, long before we were doing this podcast, Jack and I and a couple of other friends really tried our best to do a podcast about this one, and the technical problems just...
We're not insurmountable, but they were insurmountable enough that from now on we never record anything without a master recording that we can go to for everything.
You just go, just release the master, it's fine, you don't have to align all this crap.
I went looking to see if I still had the elements of that, and I think that got lost a little while ago, so unfortunately I don't think that one's ever going to...
To surface but yeah, it was a fun time and I thank you I think our friends who I know are still listeners for for coming on for that because that was a really Fun recording about a really terrible movie and I really wish we had been able to share that with the world But now you and I get to do it just the two of us Yeah, yeah.
Birth of a Nation.
But before we get on to that, well, let me see, what have we got as our preliminary stuff?
Apologies, we've done that for the delay, yeah, we've done that.
Mexico Part 2's on its way, done that.
We need to, yeah, the next thing is we need to announce some changes to the podcast for the coming year.
I think minor changes, nothing too drastic.
Tweaks.
Tweaks, refinements.
Which I think we've been hinting at this for a little while, so I don't think this is going to come out of the blue for anybody.
No, no.
The gist of it is that we're... I mean, at the moment we... I mean, normally we get round about two or three episodes out a month.
Sometimes we've gotten more than that out per month.
We're going to go on to a more deliberate schedule of two main episodes per month, with a third episode per month, which will be just for our Patreon subscribers.
Right.
And that will be some sort of special episode, like usually it will be a movie episode a bit like this one, or it might be a Q&A or something a little bit different.
That's the basic... The idea is because I've always said that the content of this podcast should be free, like everybody should be able to access this, I don't want it to ever be...
I don't want you to have to pay for basic anti-fascist research.
But we do incur costs for this.
And we do not just material costs in terms of buying nice microphones and toasting things.
But just our time and all this other stuff.
My Patreon took a hit over the last couple of months.
And I don't blame people for that.
I've deliberately avoided leaning into doing something to puff that.
But I think it's worth saying.
If you're on the fence about supporting it and you want those extra episodes, give me a dollar.
Or give Jack a dollar.
Either one of us.
You'll get the you'll get the content There's no there's no kind of questions asked.
What a main main episodes are gonna be Always free the the only ones that we're gonna kind of put behind the paywall are gonna be you know kind of more fun stuff like this and You know, we may end up kind of putting those out, you know, like a couple months later anyway.
So, you know, we're treating this very, very kind of casually.
It really is just that kind of like little extra incentive to come and give me a dollar if you think this is worthwhile.
Because, like, right now this is paying less than a job bagging groceries that the grocery store would pay me.
Oh yeah, a lot less!
And this is a lot of work, not to try to guilt you or anything, but this is a lot of work, especially for Daniel, but also it takes a fair amount of time and work to edit one of these and make it sound good, as I hope it does.
So, as Daniel says, yeah, the main episodes where we give you info about these people will always be free, but the extra ones, you know, if you like hearing us talk, and I suppose some of you must do for some bizarre reason, you know, pop by one of our Patreons, and at least one, and I think yours is the same as mine, isn't it, Daniel, which is that there's no tiers, you just, it's a dollar and you get everything.
Yeah, I don't have tiers.
I'm going to update everything and put this out in writing once this episode goes out to be clear about that, because I've always just gone out there and gone.
There's no tears or anything.
It's just, give me a dollar, and that's great.
I have been really seriously talking about writing some more in the new year as well, and we'll probably start putting that stuff up on the Patreon as well.
And that will also be kind of a, you get it a couple of days early if you subscribe and But all that will eventually become free as well.
So I think that's kind of the model moving forward is if you want it on the day it's released, give us a dollar.
If you don't mind waiting a couple of days, I don't blame you.
That's perfectly fine.
Just, you know, wait for it.
So.
Yep.
Yep.
And certainly on my Patreon you get access to a fair bit of other stuff.
You get access to old episodes of, and Daniel can post these as well, old episodes of Wrong With Authority, our old podcast where we talk about movies about history and the history they're about, which is quite apt for this episode.
That no longer exists on the internet, that's been taken down, but I'm putting the old episodes up on my Patreon, as are the other hosts of that show.
And anything I write, you get advance access to, and also another podcast.
There's one at the moment I'm doing where it's probably going to be a five-part show where Holly, a friend of mine who's brilliant, hi Holly, explains Final Fantasy VII to me, which I know nothing about this whatsoever.
And I've put the first couple of episodes of that up on my Patreon, and people seem to love that, and it was certainly a fun time.
So if that sounds like fun, give me a dollar a month and help me to keep doing this, and Daniel too.
Yeah, we're hoping to do some more fun content as well.
Indeed.
The thing is that Jack and I are just really good friends, and so this is sort of like the thing that we're...
We're doing now, but we would like to actually do things that are a little bit more enjoyable for us in the audience at some point as well.
Although people do seem to really like this podcast.
It's kind of weird when people message me and go, I found your podcast and I listened to 25 episodes in three days.
And I'm like, that is probably not healthy for anyone.
Really?
Anyway, that's enough e-begging, I think, to satisfy even the most e-begging thirsty listener.
So let's get on with the main episode, which, as I say, is going to be about the movie Birth of a Nation.
Birth of a Nation, released initially in 1915, directed by a legendary director.
Some would call him one of the fathers of cinema, D.W.
Griffith.
Some would.
Some would, yes.
Some would, yeah.
Based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr., starring Lillian Gish, among other people.
And famously, widely reputed to be one of the most influential and innovative and foundational works of cinematic art.
And also, I think it's now generally agreed, profoundly racist.
Yeah, and agreed at the time, for that matter as well.
You can find reviews, notices at the time, which noted it was deeply fucking racist.
This was protested in the moment.
Like, there is this, and I'm not saying you're doing this, but there is this kind of, like, people go, oh, well, it's racist, but did they know it was racist at the time?
It's like, yeah, they did.
They knew it was racist at the time.
Indeed.
The key word there is agreed.
It's now the critical consensus that this is a racist movie, whereas at the time, the it's-of-its-time defence completely fails because loads of people at the time understood that it was a deeply racist movie, including even some white people, but definitely a lot of people of colour, including the early NAACP There was a huge protest movement against it.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, I mean, as always, you know, the Of It's Time defence fails because there were people at the time who were the victim of these sorts of prejudices.
There always are people at the time, whenever that time is.
But I think now, you know, it was controversial then.
You had loads of people prepared to defend it.
And for a very long time, people prepared to defend it.
And even today, in a weird way, there's a lot of special pleading about this film and about D.W.
Griffith, etc.
But even so, it's now the consensus.
If you read any sort of mainstream criticism about this, people will say just as fact, correctly as fact, that it's racist.
That's what I was getting at.
I mean, it's probably, I was thinking about this.
I kind of re-watched this last night and kind of finished it earlier today.
You know, it is, it is, you know, again, I've seen this many times now.
It's kind of weird that I've seen it that many times, but I find new things in it.
Like, I find things to admire in the film and things that are absolutely disgusting in the film.
Like, every time I watch it, I get, like, new insight into, like, the awfulness and the sort of, and there is this kind of brilliance to it as well.
Um, I think one of the things that, you know, we're kind of, um, that's worth talking about.
First of all, if you're, uh, I guess we're, you know, we're now like 15 minutes into this episode.
We probably should have done this a little bit earlier, but, um, you don't have to have watched Birth of a Nation to get a lot out of this conversation.
I think that we're not going to talk a whole lot about, like, Birth of a Nation spoilers or whatever, or things that, like, you have to have seen Birth of a Nation.
Like, we're really talking about kind of the stuff around Birth of a Nation more so than we're talking about Birth of a Nation itself, right?
Um, but, um, you know, the other thing is, uh, the Spike Lee, uh, the filmmaker Spike Lee, who would have been in film school in like the mid eighties, um, describes, uh, going like starting, I think he was, I think he went to UCLA.
No, he went to New York film school.
Anyway, I forget.
Sorry.
I didn't have that at hand, but, um, yeah, he definitely went to film school in New York.
Uh, he talks about kind of going into film school and just kind of being given this on his, like, curriculum of, like, movies to watch, right?
And, uh, you know, you see he sits down and watches it, and he's like, well, this is just, like, super racist, right?
Because he would have been, you know, 20 years old or whatever, and not kind of given any kind of context for it.
And this is one where I actually do own the Blu-ray for this, believe it or not.
It's actually a really nice Blu-ray, and it does not defend the film at all.
I mean, it is contextualizing things, and there are some really nice documentaries on it.
And including there are some bits where D.W.
Griffith had directed a number of shorts, short films.
Set in with you know with Confederate narratives And those are really interesting to watch in comparison to kind of where he ends up going with birth of a nation So it actually is like a really great like piece of work if you are interested in the film And you know sort of the the cultural context around it there are some nice documentaries But Spike Lee is in one of the documentaries, and he says like I never thought they shouldn't have had us watch it I mean, it's absolutely you you have to see this if you're a film student like it's required viewing and
I was upset that they didn't contextualize this at all, that they didn't say, they didn't kind of give us the context of like when and how this was made.
And I think that some of the, this is the greatest film of its kind ever made.
Some of the, this was the first film that did this and the first film that did that, which is, you know, mostly nonsense.
I put a link in the show notes to a blogger and a Twitter person who goes by MovieSilently, And she is a, she knows more about, she has forgotten more about silent film than I will ever know.
And I know quite a bit about silent film.
Um, she is, uh, she, she despises Griffith and like the cult that grew up around Griffith, mostly in defense of kind of this movie of like putting this movie on, um, kind of significant lists and sort of like diminishing some of its flaws.
And enhancing its positive qualities as a way of sort of like answering that question of like, you know, this is super racist.
Why are we watching this?
Right.
And I think that I get the sense that there is there was this kind of thing in film culture for a while of of doing that move.
Right.
Whereas I think we can acknowledge the film for what it is, which is a masterpiece on many, many levels.
And something that is probably the most racist movie ever made.
Like, I was trying to think about this.
Like, there are a handful of other films that kind of get close, but like it is, it is just...
Wretched how racist like 95% of this film is like it's just there is no abstracting the racism from this the racism is the point of of birth of a nation that is what it did like this film more than any other like single factor led to the revival of the Klan in the night in the late 19 teens in 1920s um Yeah, I mean, I don't know sorry.
I'm kind of babbling now, and I don't I didn't mean to it kind of Go there in quite that degree.
Your thoughts?
No, I mean, I absolutely agree.
You can't take the racism out of the film any more than you can take the egg out of the cake.
You know, it's just absolutely integral.
The racism is the point.
It's a story.
Even more fundamentally than the absolute
Disgusting depiction of African-Americans as, you know, African-American men as just sexually rapacious, a sexual danger to white women, African-Americans as stupid and wily and self-interested and just a danger to democracy and civilization and
And, you know, oppressing white people, stuffing ballot boxes, etc, etc.
Just this existential threat.
Even more fundamental to that is that the film's real preoccupation is race-mixing.
Miscegenation.
The two most outright villainous characters in it are quote-unquote mulattoes.
You have the absolutely disgusting depictions of the character of Silas Lynch and the The Senator Stoneman's mixed-race housekeeper.
And that, by the way, is a direct reference to Thaddeus Stevens, who had a mixed-race housekeeper.
Thaddeus Stevens was a great man, in many respects.
If you're going to stan a US Senator, Thaddeus Stevens is what to stan, right?
Yeah, yeah, true anti-racist.
And he is absolutely travestied in this, in the person of Senator Stoneman.
And this is a direct reference as well.
I mean, he's even got the same hair and stuff like that.
I mean, even in the book, I think it's even more, because I don't believe that he's portrayed as having a club foot in the film.
I don't know, maybe you're, I can't, I can't kind of recall like that being kind of brought out in a title card or anything.
No, I don't think so.
But Stevens himself did, you know, did walk with a limp.
And in the book, I'm sorry, there's a history here.
I'm just going to kind of throw it in just briefly.
There's a 1905 novel by a guy named Thomas Dixon, who we're going to talk about more very shortly.
And then this is adapted into a stage play by Dixon.
Apparently there was a 1911 film, which is now lost, which is called The Clansman.
That's what the novel and the play were called.
And then Griffith kind of gets a hold of the material and sort of transforms it slightly and turns it into this kind of giant epic.
But I have read the novel The Klansman, which is, I believe it's called A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.
And oh boy, if you want some racism, just pure, pure through the line, right into my veins, racism, racism.
Read The Clansman.
We might be reading a little segment of it here shortly.
Oh, good.
Great.
Yeah, I might.
I talked about doing some essays.
I might do an essay about The Clansman and Birth of a Nation at some point in the near future.
I've been meaning to reread it, and it would be worth rereading.
But The Clansman is the second of a trilogy of books.
And there I have not read all three of the books, but I have read the Klansman and oh boy.
Oh boy It's bad, but in the book.
It's very explicitly Stoneman is described as like walking with a clubfoot and in fact they're like sequences in which he's you know kind of Stalking people and sort of like he's dragging it behind him in this like very you know kind of grotesque fashion and that sort of thing it's it's a very Yeah, indeed.
But the point is that the danger of people like Stoneman is that they unleash these forces of miscegenation, of race mixing.
Silas Lynch is Stoneman's protege.
There's a very telling moment in the film Which is a really sickening recitation of a right-wing libel, I suppose, which is, you know, Senator Stoneman congratulates Silas Lynch when he says he's going to marry a white woman, and then when he says, actually, it's your daughter, Senator Stoneman is less than thrilled.
So there's the, you know, that is a trope of right-wing Slander against anti-racists, but really I mean I didn't there is there is the question of the of the slander of Thaddeus Stevens, but really the point is that the threat he represents is the threat to democracy and civilization and decent values and so on which is represented by white civilization and
And the threat to that is explicitly, it's not just the artificial elevation of African Americans out of their happy servitude, where they're depicted at the start of the film as belonging, you know, they're working in the fields and they're happy and dancing and so on.
It's not just their artificial elevation out of that.
And of course, that's another right-wing trope, you know, that the people of color are just being used by the left or whatever.
I don't think this film is actually anti-Semitic, but that's where that trope ends up.
Well, yeah, there are no Jewish characters in the film.
No, but that's where that trope, that's the terminus of that trope.
We should put a pin in that for later.
But yeah, it's the artificial elevation at the hands of these outsiders who come in and upset the social order.
Their artificial elevation from their proper place to somewhere where they don't deserve to be.
For instance, obviously all of this is in huge scare quotes because this is not...
I think we can be allowed a little bit of latitude in terms of not defending ourselves with every sentence in terms of just describing the content of the film.
I understand your reticence to not say these things out loud, but at a certain point, we're talking about Birth of a Nation, this is in the context of a podcast where we spent 75 episodes yelling at Nazis.
Just, just, you know, it's okay.
I think our audience is going to get it.
I know.
I'll be accused of virtue signaling, but it does genuinely sicken me to just give voice to this stuff.
It really does.
I mean, you know, I don't disagree with you.
I just think, you know, to some degree, and again, I'm not criticizing you for this, but I think that some of the Tiptoeing around some of the material out of a desire to, out of a reasonable desire to either not be kind of seen as, you know, giving voice to racist thoughts or to, you know, just out of a need for like a certain civility and a certain kind of family friendliness is part of what makes these things so like powerful when people find them, right?
And it's part of what like the kind of the people formerly known as the alt-right kind of got out of this kind of material is.
Well, you're not even allowed to say these words.
They make fun of us, I mean, not you and me specifically, but for using the word ched.
When it's like, you know why they say ched?
It's because they won't say, and then they say the six-letter F word, you know?
It's because what they want to say is a six-letter F word, but you won't say that because you're a six-letter F word, right?
And so they use the sort of verboten nature, the fact that we kind of dance around it, Reasonably so.
They go, like, no, this is just what it is.
And, like, they won't even talk about it because they're so scared of, like, they're such, like, pansies, you know, or whatever.
So, again, that's not a criticism of you, it's just kind of describing, it's getting at, like, kind of the thing that I'm talking about, like, the whole podcast is about, like, sort of exploring this liminal space, which most people don't want to go, and the way that, like, these far-right figures use our reticence to go there as a way of recruiting people, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, you're absolutely right.
I agree.
That doesn't lessen my... That doesn't lessen your... I even said six letter F word a couple of times there, which, you know, I get it.
Like, you know, there are lines.
There are lines in their grey areas and then there are black lines at the end of grey areas.
So, you know, like, anyway, we should continue.
Yeah, to finally get to the point, you have the absolutely, to my mind, pivotal scene where you have the new black members of the state legislature in South Carolina and they're actual black Americans in this because they're extras.
All the black main characters are white actors.
In blackface these are actual black men acting as extras in this scene and they're taking their shoes off they're swigging from bottles they're eating fried chicken and they're eyeing up the white women in the gallery while they're passing laws allowing intermarriage and that to me is like the central The central problem that this film has, it's obsessed with this idea, the problem is that these people have come in from the outside and they've upended the natural order.
That's what reconstruction is to this film.
It's the people from outside upending the proper order, the natural order, the proper hierarchy, and it's allowed people who deserve to be at the bottom working in the fields to rise artificially because they're not fully human.
They're stupid, and they're lustful, and they're dangerous, etc., etc.
And it destroys the structure of personal liberty, democracy, civilization itself.
And the central motor of that is the danger of the black man's sexuality, and the threat that that poses to white women.
And you have this threat running through the whole thing, from the central evil characters being the quote-unquote mulattoes, the mixed-race characters, through to the constant threat of the legalisation of mixed-race marriages, the two separate proposed marriages between a black man and a white woman, and then of course, again, another central scene, the black soldier, Gus, his attempted
Well, after he proposes to, is it Flora?
And she turns him down.
He chases her, obviously intending to rape her.
And, you know, better suicide, better throwing herself off a cliff than anything like that.
And that's what this film's really about.
I mean, I'm not being original here, but it's been said that for this film, the original sin of America isn't slavery.
It's not the racial hierarchy, it's the fact that the racial hierarchy isn't... you know, the problem is that it's endangered, that it's not strong enough, that it becomes... that it's taken away.
That's the problem, the civil war.
The problem with the civil war is that you even have the scene with the two sympathetic Union soldiers that take in whoever it is, Well they're escaping it's very hard to remember what the characters names are it's very confusing it's very there's there's a lot of characters there's a lot going on this is part of what makes it difficult to watch for a modern audience is that you end up just kind of glazing over and kind of going like I'm watching people acting.
And speaking, I can't hear it.
And, I mean, you know, it is, like, it is, it is kind of one of those things of, like, the characters are not, like, visually well enough identified between each other, and there are a lot of them, and so you almost have to kind of sit down with a notebook to really kind of keep track of who's who in any given scene.
And so, yeah, and not, again, just, like, I've seen it five times, and even I don't know, like, exactly which characters are in which scenes at all times.
Like, it's, you know.
Anyway, there is at one point an intertitle where it says, Former Enemies United in Defense of Their Common Aryan Birthright.
Oh yeah!
And that's what this film is all about.
It's about the birth of a nation that's being referred to as the unified United States after the Civil War.
And it's specifically the white United States.
It's the union of the former enemies of the Confederacy and the Union, the North and South.
It's their unity together, potentially, you know, in the future, after the division of the Civil War, as white America.
That is what the film is celebrating.
Sure.
And in fact, that's really the point of the film, and I do want to circle back to that.
But first, you mentioned the attempted rape and then the suicide of one of the characters there.
And I regret to inform you, it's even worse in the book.
Uh-huh.
And this is the bit where I'm going to read a little bit of the book to give you a sense of just how awful this is.
Yeah, I can kind of guess where this might be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK, go on.
And I'm reading a very small snippet of this.
And there are no slurs in this.
Like, that's the thing.
It doesn't need it.
Marion staggered against the wall, her face white, her delicate lips trembling with the chill of a fear colder than death.
We have no money.
The deed has not been delivered, she pleaded, a sudden glimmer of hope flashing in her blue eyes.
Gus stepped closer with an ugly leer, his fat nose dilated, his sinister bead eyes wide apart, gleaming ape-like as he laughed.
We ain't had our money.
The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous.
A single tiger's spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat, and she was still.
And then the next chapter is all about the girl and her mother deciding that if they commit suicide now, no one has to know about how they were defiled, and they can die with their reputations intact.
It's a whole chapter where they have a long conversation about that.
And then they dive off a cliff.
Imagine 200 pages of that.
That's what reading The Clansman is like.
Yeah.
And it's worth stating that Thomas Dixon Jr.
vehemently denied that he was a racist.
I mean, God, there's so many, like, directions we can go here.
Like, I was gonna, like, kind of, like, recount a little bit of the plot, maybe, and kind of give people a little bit of the sense of, kind of, what the context was.
You're absolutely right in terms of, like, what the film is trying to say.
And I think this film does kind of get, um...
For people who haven't seen it, they hear it's a pro-slavery movie about the Ku Klux Klan, and they think it's like, oh, raw rock confederacy, the way that a modern telling of these kinds of events would likely be.
But the film is more subtle than that.
The first shots of the film are the original sin of America.
The African is brought to America, essentially.
Yeah.
Right.
And it shows, you know, like black men in chains and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And then it kind of moves on into and then there's this kind of idyllic life of the southerners, southern plantation.
This is pre-war and kind of northerners.
You kind of meet your major characters.
And the through line of the plot is a pair of romances between Senator Stoneman's daughter And a Confederate soldier, and then also a Union soldier and one of the daughters of that, or the sister of that soldier or something.
So it's two parallel romances between Northerners and Southerners that have been pit asunder by this war, this war that was created not by the existence of slavery in the society or by more complicated socioeconomic factors, But by the existence of black people on the North American continent and within the United States.
Exactly, that's the original sin that's being referred to.
Not slavery, but the importation of this impurity.
Right, exactly.
And as you kind of get to Tales of Heroes, and the film is split into two parts.
The book I think is split into six parts, but the film is split into two, and it's sort of like...
Up to the assassination of Lincoln, who is portrayed unusually within this kind of lost cause literature, is presented as kind of a hero.
He's one of the kindly father figures of the film.
And in the book, he is someone who actually intervenes to pardon one of the Confederate soldiers when he is Given a sob story about like his background etc like he sees portrays like kindly and the reason that he is presented that way is because It's using the line that like Lincoln himself.
His goal was to end the war and then to Export all the Africans off of the North American continents in the back to Africa sort of sort of thing and so like this kind of abolitionist thing was really just sort of a Way of kind of getting through the messiness in terms of like kind of recreating this Nation as it should have been originally.
And then you enter Reconstruction, in which Stoneman is the real enemy, is the real villain here.
Because not only is he sending in kind of northern troops, but these troops are often either black or they are, quote-unquote, mulattoes.
And mulattoes is a term that gets used a lot in this film, and so I'm just gonna kind of use it, as we discussed earlier.
Obviously it's a slur, I don't mean it that way.
You also get quite a bit, I think there's something subtle going on with makeup here, in which the It is kind of portraying African, you know, kind of black people in mulattoes differently in the use of like the mulattoes are typically people in, uh, white people in blackface.
And so I think there is, there is this kind of thing of where people kind of new viewers of the film are kind of viewing it and kind of going like, Oh, that doesn't look like a black person.
No, it's meant to look like a, it's meant to look like a half breed.
Like that's literally the point of the film.
And I think that that's pretty universal.
I don't know that like every extra is kind of treated the same way, but I, from my understanding, from my viewings of it, I think it's pretty universal that the, that when a character is considered to be black by the film, it is a black person playing the character.
When the film considers the person to be a mulatto, it's a white person in blackface, which is a kind of fascinating thing if you view the film through that lens and then you kind of go back and watch it because there are even in like crowd scenes you can see like a difference in behavior in the way that like certain people are portrayed it's again you learn new very racist things every time you watch this film um as the uh in the in the area of the film as the uh kind of black people and as the northern troops kind of come in and start
um you know reconstruction happens and you start seeing uh black people voting you start seeing black people uh entering the legislature and you're right that is like a clear like the most pivotal scene in the film is the scene in which these like Quote-unquote savages are invading the legal apparatus and making a mockery of the thing that white people have built Then they start to invade relationships.
They start to do kind of interracial Sexual relations.
There's the there's the attempted rape Etc, etc.
And then eventually you run into you know, our southern hero has had enough founds the Ku Klux Klan and eventually saves the day and Stirring scenes like these, I mean, brilliantly constructed action scenes.
It must cost a fortune at the time.
You know, like this is this is like kind of top notch, very well directed action in which a group of white men seeing this infection of their society band together under hoods and ride along to Remove this from their society.
And then at the end, you literally get scenes in which armed white men in Klan hoods and Klan robes on horseback are preventing black people from voting.
This is a heroic moment in the film.
That's the happy ending.
This is our happy ending.
And then The two couples get together.
This is like the final show of the film.
The two couples get together, and Jesus himself beams.
Christ himself appears.
He appears to beam over the birth of the new nation.
That is the actual plot of Birth of a Nation.
I left a whole lot out there, but I hope you'll agree that I hit the high points on that, right?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
It's quite something when Jesus himself actually materializes to bless the new order based on the suppression of the black vote.
Now that black people aren't voting anymore, Jesus has come back to really just smile on you and give you the thumbs up.
That's what Jesus does, apparently.
It's also worth noting that Dixon himself was... I mean, people don't really get this context.
Both Dixon and... I know Griffith, and I believe Dixon was the son of a Confederate soldier, of an actual soldier who fought for the Confederacy.
And Dixon was a best-selling author, like the play based on this book.
It was a very popular play.
I mean, it was a hit at the time, in the early 1900s.
Dixon was a friend of Woodrow Wilson, a personal friend, and I believe a college roommate, if I'm remembering correctly.
Yeah, they were college buddies, certainly.
They were college buddies, at least.
They knew each other.
And so there's this kind of famous quote that's supposedly from Woodrow Wilson, where he says, the film was famously screened at the White House.
There's a quote supposedly from Wilson where he says, it's like history written with lightning.
Well, historians dispute that as to whether that was actually Wilson.
It seems like what happened was there was someone speaking to a reporter who reported that Wilson said, it's history written with lightning.
And there is some indication that that was actually Dixon himself saying that.
You know my buddy, the President of the United States, he said this film is like history written with lightning!
That's what that guy, that big famous guy said.
Not to say that Rudra Wilson was not also a terrible human being, and one of our worst presidents, and deeply fucking racist.
But there is propaganda built into every element of the way this film has been treated by people of the time, people today, by film historians.
And I think it's worth unpacking all that a little bit, and examining where do we get these ideas from?
Because there's propaganda built in.
The Klan of 1867 didn't look like the Klan in Birth of a Nation at all.
There was no mass ride to save towns.
The Klan of the late 1860s up to 1870 or so, in which it was like, Explicitly banned, and basically all the people who were in the Klan, they just took off the white hoods and put on different colored hoods and went and did the same thing, just not under the auspices of the Klan.
Great job, federal government.
U.S.
Grant destroyed the Klan.
Didn't really solve the problem, but hey, it's great.
Anyway, yeah, that's totally not something that happens today.
Yeah, certainly don't see that problem over and over again.
Yeah, don't see that thing where they just suppress the worst, most visible manifestation, and then just ignore the problem after that.
Right.
But these were like nighttime pinprick raids, typically.
These were kind of quiet nighttime lynchings.
Yeah, yeah.
This was a gang of reactionary terrorists.
Right.
Heroic figures riding in the daylight, 40,000 men strong or something like that.
I believe I told this joke on the first time we tried to record this, but there were probably more miles of Klan robes made, or more square miles of Klan robes made for this film than had existed for the entirety of human history up to the point that this film was made.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There is disagreement about how directly this film played into the formation of the Second Klan in the 1920s, but certainly it influenced the Second Klan, and loads of what we think of as quintessentially Klan iconography and Klan aesthetics, even down to stuff like the white robes and the burning cross etc, the Second Klan adopted from this film.
Yeah.
The burning cross seems to be – I mean, there are kind of murky historical origins.
It may have come from like a 17th century Scottish practice that was kind of – but it seems to have been appropriated by Dixon.
Like, nobody burned crosses in the 1860s.
In the original clan.
And in fact, in the book, it's shown as a way of signaling on treetops, or not treetops, but hilltops and mountaintops, to other members of the clan as to what the intentions were, is to burn the cross as a signal kind of thing.
In the film, you actually see them carrying small crosses, but the idea of burning a cross and putting it in somebody's lawn or something like that, that comes Significantly later.
And that's certainly not kind of original, like, clan lore.
That was invented by the book and the movie.
That comes from the mind of Dixon himself.
Yeah, and it's interesting, given when this, I mean, this is a bit of a byway, but this film comes along in 1915, it's resurrected in 1920, and that's round about the time it at least plays into the formation of the second clan.
These were revolutionary years, and in the same way that you have to, I think, look at the first clan, the early clan, as a counter-revolutionary force against Reconstruction.
I mean, if you look at the work of historians like Eric Foner, you know, drawing on W.E.B.
The reassessment of Reconstruction as a revolutionary period or a semi-revolutionary period where you have amazing achievements of African-Americans and coalitions of African-Americans and progressive whites, you know, creating black enfranchisement and education programs and so, you know, African-Americans are becoming elected to state legislatures and Congress and stuff like that.
And you can see the Klan as part of a reactionary, counter-revolutionary movement on the part of Southern Democrats and a wider system of militias, you know, to suppress this social movement.
In the same way that that was true of the first Klan, the second Klan I think you can see at least partly as a reactionary, counter-revolutionary force.
You know, that starts in this period of... These were revolutionary years all across the globe.
Obviously, you have the end of the First World War, you have the Russian Revolution, you have the German Revolution, you have revolutions all across Europe, and you have a lot of tumult and revolt in the United States.
And social change more broadly.
And then the second Klan comes along as part of the huge, much wider than just that, reactionary backlash against these things.
I mean, the Klan of the 20s is much more a political movement.
And I think partly, I mean, I think you're right that there is a...
It's proto-fascist.
It's anti-Catholic, it's anti-Semitic, it's anti-left, it's anti-social progress in all sorts of ways.
And I think the point I was just going to make was that it's interesting that into the film, via Dixon, you get all this stuff about pagan rites and pagan symbology coming into the clan with the white robes and the crosses.
They even mention Scottish rituals and stuff like this.
Because it's all supposed to be Aryan.
It's all supposed to be rooted in this heritage of Anglo-Saxons, you know?
And this is exactly the same time that the early Nazi party is forming and adopting similar sorts of, you know, in Germany, similar sorts of ideas based on Aryanism, which ultimately, of course, comes from the ideology of the British Empire.
But it's very much a global movement.
This reactionary, counter-revolutionary, racist formation of proto-fascist groups Yeah, no, absolutely.
that are forming themselves around that, exactly that sort of pagan, supposedly Aryan symbolism.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, you know, and these things, I mean, you say proto-fascist, I'm really kind of okay with calling it fascist.
That's not an argument that you and I need to have.
I think you would... No, I just mean proto in the sense that it's... I'm talking about the moment when it starts and starts to grow.
It predates the term.
There is a part of me that would argue that the Confederacy itself is sort of among the first sort of fascist states.
But I think you're right.
No, I'd agree.
Like the Black Hundreds in Russia, etc.
You're seeing the 1920s, or pardon me, yeah, you're seeing in the 1910s and 1920s, you're seeing a rising socialist movement in the United States.
I mean, you know, Eugene V. Debs runs for president four times.
Does a respectful job running for president, you know?
And suddenly you see this kind of like revision of this kind of far-right thing.
You're also seeing in the 1920s, or in the 1910s, and kind of up to about 1930, you're seeing the Great Migration.
And this was explicitly in response to the horrifying conditions of the Jim Crow South, in which African Americans are escaping the strictures of the Jim Crow South for the slightly less but still horrifying conditions of the cities of the North.
And I think that that's part of what drives this kind of conflict and this kind of rising racial resentment because Ultimately, you know, people are competing with one another under a capitalist system and are not like actually working in solidarity with one another.
And you have figures that are encouraging this.
This is not like a natural state of affairs.
This is something that is created by the capitalist class to prevent us from bonding together and working against the capitalist class.
But you see this this kind of sorry, I just wanted to highlight that for the Nazis that are listening They're gonna like, you know, you're gonna use me to go like yeah, it's just a natural thing You know, I have you you defend yourself from the like kind of reasonable centrists who are you know?
Like reading your words and might misread you I'm like, no, no, I'm deliberately saying to the nights for listening like you're full of shit.
I'm telling you this now You will never respond to me now because you have no argument against that like ultimately Absolutely.
You're just going to keep caricaturing what I have to say.
I just love that I have Nazi listeners.
I find it amusing.
Sorry, I get completely distracted.
It's one of, I find it amusing.
Anyway.
Yeah, no.
Sorry, I get completely distracted.
It's fine.
I don't know.
Like, we've been going for about an hour.
I feel like, I don't know, is there stuff we should hit on this?
Because I feel like we could talk for four hours and not really kind of get at the core of what's going on.
I think that we've discussed the film to a degree that I think people kind of understand it.
I'm going to ask you a question.
Would you recommend that people, like fans of the show, do you think people should watch this film?
I think... I mean, you know, listener, if you're the sort of person that from sheer kind of historical or political or even just aesthetic interest is prepared to sit and watch a three-hour silent racist movie, you know.
I...
Look, if you're a film student, I would say, yeah, you should watch this.
I mean, I'd like to touch upon the subject of How important this is in the history of film, the evolution of the art form.
That's not our main subject here, obviously, but it's something I'd like to touch upon.
Undoubtedly, if you're a film student, or even if you're just interested in cinema as an art form, yeah, you should watch it, because this is part of the early history of cinema.
And I think this is a very important work of art.
The trouble with this film is what you read over and over again when you read about this is people say, well, you get this kind of yes, but thing, yeah, from which it comes from two directions.
You either get the it's racist, yes, but it's also a great work of art, or you get you get it the other way around.
You get the it's a great work of art, but it's racist.
And in so many cases, it sounds like a sort of unfortunate juxtaposition, like it's a sort of accident, you know, like he made a great movie that was accidentally racist, or he made a racist movie that was accidentally a great movie.
And I think As you said earlier, you can't take the racism out of it, and that's absolutely true in terms of the subject matter, because the film is just about that.
The film is just about how terrible it is for civilisation and humanity and democracy and liberty and freedom and America, etc., when the vile subhuman blacks get out of their proper place and start voting and start getting elected and start Getting ideas about white women, etc, etc.
That's just what the movie is about.
And the movie is about how, in order for America to sort of capture or recapture its great promise of this unified, harmonious whole, it needs to specifically be a white supremacist nation.
That is the movie.
And there's a hell of a lot of special pleading that goes on for this movie and goes on for D.W.
Griffiths.
People say, well, you know, Griffiths wasn't so much a racist as he was enthralled to other people's ideas or enthralled to story or whatever.
No, this is his thing.
He knew exactly what he was doing here.
You can't make this film.
This isn't accidental.
You can't make this film.
And if you watch the film, you know that you can't make this without having these kinds of racial attitudes.
Yeah, absolutely.
You make this film, you're a racist.
It's that simple.
Griffith was 100% on board with the script as well.
He even changed aspects of the Klansmen, the play, and I haven't read the play, but from what I've learned to understand, Dixon emphasized different elements of the book in the play than griffith did in the film and so griffith is absolutely like this is his narrative as much as it is anything you know and yeah you know griffith's one of the early auteurs i mean long before the term auteur was actually used but he you know he is the author of this film
you can't divorce him from that you know if you're going to give him credit for for all the technical marvels, which are overstated, as I've argued previously, then you also have to give him, you also have to damn him for the racism, because it's all part of the same thing, you know?
Yep, yep.
And as I say, there's a lot of special pleading on his behalf.
It's like...
And the decision to make this, like, again, the decision to make this film, if he wanted to make, like, a brilliant epic, you know, history, you know, if he wanted to use these techniques in this kind of big epic, he had a whole lot of things he could have made movies about, but he made this one instead, he had a whole lot of things he could have made movies And so you have to, like, you can't, like, I mean, fuck Griffith.
Like, what do you want to say?
Yeah, yeah, no, but people will bring up stuff like broken blossoms, which is another film he made Oh, which is which is also deeply racist, but it's like, you know, it's it's it's a he's a kindly old Chinaman, so it's fine.
Yeah, and there's no physical relationship.
So the fact that he's a sinister figure You're who's learning over this white woman and I've portrayed him in this way.
Yeah, I've watched a lot of silent films It's fine, you know like watch broken blossoms watch the way that the the Chinese character who is yeah And you know it is like credited as like he's the first Chinese actor in a lead in a film in a Hollywood film and it's like yeah, and like maybe he's not maybe they're not literally saying like Asian peril, but It's like Asian peril, question mark?
No, this is one of the good ones!
That's what Broken Blossoms is!
Come on!
That's the point about Birth of a Nation as well, there's quote-unquote good ones in Birth of a Nation, and they're the ones who know their place.
They know their place, right?
And this is, I believe I mentioned this, like, the real instigators, and we've kind of discussed this, but the real instigators of the problem is, like, Stoneman kind of saying to the Mulatto characters, like, no, you should hold your head high, and it's your sidewalk, too.
And this is considered, like, the deep affront to the Southern pride from the white men.
And, like, Stoneman is sort of, like, egging these people on.
And again, the mulattos are especially dangerous because they are a blend of black and white.
And so they have the bestial impulses of the African alongside the agency and intelligence of the white man.
And therefore, this is why race mixing, this is why miscegenation should not be allowed.
In fact, it is more dangerous to have mulattos in your society than to have actual Africans.
And again, not me saying this, this is not just what Griffith believed.
The modern Nazis I follow today will believe.
There will be people listening to this podcast, listening to me talk about it, who are going to say, we didn't refute that!
You didn't refute that fact on your podcast, you, sir!
You must be controlled by the Jews!
Clearly, because otherwise you would refute that.
It's ridiculous.
It's silly.
It's deeply silly, yeah.
But, I mean, I was talking about how it's not an accident, and you can't take the racism out of it because the racism is the story, but it's also not an accident in the sense that you said he wanted to make an epic movie about America.
He wanted to make a big commercial movie, a big action movie, etc.
And this was a huge movie.
This was mega budget, this was hyped to the hilt, advertising everywhere, they had guys riding up and down outside theatres in clan robes to promote it.
Like in the initial release in, I believe in Tennessee?
Yeah, no.
And a lot of the original release schedule, they literally did that.
Yeah, no clue.
Yeah.
It got a roadshow release, you know, you bought a ticket.
It was played in theater, like in non-traditional theatrical distribution kind of settings.
Yeah, yeah.
If you remember the way that Passion of the Christ, I don't know if this played this well in your neck of the woods, Jack, but Passion of the Christ was played in churches.
Like mega churches and even in like small churches like if you drove through countryside At the time that was released in Alabama where I was from where I lived at the time You would see kind of like big banners of like, you know the passion of the Christ playing such-and-such date Like and so they would like put up like kind of like tarps essentially and play passion of the Christ for the religious audiences and you saw very similar kinds of things happening with birth of a nation in
You know, upon release, like, they would just rent a projector, they would rent a film strip, and they would play it.
And so, a lot of the thing of, like, analyzing its box office receipts is we kind of don't know how many people saw this, because it was such a, like, non-traditional, even for the time before we had, like, traditional movie theater distribution systems and, like, everything was computerized, it had, like, this very non-traditional release thing.
But, like, this was, The top grossing movie of all time, for 25 years.
Yeah.
And it was widely considered to be the greatest movie of all time, until the next top grossing movie stroke greatest movie of all time came along, which, interestingly enough, was Gone with the Wind.
Yes.
You got there, because you, I pitched it and you hit it out of the park.
That's where that goes.
Exactly!
For like 50 years of cinema history, the top grossing film of all time was either Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind.
And just sit on that for a second, and what that means about America.
Just turn that over.
This really does circle back to my point, which is that, as I say, huge budget.
They hired the LA Phil to do the music.
You got a souvenir booklet when you bought a ticket.
The tickets were extra expensive.
They made the tickets more expensive.
It was a monster of hype and advertising.
And, you know, he wanted to make that kind of film, and he chose this source material.
And that's not an accident because it had to be this sort of source material in order to justify that tone of seriousness and pomposity and state of the nation gravitas to justify the opulence and the hype and draw people into this monster hit.
It needed to be this subject matter.
And this resonated with people because this reflected back to white audiences right the way across America, their viewpoint, their worldview shaped by white supremacy. - I see.
Absolutely.
Again, you can't divorce it from anything that's around at the time.
As you said, whether it created the rise of the Second Klan, I think that's an overstatement, but it certainly provided a propaganda value.
Yeah.
I want to go off script slightly here.
Have you seen Black Klansman, Jack?
I haven't, no.
Okay.
It's a deeply broken film that I sort of love for, like, the bits of it that work are really worth the bits of it that don't.
And I think you would find it insufferable, but I find it really useful and moving.
And there's no, like, I'm not defending anything.
I'm just saying.
I enjoy the film.
I think it works on its own terms.
It's very pro-cop.
I hate it.
I hate it for that.
There are parts of it I hate, there are parts of it I love.
As someone following these movements, there are parts of it that ring really, really true to me.
I'll just leave it there.
But there's a sequence in which members of the 1978 clan led by David Duke, played by Topher Grace, which is always great because Topher Grace is Jewish and David Duke got so angry about that.
Anyway, they do a clan initiation, and it's a very solemn ceremony, etc., etc.
It's one of the great scenes in the film, because you have Harry Belafonte in a kind of cross-cut talking about an actual real lynching case from 1919, in which A black man was tortured and burned to death after being accused of raping a white woman intercut with this sequence of these new clan initiates watching Birth of a Nation.
And getting really raucous and really like they're, they're saying they get into the movie, right?
Like they're really, I mean, they're watching this like three hour movie and getting like, you know, they're like throwing popcorn at the screen.
It's like this kind of really like happy occasion to get to watch this.
And I think you would be justified in thinking, well, that's kind of, I mean, it's a movie from 1915.
Like who could possibly kind of get that much into it?
Like this far divorced from its kind of cultural reality and kind of like really understand the language that the film is using.
Except I have done something that few other people have done.
And I have watched television.
TRS, the Daily Show guys, Mike Enoch and Alex McNabb, alongside the early heel turn crew, watch this film start to finish, and they do the exact same fucking thing.
It's amazing.
They start off kind of going like, oh, it was a silent film.
They don't understand anything about cinema of that period.
It's hilarious.
Anyway, They don't understand anything.
In fairness, I can get quite into Battleship Potemkin if it's on.
Battleship Potemkin, getting into Battleship Potemkin is actually good.
Getting into Birth of a Nation is actually bad, and the reason being because politics has form as well as content, or content as well as form.
Exactly.
So, but you can literally watch and I've decided what our first bonus episode in January is going to be and I have, I'm going to stream together some clips of the showaboys talking about Our recent coverage of the NJP and some of the old stuff from early 2018 of them watching Birth of a Nation with commentary.
That will be our first bonus episode in January.
Right.
And oh boy, do I have some content.
I thought about kind of cutting some stuff together and putting it in this episode, but I'm very, like, I was thinking about it and I'm like, no, that sounds like, pay me a dollar a month for that.
That's a lot of work.
Yeah, I'm just like, again, the film has power.
And the reason that it's worth talking about even today is that the same stereotypes, the same ideas of like, well, you just put black people in charge of your government, and they're just going to put their feet up and eat watermelon or fried chicken.
This is prior to the watermelon thing.
They're just going to invade, they're just going to do awful things, they're not going to treat it with respect because of, and within the kind of mainstream conservative movement it's, well, they don't have a culture of respect, or they have this kind of violent culture, they're listening to the hip-hop and they've got their pants hanging down, and within the overt Nazi movement it's, well, they're just genetically inferior.
And, like, these things are not, like, they are distinct, and we draw that distinction here on this podcast because I think it's important to do that within this context, but ultimately it's the same fucking difference, right?
Yeah.
There are certain people who are not capable of being within our government, who are not capable of judging our society, and are not capable of governing, because .
They're not like me.
And, like, fuck off, you fucking assholes.
Like, it's just complete nonsense from beginning to end.
But, yeah.
Thoughts on that before I think we should wrap up.
And I do have a final plea to the audience before we wrap up.
But if you've got something, I would love to talk for another few minutes.
Well, I said I wanted to touch upon the question of how much of an artistic triumph this is.
And I think the instinct to downplay it as artistry is understandable because we want to distance ourselves from its content.
There's an instinct, I think, in some quarters to downplay the brilliance of the form because we want to distance ourselves from the content.
I think it is brilliantly made.
I think sometimes, part of the problem is that the claims made for it originally are vastly overstated.
It's not a great triumph of innovation because loads of the, you've said this already, but loads of the things in the film are techniques that already existed in cinema.
But I think what it is, it's a triumph of synthesis and popularisation, not of innovation.
And that's fine.
Because I think the stress upon innovation is actually a mistaken idea.
Artistry is not really about innovation.
It is about synthesis and how you treat form and content, etc.
Spoken like a philosophy major.
It's one of those things people always say about Shakespeare, you know, he invented all these words.
He probably didn't invent them, we probably just have our first usages of them in print in Shakespeare.
The point isn't that he was a genius sat in a garret somewhere listening to the muse inventing words, you know, that's not the point.
That's a modern, romantic, capital R idea of the artist, which is a pretty stupid idea to be honest with you.
He was a commercial playwright and he wrote, and his work survives because it was Uniquely keyed into a tumultuous moment in history.
And I think you can say something similar about DW Griffiths as you can about Eisenstein and similar artists.
But I think you've put in the links a link to Dan Olsen's video about Triumph of the Will.
And I think that's a really good link, because I think the other thing about Birth of a Nation is that it's a triumph of budget and hype, as I was saying, hype and propaganda and advertising, very much like Triumph of the Will.
And as Dan Olson says in that video, you know, part of the message of Triumph of the Will is The idea of the greatness of the Nazi aesthetics and by propagating the power of the Nazi party as like this kind of overwhelming force.
Yeah, and the idea of Triumph of the Will as an artistic triumph is itself a Nazi idea.
It's Nazi propaganda in itself that we've adopted and we continue to recycle.
And I think there's something similar going on with this, which is that some people still recycle the idea of Birth of a Nation as this great artistic triumph in the sense of being innovative, creating the language of cinema, etc.
And that itself is kind of, you know, it's not explicit in the film, but it buys into the same sorts of ideas about white civilization, you know, as being triumphant.
And cinema could be seen as, because D.W.
Griffiths is very much buying into the great man theory of history throughout all his work.
DW Griffith's place in the idea of cinema as being this sort of catalogue of innovators is as one of the great men and that's very much tied to his ideas about white civilisation as needing to be protected etc etc.
So there is a sense in which this film advertises its worldview through its own Sense of itself as as this timeless masterpiece, which you know, that's not how it works.
That's not how it works at all Artistic forms evolve collaboratively over time In the same way that you know, the Soviet directors studied DW Griffiths and came up with the new synthesis things like montage, etc So it's, and I think, what I was trying to get at before is that we try to distance ourselves from this film.
And I understand why, but the trouble is this film won.
You know, this film's vision of, I mean, look at the, firstly look at the form, the action film, the family melodrama, the historical epic.
um told through this sort of language of continuity editing and so you know that that is that is the language of cinema that won in terms of hollywood big budget spectacle action that is the language you could easily see this as a story of like an afghan family who you know was high up in the ranks of the colonial project and there's a cross study of uh
Romances between families who are like some, you know, ambassador to Afghanistan and the children, etc, etc, that are torn apart by the Afghan war.
And the real problem with the Afghan war was, you know, ultimately, There are these people who want to remain free in the foothills of Kandahar or whatever.
You could rewrite this for American audiences today, and if you just took the overt clan references out of it, then suddenly it becomes this completely contextually relevant thing.
And this is kind of the problem with, broadly, Orientalism.
No, no, I agree, but I think it's even more fundamental than that, which is that if you, firstly the form, you know, the huge budget, the huge advertising, and all that, but the content as well, the unruly other as a threat to social order and civilization that's caused by
The external agitator or the external force that comes in and tries to change the world and upend established hierarchy and thus destabilizes this fundamentally just social order.
That story, told via melodrama and technical mastery of the form, that is the operative narrative in mass culture.
That's Avengers Endgame.
You know?
It won!
This film won!
And so much of the narrative about it is to say with one side of the mouth, well, it was incredibly important in the history of the form, it's incredibly influential, it invented the language of cinema, but it was also of its time and it was racist, etc, etc.
It's like we're trying to have our cake and eat it.
The basic ideas They just went underground.
They just became assimilated or coded.
And it's not just in the art form, it's in society more generally.
The same ideas are still operative everywhere.
On the one hand, they went into Dog Whistle, and on the other hand, they went into The Fringe.
But on the one side, you could say The Southern Strategy, etc.
And on the other hand, you could say the people that this podcast's about.
But the basic systems are still in place.
I was watching it, and I was struck by the scenes of the white victimhood that's larded on, and the whole stuff about ballot boxes being stuffed.
Well, what's going on in America right now except exactly the same narrative about, you know, the proper... The right people didn't win the election.
Ergo, the election wasn't fair.
The election was stolen.
The election was fraud.
The election was fake.
And you have Tucker Carlson going on talking about how, oh, there's all this unsafe stuff going on, all this fraud going on in Detroit, quote-unquote.
Or Chicago.
Chicago.
The violence in Chicago.
Yeah, dog whistle, dog whistle, dog whistle.
And it's all the same thing.
It's white victimhood saying, you know, the proper democracy, the real democracy has been stolen from us by them because the right people didn't win.
The people that are supposed to be on top aren't on top anymore.
You can see the the mere suggestion of an upending of the of the quote-unquote proper hierarchy It is always rated with yeah I mean, I think there's an ebb and flow like what we're seeing now is like kind of the crest of our hopefully the crest of this kind of particular era and like ultimately the job of sort of anti-fascists and the job of leftist is to Explain that.
What I'm trying to do here, what we're trying to do here, I won't speak for you, Jack, but like is to provide the context and to give the thing, is to make sure that people understand what's actually kind of going on here.
And that's why we cover these kinds of products.
That's why we talk about this stuff in this context is to say in 1915, you can look at this and it's happening and we can draw parallels that are not always concrete between like kind of particular small scale political movements.
But we can also look at like these kind of far right figures like, you know, the people at TRS who watched this movie knowing nothing about it and got totally in on it and believed like the stereotypes, the racist shit that's presented in this movie that any reasonable person will look the racist shit that's presented in this movie that any reasonable person will look at and go like, well, that's just super fucking stupid is actually they're Yeah.
And they believe it as reality.
They've internalized it to the degree that that's what's happening.
But to a certain extent they're pushing against an open door, because the same sorts of racist assumptions that are integral to white supremacy, and which are demonstrated so conveniently for us in pitiless detail by D.W.
Griffith, they are still there beneath the surface.
The idea that you just can't trust them with democracy, you know?
It's still there, and it's still ready to be weaponized by people like Donald Trump, and indeed by people like the TRS.
Joe Biden.
Well, yeah, true, true.
Yeah, absolutely.
Two points I'm going to make here, or two final thoughts.
Intolerance, the film that D. W. Griffith made after this, is not an apology for Birth of a Nation.
No, no.
The point of Intolerance is that he thought that the protesters of Birth of a Nation, we're being intolerant towards his artistic freedom.
That's right.
We're not going to dig into that because we don't have time, but it's true.
And if you make me, we will do an episode about this.
He even added a title card to future releases of Birth of a Nation as a plea for freedom of speech for cinematic artists.
And the TRS boys watched that title card and went, even at the time he had to fucking cuck.
Not in the many words, but you know.
It's a delightful piece of audiovisual media watching Nazis watch this movie.
It's so useful to understanding the history of this thing.
I'm tempted to just upload it.
To a no-name channel, just so people can view this.
It would be worth putting their material out there just to let people actually watch these fucking stupid dipshit Nazis jerk off to white women.
Mikey Enoch was very horny that day and he was talking about the pretty white girls.
He was really horned up for Lillian Gish circa 1950.
He really was.
He really was.
It's really uncomfortable.
I know too much about these people's penises.
Anyway, the other thing that I do want to absolutely make sure we get in here and which I included in the show notes is Within Our Gates.
This is a movie from 1920.
Yeah, so it's going to be a show.
Yep, yeah.
Five years after Birth of a Nation.
This is the oldest surviving film by an African-American director, and it is a masterpiece.
It did not have the budget of Birth of a Nation.
Imagine why.
Michaud was working into the 1940s.
He is a really understudied filmmaker, but Within Our Gates, if you're interested in understanding what the African American experience was around this time, as opposed to listening to what D.W.
Griffith has to say about this bullshit, go watch Within Our Gates.
I've included two links, one of which is to a pristine Library of Congress version of this film.
which looks amazing, but doesn't have any audio.
It doesn't have a score attached to it.
And I find it difficult to watch that version just because even having a little bit of music playing gives it, it just kind of helps the viewing experience.
I've also included a link to another version on YouTube which has some score on it.
And your mileage may vary, but that version is of much lower visual quality.
So it is worth watching both.
You know, like, watch the low-quality version to kind of get the story, and then watch the high-quality version if you have problems, as I do, with just kind of viewing it completely silently.
That may be a difficulty that I had with the film that other people won't have, but Within Our Gates is... it is a masterpiece, and it is worth viewing, and no discussion of Birth of a Nation.
Should go without at least a mention of Within Our Gates.
So, check it out.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah.
Another person to name check is William Monroe Trotter, who was very important to the protests against the film at the time.
Yep, absolutely.
And I'm sure you have some links, Jack.
Just throw those in.
Yeah, no, what have I got here in my notes?
Spielberg?
Oh, yeah, no, don't worry.
I was just going to moan about the depiction of Thaddeus Stevens in Spielberg's movie Lincoln.
Don't worry.
Oh, I had a centrist liberal quote Lincoln at me for why we should not push for far-left proposals and vote for Bernie Sanders during the primaries.
And this is a person that I otherwise respect.
In terms of their combating – I'm not going to name this.
There's no reason to name this.
Like, it's fine.
They're doing good work.
They're attacking the IDW.
They're doing good work on that realm.
But they are very much a centrist Democrat.
We need incremental approaches.
And Bernie Sanders, that far-left radical.
We can't actually promote Medicare for All.
It's the fact that Hillary Clinton herself did that in 1993.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, there's no, there's no, yeah.
Can't do that.
Yeah, no.
Sounds bad.
Sounds like a bad idea.
It's bad.
It's bad to actually advocate for the things that you want.
No, no, don't do that.
Yeah.
10% reduction in the increase in healthcare costs.
That's, That's a thing that will pass if we can get two Republicans to sign on to it, which they won't.
So, go!
I'm very disenchanted with American politics right now.
Really?
Yeah, I can't pick that up, yeah.
No, this really winds me up, this moderation and compromise thing, which is exactly what that movie's about, Spielberg's Lincoln movie, and the depiction of Thaddeus Stevens.
It just winds me up so much.
Because, as we know, you only achieve progress by constantly moderating your slogans and asking for less than you need and compromising.
You're not a serious politician.
You're not a serious person in politics unless you work for the possible.
You work for the possible.
Reconstruction, Taddy Stevens, I agree with his goals.
I agree with liberation of black people economically, but we got to maintain the country.
We got to keep the Southerners on board.
And so, you know, like, yeah, just slide that to the side.
It's going to be fine.
Everything's going to be fine.
Let them in that Jim Crow.
How long can that last?
And then a hundred years later, you get the Like, the very important – don't get me wrong – but the minuscule advantages that came from the Civil Rights Act in 1965.
After enormous deaths and destruction and torture, and, you know, like, yeah, this is what moderate politics gets us.
This is what incrementalism gets us.
Wait a century, and maybe things will be slightly better for your grandchildren.
That's fine!
It's fine!
Yeah.
And you know, we're still hundreds of thousands of black voters chucked off the voter rolls in Georgia.
But no, we got to the point where it is generally agreed that Birth of a Nation is a racist film because of the people at the time that kicked up a fuss and made DW Griffiths think of himself as oppressed and silenced and whinge about free speech, which again shows how none of this stuff is new.
I mean, even on the Wikipedia page for Birth of a Nation, as I was checking the references, it's like, you know, this is described as a racist film, and then it clicks to, like, Spike Lee describes this as a racist film.
So it really is like, yeah, 40 years ago, Spike Lee thought this was racist, and that's your reference for, you know, criticism of the film.
Yeah.
We live in hell.
We live in hell.
We do.
Well, it's called Capitalism.
New podcast name, We Live In Hell.
I think there already is one called This Is Hell, actually.
I listened to it.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Why, this is hell and nor am I out of it.
Yeah.
Anyway, that was episode... 76?
76.
76, yeah.
I knew that.
And we'll be back with Tom Metzger Part 2 pretty soon.
And I will put together that episode, the bonus episode, and that will probably be out after Tom Metzger Part 2.
But, you know, who knows?
So subscribe to one of our Patreons for a dollar a month.
It's super cheap.
A dollar a month.
That's all it takes to get what's going to be a really fun episode of, like, really terrible people saying some really terrible things.
So check it out.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
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