Why, Despite Good Intentions, Ken Burns’s "The U.S. and the Holocaust" Fails

Mosaic Magazine ^ | OCT. 13 2022 | RUTH R. WISSE

[Avoiding_Sulla]

Good intentions, my a$$.

[gibsonguy]

Good intentions, my a$$

You Beat me to it by seconds

[SunkenCiv]

[snip] ...several critics, for their part, faulted the documentary for trying to insulate President Franklin D. Roosevelt from its indictment of the rest of America. The series’ apologetics for this Democratic icon—absolving FDR of accountability for the people whom he installed, the policies he administered, and the country he led—appeared in sharp contrast... In doing so, the series paid far greater attention to those who kept Jews out than to those who helped secure their entry—or who focused on winning the war. [/snip]

[Smellin Salt]

Yup

[dfwgator]

Then there was The Old Negro Space Program
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xJzAYYrX8

[monkeyshine]

No mention of Eisenhower, who liberated Dachau and ordered everything be photographed and documented because without said documentation he feared nobody would have believed the horrors that occurred to be true?

[who_would_fardels_bear]

We holocausted the Indians. We enslaved all the Black people. And we killed all the Jews.

It's a good thing the evil US is on the way out.

I too will welcome our benevolent Chinese overlords.

[rktman]

Uh, lib progressive UPOS? Sounds right to me. 😎👍

[rrrod]

Had a Jewish friend, now deceased, told me very similar stories about Roosevelt. We had hours of discussions about as she said “All things Jewish”. Like so many older folks she delved into history.
Died at 99.

[SunkenCiv]

[snip] ...citing a passage in the diaries of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. (who was Jewish). In it, there is an account of a conversation he had with a fellow administration official who told him Roosevelt had told him that America was a Protestant country, “and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” Medoff also offers an example from the Yalta Conference of February 1945 when, according to the autobiography of Charles E. Bohlen – a senior State Department official who was part of delegation – Roosevelt told Joseph Stalin he would soon be seeing Saudi Arabian leader Ibn Saud. When Stalin asked if he intended to make any concessions to the king, the president allegedly smiled and said the only concession he might offer was 6 million American Jews. [/snip]

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/2019-01-06/ty-article/.premium/u-s-holocaust-museum-accused-of-whitewashing-fdrs-record-on-saving-jews/0000017f-e3e6-df7c-a5ff-e3fe137e0000

[ifinnegan]

Politicizing the Holocaust under the guise of documentary and then politicizing it wrong.

[lizma2]

“Good intentions, my a$$.”

From what I’ve read and been told (went to visit family in Germany in the 80’s and learned alot) the Nazi used a TB scare to start rounding up Jews.

Using a disease to round up a group of people. Sound familiar?

Ask Whitmer and Cuomo.

[pfflier]

You might want to explain that post.

[DesertRhino]

To me, it had two big failures. One, in Germany in the mid-1930s, even though there was repression and really bad rhetoric, people still thought of it as a civilized western country. The land of poets and philosophers. In reality, nobody dreamed that they would set up murder factories and kill 15 or 20 million people on an industrial scale. Two, when the repression was very bad, and times got very hard on Jewish people in Germany, we were in the absolute depths of the great depression. Opening the door to millions of European immigrants when the nation had 1/3 of the people out of work was simply not in the cards.
Also, even though I run the risk of sounding like Kanye, people were well aware that Jewish people were fairly friendly with socialism. There were sound reasons to not let all of the Jews in Europe immigrate to America in the 1930s. Number one of which, nobody could really imagine what was about to happen. It was more unthinkable than people realize. And this is probably some lame brain attempt on the part of Ken Burns to pretend America is turning Nazi today under Trump or something like that.

It was a simplistic exercise and looking at what we know now and thinking it was obvious to the people back in that time.

[RedMonqey]

Being a history buff I tried to watch the series.

Couldn’t though,the bullsh$t of Burn’s politics burns through any insight the series might have.

I quit after twenty minutes.

[RedMonqey]

Satire, I believe.

[TChad]

Then there was The Old Negro Space Program

Don't give Burns credit for that genuinely funny piece. He might accept it.

[tet68]

Lest we forget, the necessary goal of making America able and willing to confront and defeat the forces that threaten civilization requires the resolve to do it and the power to back up that resolve.

When our schools and media emphasize American failure over American achievement, they burrow at the foundations of the Republic.

Do not think that that emphasis is by any means an
accident. We are approaching the moment the communists
have been working toward for over a hundred years!!