Day: March 25, 2018

antoine-roquentin:

i’ve been seeing a post going around that blames a resurgence on anti-semitism on south park specifically instead of the fucking militia movement in the 90s, and i thought it was just tumblr having its usual obsession with media and representation over actual historical materialism, but then i saw one saying that media is always responsible for the rise of reactionary thought and blaming the rise of the second wave of the kkk on birth of a nation and the rise of nazism on nazi propaganda films, and now i’m getting annoyed because people are getting the wrong idea. fascist militias always start with demobilized troops who are submerged in nationalist propaganda during the war and desensitized to killing, but aren’t able to integrate back into an economy, often because of crisis. media is only a reflection of the crises of the times, it doesn’t cause it. 

sure, the second kkk was started the year birth of a nation was released. it didn’t have any membership to speak of outside atlanta though until 5 years, later, 1920, when ww1 soldiers were coming back and america was in the midst of the depression of 1920-21. birth of a nation’s tickets had been sold at the modern equivalent of 50 bucks a pop, more an event for the elite than for a mass audience. people were also pretty familiar with the racist dunning school interpretation of the civil war that the film was based on, given that the film itself used quotes from the works of well-read historian and president at that time woodrow wilson. they didn’t need birth of a nation to give them a bullshit historical revisionist account glorifying the kkk, they’d heard it already. all birth of a nation did was give william j simmons the idea of starting a frat to harass people with costumes and burning crosses for his rich ass friends.

nazi propaganda films didn’t even really exist until the nazis were already in power and had a ministry of propaganda to finance them. german cinema in the 1920s reflected the depths of both right and left wing thought, but certainly not driving it. they reflected what was going on in germany, which was a flourishing of working class culture at the same time as white collar workers saw higher than average unemployment and the rich saw greater working class militancy as a threat. it was the great depression and a mass base of ww1 veterans, already indoctrinated into fascist thought, that brought the nazis to power. 

and in the 1990s, it was troops returning from the gulf war and the early 90s recession that fed into the militia movement, which dealt heavily in anti-semitic tropes, 5 years before south park ever aired.