Re: Christianity
Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2022 3:18 am
Yes. I am aware of some of Lincoln's views on blacks and the belief of some that the Civil War amounted to little more than an invasion of the South by the North. My 7th grade US History teacher was quite a character and taught us about "The War of Northern Aggression", as he called it.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 1:09 amA number of things. One, the movie is a dramatic invention the purpose of which (according to my reading of course) is for the viewer to participate in an enactment that absolves the viewer of guilt. Northerners, through they rarely admit or understand this, effectively treated the Negroes in their midst in thoroughly abominable ways. Both before and after the Civil War. Lincoln was a supreme *racist* (in the terms of the word today). His idea was to export all of the Black population to some other place.Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 12:07 am That's a pretty violent scene, AJ (from the movie Mississippi burning). What is it supposed to mean in the context of the discussion?
See also North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860:Prior to Emancipation, Lincoln was a proponent of colonization: the idea of sending African American slaves to another land to live as free people. Lincoln supported resettlement schemes in Panama and Haiti early in his presidency and openly advocated the idea through the fall of 1862. But the bigoted, flawed concept of colonization never became a permanent fixture of U.S. policy, and by the time Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the word “colonization” had disappeared from his public lexicon. As such, history remembers Lincoln as having abandoned his support of colonization when he signed the proclamation. Documents exist, however, that tell another story.
So, this completely and really utterly upends the entire idea that Lincoln (or the North) had any real 'concern' (as we define it today) for the Black man. And his attitude was *your* attitude (i.e. of all your ancestors). When Lincoln is referred to, what is referred to is a cartoon version; a distortion, a lie. Why can't the *real Lincoln* be exposed and seen? Because it upends established narratives. Through these distorting lenses the *real history* and this the truth is obscured. It cannot, in fact, be seen.The Mason-Dixon Line is a convenient but an often misleading geographical division. It has been used not only to distinguish the Old South from the North and the Confederacy from the Union but to dramatize essential differences in the treatment of, and attitudes toward, the Negro - to contrast southern racial inhumanity with northern benevolence and liberality. But the historian must be wary of such an over-simplified comparison, for it does not accord with the realities of either the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The inherent cruelty and violence of southern slavery requires no further demonstration, but this does not prove northern humanity. Although slavery eventually confined itself to the region below the Mason-Dixon Line, discrimination against the Negro and a firmly held belief in the superiority of the white race were not restricted to one section but were shared by an overwhelming majority of white Americans in both the North and the South. Abraham Lincoln, in his vigorous support of both white supremacy and denial of equal rights for Negroes, simply gave expression to almost universal American convictions. In the ante bellum North racial discrimination was not as subtle or as concealed as it has been in more recent decades.
The Lincoln Monument is an entirely false representation. In so many different ways.
So a movie like Mississippi Burning should be, can be, seen in a different light. It can be read differently. It is a 'production' of a certain time frame, designed for a specific audience, and with a specific purpose: vindication for the viewer. The viewer gets to participate in all the punishments that are enacted against the Southern Man. That's you beating on Lester and giving him what he deserves. That's you treating his wife decently and, simultaneously, enlisting her in your cause. You are the FBI agents who will, if it is *righteous* violate all laws in order to bring down the perps. It is all a lie of course. Since in fact the FBI is said to have engineered the assassination of MLK. It simply repeats tropes that, unbeknownst to you(plural) were common 10-20 years prior to the outbreak of war. The vilification of the South and the Southern Man. This is 'cathartic projection' since in fact, the North (the federal structure, the régime which runs the show) is deeply invested in lies, distortions and misrepresentations.
What is the relevancy to today? That we operate from confected narratives. These are established for us, fed to us, and we become actors in them.
With a good script writer and a clever script re-write we could create a Mississippi Burning version of the Trump Presidency.
[Hold on! PBS already worked that angle!]
Instead of poor Lester (with his dumb smile) we could interpose the cartoon interpretation of Donald Trump. Seeds? What do you think? You down for this? You already have that GIF depicting Trump mimicking the cripple -- which was debunked by the way, but what does that matter? It does not matter who he is, really, what matters is how he is portrayed. And if the character in the rehearsal is to be hated then hate it shall be! So what we are dealing with is structures of view that are interposed between ourselves and *reality*.
We are both observers of theatre and, strangely enough, actors and performers in it.
