Ken Burns

A little digression from my recent series about personal and impersonal sorrows.

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Ken Burns gave a commencement speech at Brandeis University a few days ago. Here is a YouTube video of the whole speech and here’s the transcript.

Liberals are slobbering all over it. I was sickened and disgusted by it, not so much by the actual words, which were libshit boilerplate, but by the place and the timing.

As a storyteller (that’s what he calls himself, not a documentarian) Ken Burns should know that timing is all. The fact that he didn’t is telling—but the bigger question is: why did Brandeis allow this to go on? Didn’t they know what he was going to say? Why did they allow their commencement to be exploited in such a shameless fashion?

Rather than go into a tedious refutation of its logical flaws, I’m going to offer themes for an alternate speech that Ken Burns might have given, not from my POV, but from his as an anti-Trump Christian of good will. (These are themes, not wording, and I wander in and out of the first person at will.) Then I’ll follow up with my own speech.

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I would have acknowledged that:

First and absolutely foremost, Brandeis was founded by secular Jews during a period when Jews still discriminated against at the Ivies and other top universities.

On October 7, 2023, an earthquake shattered the Jewish world and we are here at this Jewish-founded place, at this very fraught time, still in a state of shock, trying to make sense of it—if sense is to be made at all.

Not to state this upfront here and now would be dissimulation, and I’m here to be as honest with you as I can be. I would not mention this at Princeton. But we’re not at Princeton.

On October 7, Jews—and their guests from Thailand, Tanzania, and India who entrusted their safety to Israel’s authorities—were sadistically butchered by a psychopathic death cult that’s taken over a good portion of the Muslim world and is dedicated to doing it a thousand times more.

Since then, massive demonstrations have taken place in Europe, Canada, and Australia supporting this. Numerous instances of outright anti-Semitism have taken place in such heretofore benign places as Canada and Australia.

What happened on October 7 was broadcast by the criminals using GoPros on their Telegram channel and then on the Internet. Men called their parents excitedly telling them they’d murdered Jews. Their parents were proud of them.

These facts are ghoulishly denied by their Western supporters, who take pride in lying and distorting.

Many people are charging Israel with “genocide.” Some are naïve kids unused to war who sincerely believe this. Others are cynical propagandists. Others are psychopathic death cultists who know they’re lying. Others are simply psychopaths.

Jewish students on many campuses feel threatened and isolated.

Israel is doing something that, in my opinion, only leads to a worse outcome. We need to work together to find a way out. I don’t know what that is but I have faith that we can find that way if we try.¹

When one has actually been the object of a genuine genocide in living memory and is now the object of an extermination campaign by tens of millions, it’s easy to fall into the trap of hatred and paranoia.

But — and this is crucially important — paranoia is a sickness. It debilitates and deforms.

And then, having acknowledged the previous I’d go into a classic anti-Trump rant, and say that Trump is no solution to these problems. He’ll only make them worse. I’d say that the Democrats and Biden may not be perfect, but with Trump in the White House, things will become catastrophic. And who will be blamed? You. It’s always been that way. I’d say, “Think.” Remember the teachings of your own rabbis. They did not admire militarism. The rabbis didn’t allow Maccabees in the canonical Hebrew Bible.

And, most important, I’d wind up by saying something like this:

“Young people, all of you, whatever your ethnicity or religion or race, I have your back. The world is in a miserable state. Anyone who feels isolated and stunned and out of hope — I hear you, I love you, I’m telling you that as an adult, I’m trying my best to pull us back from the brink. And now that you’re adults, we need your help.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip, wrote a memoir called Hope Against Hope. It means you must keep hoping especially when there’s little reason for it. We do it to keep alive. When hope dies, we die.”

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That’s what I would suggest an anti-Trump Christian of good will should have said at Brandeis University.

But he didn’t. He gave us a condescending crock of shit whose only reference to Israel was this:

That, for example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard.

Wow. That’s what Israel is? A “shameful graveyard”?

He insulted his hosts, and they groveled at his feet.

I’ll let you read the transcript and point out the speech’s screaming logical fallacies but here’s one so loud I can’t hold back: There is no “us” and “them” — there is only “we” — but anyone who votes for Trump is bringing on the second Civil War. Figure that one out for me. ²

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Here’s the speech I’d have given to Brandeis. Pardon the lack of eloquence and soaring rhetoric. I’m dashing this off.

“Ken Burns talks about nuance, about not turning the human race into an “us” and “them.” There is only a grand “us.”

He also loves to talk about slavery. He doesn’t seem to have learned much from his study of the US Civil War, or rather, what he’s learned only confirmed his cozy theories of eternal “us-ness.” Because the Civil War’s big lesson is that there really are irreconcilable differences that can only be settled by force under some circumstances.

Let me ask: where’s the nuance in slavery? Isn’t this a right or wrong thing if ever there was one? We tried to placate the Slavocracy, the Fire Eaters, the slaveowners bloc for at least two generations. In 1825 Jefferson, whom you love to quote, wrote of ‘the fire bell in the night.’

We tried, we tried, we tried. We tried this. We tried that. We even came up with a 13th Amendment that gave the slave bloc everything they wanted and then some...³

To no avail! Negotiating with a Fire-Eater was like negotiating with Hamas.

Nuance nuance nuance nuance nuance! There comes a time when nuance is denial, and denial only allows the problem to multiply and compound like a cancer.

Please stop with the stories. I deal with facts, with people as they are.

I’m sure there were some sterling gentlemen slave-owners who treated their chattel far better than rapacious northern factory-owners treated their workers. Making steel and killing men, don’t you know? It didn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Labor law you can reform. Slavery couldn’t be reformed, it could only be destroyed.

We didn’t have a Tsar who could do away with slavery by the stroke of a pen. We were a prisoner of our own constitution and republican democracy. The only way to get rid of them was to kill them and their way of life. Lucky for the Union the South decided to push the issue.

So it is with Hamas. Israel denied the problem for years. They played the game, led by the US, with its base in Qatar and its deals with Iran and Egypt.

And it blew up in their faces.

In opting for Pax Americana, the Israelis forgot the wisdom of their own forefathers:

If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first.

I will leave the discussions of ‘othering’ and ‘binaries’ to future generations, who will have been born because I didn’t trouble myself with such trivialities.

I will conclude with a quote from William Tecumseh Sherman, a Civil War general with whom I believe Mr. Burns has a passing familiarity:

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.⁴

That’s the speech I’d have given at Brandeis.

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Until October 7, 2023, I was big on “nuance.”

But when I think of the little girl whose hand was chopped off, and the boy whose eye was gouged out, dying alone and in pain, I’m out of nuance.

I say kill them until you run out of bullets. Then get more bullets.

One of “them.” Not my kind of guy.

1. Reminder: I’m speaking here from a theoretical Ken Burns’ POV, not mine.

2. Full quote: “And if I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a them, run away.”

I went to a different school. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s run away from bullshit artists who tell you things like this. There are some very bad guys in the world selling some very bad ideas. Learn to recognize them before you end up a shell of yourself.

3. Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery goes into this.

4. The problem that Israel has with the Palestinians is that the Palestinians are not really scared of Israel. Some are fanatics who really do welcome death, but even the ones who have a natural love of life know perfectly well that in the end the Israelis will be restrained from wiping them out. Wars end when one side is faced with annihilation.