Dick Lehr’s The Birth of a Nation Reviewed by Today’s Leftist Blacks of all Colors……Others Need Not Apply

I am 80. My generation was not allowed to see director D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”. It was ‘KKK racist’, those in control said. I cannot remember the first time I had heard of the movie, but learned early in life, the film was a masterpiece of art and form of its time and thought I should like to see it.

Racism, neither the white nor the black variety, was not a common word in St. Paul, Minnesota vocabulary in early years of learnings. I was a Brooklyn Dodger baseball fan then, for our local club, the Saints, belonged to the Dodger franchise. A Negro, Jackie Robinson was already a national hero as a Dodger in 1947. I was aware he was the first Negro introduced to the Major Leagues. I already knew the name Satchel Paige, a long time pitching star in some national ‘colored’ league as they called it from the baseball world then. The next year a Negro catcher, Roy Campanela joined our Saints. President Harry Truman opened the door for Negroes to serve in the military. Contrary to much black racist folklore, there were no riots, no stirs, no collapse of civil obedience.

Philco television arrived at our house in early 1948. CBS’s radio program, “You Are There” became “See It Now” on television, programs about American history I followed as a religion. I believe it was CBS television where, upon occasion, great movies were mentioned and reviewed regularly. I had already seen “Gone With the Wind” somewhere along the line and became entranced by all things dealing with the Civil War and the nation’s history since. I bought my first Abraham Lincoln biography the same year. The KKK never acquired any sympathy anywhere that I know of in those days around our geography. However, lefties even then celebrated a Negro hanging in Duluth in the 1910s. They were selling Soviet Communism to destroy America then.

I remember viewing bits and pieces of “The Birth of a Nation” both shown on television during my adolescence, and later in a college classroom or two being sold as white racist propaganda. I received it as so, for the depictions I saw in the bits shown of black ignorance, vulgarities, and savagery seemed racist and false. I attended a mixed race public school from freshman year-on where racism of any kind was neither expected nor allowed by the male authoritarians running the place. While there I never heard of nor saw a fist fight between races…..the entire community was supposed to be equally civilized or else.

I now spend time at American History Channel television where I can keep up on things atheist, black racist, leftist, feminist, to keep up with the language and mind of today’s American university professors who corrupt American culture.

AHC was featuring Dick Lehr who had just written, “The Birth of a Nation”, a book about the origins of the film of that name and its white racist, a bigot, as Lehr politely described him, the director and producer, D.W. Griffith. He teaches journalism at Boston U. He was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Harvard…..exactly as I expected him to be.

Mr. Lehr seemed very polite and sincerely taken by the art of Griffith’s work….which quickly made him worthy of my ear….(snobby though that may sound, I need such censorship or I would never get away from television’s classes, the good and the bad. I much prefer listening to enemies of learning and other leftist propaganda so I understand better today’s enemies of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Mr. Lehr admitted he was not an historian. One does not have to be a history major graduate to have ideas and interests in history. He declared unequivocally that Griffith’s “Birth” was a white racist propaganda piece. (So was Edward Zwick’s film, “Glory”, or any movie with a particular social-historical tale to tell, but he didn’t mention that.)

Mr. Lehr’s book was written to hook up with the 100th year ‘celebration’ of this Griffith masterpiece production….February 17th, 2015. He was noticeably proud of the riots against the showing of the film in Boston in 1915, yet he didn’t seem to be calling for universal censorship. It’s the second half of the film (which expressed a southern white interpretation of the rise and purpose of the Ku Klux Klan….after all, Griffith was born and raised a southern white.)

The claim that Griffith’s “Birth” set a stage for the KKK’s massive widespread revival of violence throughout our border and southern states up to the late 1920s can be proved by statistics. How does anyone know if that was his ‘racist’ intent? How can claim he projected in his artwork the basics of the life he experienced and learned in his own childhood.

I suggest Professor Lehr and others condemned to effect black racism upon Americans these days ignore the conditions of the defeated and devastated South from 1865 for the next quarter century and then again through 1915 to understand the world not as the snobs at Harvard and its Massachusetts entertain in the then and now, but how the white agricultural South, profoundly struggled in every conceivable way particularly during “Reconstruction”.

Mr. Lehr added a lefty programmed gentle black to his after film conversation and phone answsering time. Only black racists filled the phone line most of them black. One black feminist excitedly announced “Black women were raped…all legalized by whites”, but was not asked for details of the where, when, and the count.

President Woodrow Wilson also failed the History Channel’s racistlessness test. This president, Lehr suggested, participated in Griffith’s profiteering by hosting a packed-house IN the White House, the first showing of “The Birth of a Nation”, Feb. 18, 1915. The president’s comments about the film made a century ago did not pass the author’s muster at this December 22, 2014 AHC CSpan3 performance. The president never mentioned the cultural environment and language of that day might not be quite the same as today’s marriage of black racism to university standards of intolerance.

I am glad that I had not seen more than the bits and pieces of “The Birth” during my young yesterday. The film’s over exercisings and dramatizings might have sent me outdoors for better use of my time. I felt art in those days, but didn’t understand it. Today, I watched the film, about the two and a half hour version of it, as an art piece. Dick Lehr’s ravings of Griffith’s movie were in no way a stretch. To think that this “Birth” was the first of the truly greats in our world of movies is minor compared to the skilled mastery of the director’s eye and command to ‘invent’ life in a new world of entertainment and learnings so vital in our human efforts to know better the known and the unknown.

The following is a review of Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” by film critic, Roger Ebert:

“He achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.

These words by James Agee about D. W. Griffith are almost by definition the highest praise any film director has ever received from a great film critic. On the other hand, the equally distinguished critic Andrew Sarris wrote about Griffith’s masterpiece: “Classic or not, ‘Birth of a Nation’ has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can’t be ignored…and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word.” Please read on:

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-birth-of-a-nation-1915

Ellie Wiesel Endorses Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress

“How Can I Remain Silent?”: Elie Wiesel Comes Forward With Major Endorsement of Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress

“As the debate over Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 address to Congress continues, a well-known figure has come out in support of the controversial speech: Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel, 86, author of “Night,” a famed book that documented his horrific experiences in Nazi concentration camps, will be featured in a full-page newspaper advertorial that will run in both the New York Times and Washington Post, Reuters reported.

He says in the ad that he will attend Netanyahu’s speech — an address that will focus on the dangers of a nuclear Iran — and urges American leaders to put politics aside and consider the difficult issues on the table.”

Please read the article from the Blaze further, and while doing so, think how proud we conservative Americans concerned about democratic societies should be that our Representatives had the courage and wisdom to invite the Prime Minister to speak words to give balance to those duplicitous spoken by rote habit by the present Islamist sympathizer in the White House:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/13/how-can-i-remain-silent-elie-wiesel-comes-forward-with-major-endorsement-of-netanyahus-speech-to-congress/ article sent by Mark Waldeland