tijd | Всеобщее братство (Reply)

15 июня 1940 немецкие войска входили в Париж, а советские - в страны Прибалтики, которым предстояло стать «братскими» республиками. В этот день в США начинался съезд демократической партии, который выдвинет президента Рузвельта на третий срок. Тем временем в Миссури сенатор Гарри Трумэн начинал свою предвыборную кампанию. Борьба за переизбрание Трумэна была непростой - незадолго до этого его покровитель, влиятельный политик Том Пендергаст сел в тюрьму за уклонение от уплаты налогов, а на демократических праймериз выставился действующий губернатор. Выступая в этот день в небольшом городке Седалия перед чисто белой аудиторией, Трумэн говорил о всеобщем братстве.

“I believe in the brotherhood of man; not merely the brotherhood of white men, but the brotherhood of all men before law. I believe in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In giving to the Negroes the rights that are theirs, we are only acting in accord with our ideals of a true democracy. If any class or race can be permanently set apart from, or pushed down below, the rest in political and civil rights, so may any other class or race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful associates, and we may say farewell to the principles on which we count our safety.”
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/lesson-plans/truman-and-civil-rights-analyzing-sources

Неясно, насколько эта риторика была продиктована политическим расчетом, но свою верность принципам равенства Трумэн продемонстрировал позже на посту президента, став инициатором десегрегации в армии и других реформ.

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Видеоролик "Brotherhood of man" был сделан в 1946 по заказу профсоюза работников автомобильной промышленности в целях улучшения межрасовой пролетарской солидарности. Город Детройт переваривал последствия расовых волнений 1943 года, подавленных федеральными войсками.

Фильм был основана на брошюре "Races of Mankind", подготовленной во время войны известными антропологами Рут Бенедикт и Джин Уэлтфиш в качестве ответа на нацистскую пропаганду, но вскоре запрещенной к распространению в армии. Руководство рассудило, что не все американцы были готовы к идее о том, что все люди родственны друг другу, а существование рас является социальным предрассудком.

10-пенсовая брошюра с красочными иллюстрациями художника-авангардиста Эда Рейнхардта популярным языком излагала идеи из академической книжки Бенедикт "Race: Science and Politics", опубликованной в 1940.

"The races of mankind are what the Bible says they are: brothers. In their bodies is the record of their brotherhood."
https://archive.org/details/TheRacesOfMankind

Брошюра стала предметом разбирательств в Конгрессе, где в ней пытались отыскать подрывную коммунистическую пропаганду.

Per his request via telegram, Gene Weltfish informed US Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-MS) that the Public Affairs Committee was sending him a copy of the pamphlet. Weltfish appealed to the Senator by invoking “the facts of science” to be used “against the lies of Hitler and his henchmen, for Hitler fights with ideas as well as with guns.” Attempting to close convincingly, she wrote, “I know that you agree with me that now more than ever we must stand together in common brotherhood, when the eyes of the peoples of all continents are upon us.”142 It is not clear if Weltfish was aware of Biblo’s feelings on matters of race, but his pro-segregationist politics made clear that he was not amenable to her appeal to “common brotherhood.” Bilbo’s book Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization would appear in 1947, attesting to his sentiments on race.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-40882-4_6

Упомянутый сенатор Теодор Бильбо, бывший губернатор Миссисипи, гордился своим членством в Куклуксклане и предлагал депортировать всех черных из страны.

During his multiple terms of office, as both a governor and senator from Mississippi in the early 20th century, Theodore Bilbo’s name became synonymous with racism in America. Renowned journalist H. L. Mencken even coined the term “Bilboism” for the kind of official prejudice Bilbo campaigned on.
In 1938, he tried to amend the federal work-relief bill in the Senate with a provision to deport 12 million black Americans to Liberia. That same year, facing the prospect of a federal anti-lynching bill, Bilbo argued:
“If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.”
Near the end of his life, Bilbo appeared on the radio program Meet the Press and admitted to having been a lifelong KKK member.
With the air of a man stating a solemn principle, he claimed: “No man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.”
https://allthatsinteresting.com/famous-kkk-members/2

В итоге жернова сработали, и во времена маккартизма создатели креативов "Races of Mankind" и "Brotherhood of man" подверглись жесткой чистке. Рут Бенедикт не дожила, умерев в 1948. Джин Уэлтфиш после показаний в комиссии Маккарти была уволена из Колумбийского университета и попала в "черный список", оставшись без работы почти на 10 лет. Потерял работу такюе Ашли Монтагу, другой известный антрополог и ученик Бенедикт, опубликовший в 1942 книгу "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race". Ринг Ларднер, автор сценария "Brotherhood of man", попал в тюрьму и в знаменитый черный списке "голливудской десятки" вместе с другими сценаристами.

До остракизма Уэлтфиш успела войти в историю также тем, что, оглядываясь на наследие нацистской Германии, предложила в 1945 клятву ученого: "I pledge that I will use my knowledge for the good of humanity and against the destructive forces of the world and the ruthless intent of men; and that I will work together with my fellow scientists of whatever nation, creed or color, for these, our common ends."

Такая клятва была призвана стать аналогом клятвы Гиппократа для врачей.

"Some years ago, while attending commencement exercises, I heard the medical graduates recite the Hippocratic Oath. I was impressed by its solemnity and also by the fact that this was the only group of graduates that was asked to express any public responsibility in the exercise of its future profession. We well know that not all physicians are strictly faithful to the implied ideals of the code. But it is also a fact that such practices, when exposed, are subject to considerable public censure.
The scientist, on the other hand, does not have the same kind of check upon his actions. On the contrary, his freedom from public responsibility is condoned and considered to be his right. This, despite the fact that science has far-reaching social consequences - considerably greater than the actions of the individual physician."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/18579

Если считать, что под "scientists of whatever nation" имелись в виду советские ученые, а призыв работать "against the destructive forces of the world" был призван пристыдить разработчиков атомной бомбы, этот призыв тоже можно отнести к подрывной коммунистической пропаганде.

Отцом американской антропологии и этнографии был Франц Боас. Выросший в ассимилированной еврейской семье в Германии, Боас пришел в антропологию из физики. Рут Бенедикт, Маргарет Мид и многие другие известные антропологи была его учениками. Больше кого-либо другого Боас и его ученики внесли вклад в разоблачение псевдонаучности популярных в свое время идей расового превосходства.

Boas would not live to see his insights and intuitions confirmed by hard science, let alone define the zeitgeist of a new global culture. But, 80 years on, studies of the human genome have indeed revealed the genetic endowment of humanity to be a single continuum. Race truly is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of common ancestors, including those who walked out of Africa some 65,000 years ago, embarking on a journey that over 40,000 years, a mere 2500 generations, carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.
But here is the important idea. If we are all cut from the same fabric of life, then by definition we all share the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual potential is exercised through technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth, a priority of many other peoples in the world, is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural emphasis. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no evolutionary ladder to success. Boas and his students were right. The brilliance of scientific research, the revelations of modern genetics, has affirmed in an astonishing way both the unity of humanity and the essential wisdom of cultural relativism. Every culture really does have something to say; each deserves to be heard, just as none has a monopoly on the route to the divine.
As a scholar, Boas ranks with Einstein, Darwin and Freud as one of the four intellectual pillars of modernity. His core idea, distilled in the notion of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom. And though his research took him to esoteric realms of myth and shamanism, symbolism and the spirit, he remained grounded in the politics of racial and economic justice, the promise and potential of social change. A tireless campaigner for human rights, Boas maintained always that anthropology as a science only made sense if it was practiced in the service of a higher tolerance. “It is possible,” wrote Thomas Gossett in his 1963 book Race: The History of an Idea in America, that “Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-anthropology-matters/

Франц Боас умер в 1942 в возрасте 84 года. В последние годы перед смертью он перешел от науки от политическому активизму, вызванному тревогой по поводу роста нацизма. Боас участвовал в левых анти-нацистских организациях и, хотя не был коммунистом, предпочитал закрывать глаза как на проникновение в эти организации американских коммунистов, так и на преступления сталинского режима.

В 1936 в письме советскому послу Трояновскому Боас даже делал реварансы в сторону нападок Лысенко на генетику: https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/text:126056#page/1/mode/1up Хотя, если читать их в контексте, видно, что это было попыткой заступиться за советских генетиков после того, как была разогнана их конференция.

Письмо Боаса интересно тем, что, с одной стороны, он безусловно очень xотел защитить советских генетиков от преследования и спасти генетический конгресс, а с другой, очень старался показать свою научную объективность, критикуя фанатичных американских генетиков, с которыми он расходился во мнении. Помимо этого, он явно хотел подчеркнуть, что несмотря на несправедливую критику, которой его подвергла "Советская этнография", он является прогрессивным ученым и антифашистом, разделяющим отрицательное отношение советских ученых к нацистским расовым теориям.
Меньше чем через неделю Боас получил ответ от советского посла в виде следующей телеграммы: "Информация, о которой Вы сообщили не верна. Профессор Вавилов не был арестован. Агол же арестован за нелегальную деятельность, не имеющую отношения к научным делам. Конгресс генетиков не отменен, а отложен по просьбе ряда ученых, которые хотят иметь больше времени на подготовку". За исключением сообщения о том, что Вавилов не был арестован, в телеграмме Трояновского нет и доли правды. Намечавшийся в 1937 г. VII конгресс генетиков бы отменен советским правительством, а настоящей причиной ареста И.И. Агола были его научные взгляды генетика-морганиста.
http://journals.tsu.ru//siberia/&journal_page=archive&id=2083&article_id=47000

В ФБР Боаса считали коммунистическим "попутчиком", но до маккартизма он, слава богу, не дожил.

Профсоюз работников автомобильной промышленности не забыл про идею всеобщего братства. Председатель профсоюза Вальтер Райтер говорил о ней, выступая на съезде NAACP в Детройте в 1957. В своей речи он упоминает Джеймса Истлэнда, другого влиятельного сенатора из Миссисипи, который отчаянно боролся против расовой десегрегации и считал ее тайным коммунистическим заговором.

"The NAACP and the American labor movement do more than just dream about that better tomorrow. And that’s why you can preach about the brotherhood of man from morn til night, and the Eastlands and the Talmadges and the bigots will never raise their voices in protest. But when you begin to work to translate the brotherhood of man into practical fulfillment, that’s when they begin to fight back. They are fighting us because we are working, trying to give practical substance and meaning and purpose to the noble concept of the brotherhood of man. <...>
I've often thought — why is it that you can get a great nation like America marching, fighting, sacrificing, and dying in the struggle to destroy the master race theory in Berlin, and people haven’t got an ounce of courage to fight against the master race theory in America? We need the same sense of dedication, the same courage and the same determination to fight the immorality of segregation and racial bigotry in America as we did in the battlefields against Hitlerism. <...>
Mr Eastland sits there in his Committee, and you would think that he is really trying to fight the Communists. He doesn’t know anything about what makes a Communist. What he does not understand are the great social, dynamic forces sweeping the world. This struggle between freedom and tyranny is not an old fashioned struggle for geography. This is a struggle for the hearts and minds of people. And you can’t ivm it with an H bomb, even though you need one to defend yourself. You can't win the struggle of ideas and ideals with guns, although we as a part of the free world must of necessity be strong on the military front, in order to meet the challenge of aggression no matter where it may raise its ugly head. But what we need to understand in the world is that military power is the negative aspect of a dynamic foreign policy, and that if you want to win the struggle of ideas and ideals for the hearts and minds of men, you have got to wage the struggle on the positive basis, and civil rights is the key issue in the world. Mr Eastland and his associates and the association of bigots don’t understand this. We need somehow to get through to the dark comers of their small mentalities on these kinds of things. <...>
And yet we have enemies. I get a lot of literature, you know. I don’t read it all, but I read a couple that came over my desk the other day. Here’s one "Behind the Plot to Sovietize the South:. And on the back it tells you in summary what this pamphlet is about, and I'll read it to you 'This booklet tells about the activities of Walter Reuther and his collaborating white and Negro Communist, Socialist and Marxist kind of labor agitators who are mobilizing a massive offensive to impose an insidious civil rights program on the South'. I want to say to the people who put out this kind of literary trash that the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and all of the good people who are joined together m the fight for civil rights, we do more to fight the Communists in one week, than all these people would do in their whole lives put together. <...>
The task is difficult. The struggle will be hard, but let us always remember that human progress has never been served to mankind on a silver platter. The history of the world shows chapter after chapter that men of faith and courage have had to fight to bring to fulfillment their dreams and their hopes and their aspirations. What we need to do is to keep the faith. Keep the faith in ourselves. And when the going is rough, as it will be, let us remember that the test of one’s convictions is not how did you behave, how did you stand up when it was convenient and comfortable. The test of one’s convictions is do you stand up for the things that you believe when it takes courage. Do you stand up in the face of adversity, in the face of great controversy. This is the kind of fight we are engaged in. That’s why when the going is rough, always remember that there are millions of us, and that together we can move mountains, and that together we can solve this problem and make America in the image of what it really stands for.
So I say to you, we pledge our hands and our hearts, we pledge our all to you in this struggle, because we believe that this is the most important struggle that America must win, if it is going to be true to itself and provide leadership to the free world. And if we mobilize our multitudes, if we mobilize all the people of good will and good faith m America, I say that we can do the job, and together we can build that brave new tomorrow that we dream about and fashion it in the image of peace, freedom and justice, and human brotherhood."
http://reuther100.wayne.edu/pdf/NAACP_1957.pdf

Год 1960 стал времене избавления от наследия маккартизма. Этому способствовал проигрыш на президентских выборах Никсона, приложившего руку к раскручиванию антикоммунистической паранойи.

Избирательная кампания Кеннеди висела на волоске и хваталась за любую помощь, которую она могла найти, включая использование первой версии искусственного интеллекта.

“Simulmatics,” a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic,” had much the same mystique as another nineteen-fifties neologism: “artificial intelligence.” Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of it all: they had the idea that, if they could collect enough data about enough people and write enough good code, everything, one day, might be predicted—every human mind simulated and then directed by targeted messages as unerring as missiles. For its first mission, Simulmatics aimed to win the White House back for the Democratic Party.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon in a campaign that carries an air of destiny, mainly because of an iconic account by the reporter Theodore H. White. In “The Making of the President 1960,” White created the myth of Kennedy as an inevitable President—King Arthur, pulling Excalibur from the stone. But Kennedy’s bid for the nomination was a long shot, his victory in the general election was one of the closest in American history, and his campaign deployed an election simulator. However commonplace now, this was new then, and fiercely controversial. White, while never naming Simulmatics, took the trouble to disavow its influence on the very first page of his book. “It is the nature of politics that men must always act on the basis of uncertain fact,” he wrote. “Were it otherwise, then . . . politics would be an exact science in which our purposes and destiny could be left to great impersonal computers.” White was close to the Kennedy campaign, and the Kennedy campaign had decided to deny, publicly, that it had used Simulmatics. <...>
On May 15, 1960, Simulmatics presented its first report, “Negro Voters in Northern Cities,” to the Democratic Advisory Council. In a year when two hundred and sixty-nine of a possible five hundred and thirty-seven Electoral College delegates were needed to win the Presidency, eight states with high African-American voter turnout—New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and Missouri—would together account for two hundred and ten. African-Americans had long voted Republican, but in the nineteen-thirties F.D.R. had pulled many into his New Deal coalition. Simulmatics reported that, in the nineteen-fifties, this coalition had begun to fall apart: in 1956 and 1958, Democratic candidates had lost Black voters in the North, especially middle-class Black voters, especially after Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act. “The shift was not just a swing to ‘Ike,’ ” Simulmatics reported. “It was definitely a shift in party loyalty,” as evidenced by the swing in the 1958 midterms, when Eisenhower was not on the ballot. “The thing that won them over was not the father-image of Eisenhower (who was, however, not disliked) but the image of what each party had done for the Negro people.” It came to this: the Democratic Party could not win back the White House without winning back those Black voters, and it couldn’t win them back without taking a stronger position on civil rights. Reaching this conclusion might not have seemed to require a team of quantitative behavioral scientists, an I.B.M. 704, and more than half a million dollars—really, you had only to watch the sit-ins on TV. But, given the Party’s intransigence, maybe it did. <...>
Kennedy, who had been trailing Nixon in the polls all summer, gained on him after Labor Day because of his frank talk about religion, because of his new stand on civil rights, and because of his performance in televised debates with Nixon. In each of these cases, the approach he took had been recommended by Simulmatics. Simulmatics had urged a stronger stance on civil rights in its first report, presented to the D.N.C. in May, sent by Pool to the Kennedy campaign in June, and handed to the chairman of the platform committee by Greenfield in advance of the Convention. Immediately after the Convention, Kennedy, who, according to White, was the Democratic candidate least appealing to African-Americans, set up a civil-rights “division” headed by Harris Wofford, the friend of Ed Greenfield’s who had drafted the civil-rights plank of the Party’s platform. In October, Kennedy dramatically improved his standing with African-American voters when (urged by Wofford) he called Coretta Scott King, after her husband was arrested at a sit-in in Atlanta. One of the Simulmatics reports given to Kennedy specifically addressed the upcoming debates, describing them as a risk for Nixon: “The danger to Nixon is that Kennedy can make use of his more personable traits—including a range of Camseriousness and anger.” <...>
Kennedy’s electoral margin of victory, three hundred and three to two hundred and nineteen, was wide. But his margin in the popular vote—49.7 per cent to 49.6 per cent—was the closest since 1888, close enough to lead to two recount efforts led by the Republican National Committee but not endorsed by Nixon, who told a biographer that he wanted to spare the country the “agony of a constitutional crisis.” And, as Simulmatics had predicted, “Negro Voters in Northern Cities” turned out to be crucial to the Democrats’ victory. Kennedy won six of the eight states mentioned in the report.
“What we have demonstrated is how data from past situations can be used to simulate a future situation,” the scientists of Simulmatics had boasted.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-the-simulmatics-corporation-invented-the-future

Компания Simulmatics бежала впереди своего времени и в итоге обанкротилась, но проложила дорогу технологиям микротаргетинга нашего времени, от Фейсбука до Cambridge Analytica. Компьютерные технологии на службе политике ждали скачка в компьютерной мощности и алгоритмах анализа данных.

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1960 был также годом кино. Имя Далтона Трамбо, самого известного из "голливудской десятки", демонстративно появилось в титрах эпического фильма "Спартак", тем самым сигнализируя конец остракизма. Трамбо был также сценаристом другого нашумевшего фильма этого года, "Исход" ("Exodus"), об образовании государства Израиль и его борьбе за независимость.

Среди награжденных Оскаром за фильм "Спартак" - художник-постановщик Александр Голицын. Беженец из нацистской Германии Билли Уайлдер становится тогда же первым в истории кинорежиссером, получившим три Оскара (лучший фильм, лучшая режиссуря и лучший сценарий) за комедию "The Apartment" со смелой по тем временам темой внебрачных связей.

В том же 1960 Альфред Хичкок выпускает классический триллер "Psycho", а Стенли Крамер - картину "Inherit the wind" с обличением мракобесия. Фильм призван служить аллегорией маккартизма и в художественной форме пересказывает случай Scopes Trial - громкого судебного процесса из 1925, в которой Джон Скоупс, учитель средней школы из Теннеси, был осужден за нарушение запрета на преподавание теории эволюции.

Настоящая история, как это обычно бывает, несколько сложнее. Учебник "Civil biology", по которому пытался преподавать Скоупс, включал не только обсуждение эволюции, но и плавный переход от нее к обсуждению врожденного превосходства белой расы и модной тогда евгеники.

The lesser known part of this story is that “Civic Biology” itself was far from precise—or even scientific. With no trace of evidence, for example, the book flatly rated what it called the “negro type” beneath “the highest type of all,” the Caucasian.
“Civic Biology” advocated eugenics on the basis of race and flirted with the fallacy that acquired traits such as “shiftlessness” might be passed down the generations. Of the so-called shiftless the text’s author, George Hunter, wrote: “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-progressive-history-of-eugenics-1456521508

Разумеется, штаты, в которых вслед за Теннеси было запрещено преподавание теории эволюции (Миссисипи, Техас и т.п.) не нуждались в научном обосновании расизма, удовлетворяясь традиционным. Они находили слишком опасной идею о том, что у людей разных рас и национальностей могут быть общие предки.

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Другим декларативным фильмом из 1960 стал "Аламо" Джона Уэйна. Чтобы снять эпическую картину с многотысячной массовкой и красивой музыкой Дмитрия Темкина, Уэйн вложил собственные деньги, заложив в ссуду свои дома и яхту. Он сам исполнял роль Дэви Крокетта, народного любимца и спасителя Техаса из Теннеси. Образ осажденной крепости использовался в качестве аллегории Америки в кольце коммунистической угрозы.

История "Аламо", как основополагающий миф о создания Техаса, ныне частично развенчана профессиональными историками, но школьникам про это знать запрещается, потому что с нынешнего года в Техасе действуют новые запреты на преподавание опасных идей.

In Wayne’s world, the defenders of the Alamo were noble martyrs for the cause of liberty, gallantly fighting to the death against the forces of a monstrous Mexican dictator (Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna).
There was no hint in the film that their rebellion against Mexico was largely an attempt to preserve slavery. You got no sense of the sleazy history of its most famous characters (James Bowie, for example, was a slave trader and a scam artist).
You got the dramatic image of William Travis drawing a line in the sand, despite the dearth of evidence that he ever did such a thing. You got the equally dramatic image of Davy Crockett (as portrayed by Wayne) fighting to the death, despite historical accounts indicating he surrendered to Mexican soldiers.
While it’s truly taken a village to propagate all the romanticized falsehoods that define the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, Wayne took the stray, apocryphal pieces of mythology that had accumulated for more than a century, put them up on the big screen and wrapped them in his ultra-patriotic aura.
Although the film did only middling box office and received scathing reviews, it cemented an Alamo narrative that Texas exceptionalists cling to with a come-and-take-it stubbornness.
That stubbornness was on display this past week, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick spiked a scheduled Thursday night event at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, featuring Chris Tomlinson and Bryan Burrough, two of the authors (along with Jason Stanford) of the compelling new historical corrective, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.”
Patrick, a member of the museum’s board of directors, tweeted Friday that “this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place” at the Bullock.
The lieutenant governor’s censorship move was disgusting, but not exactly surprising. He is a self-described John Wayne fanatic who maintains a collection of The Duke’s movie memorabilia — including items from “The Alamo” — at his Capitol office. For him, Wayne is Davy Crockett, and Wayne’s movie is the definitive account of the 13-day siege.
The authors of “Forget the Alamo” take direct aim at Wayne’s film. They point out that Wayne tried to shoehorn the Alamo story into a Cold War parable that equated Santa Anna with Soviet Communist Party leaders. This led him “far from the truth and beyond much of the myth.”
Where Wayne failed as a historian and as a cinematic auteur, however, he succeeded as a purveyor of agitprop.
The authors of “Forget the Alamo” write that Wayne’s film “marked a turning point in the way the Alamo was viewed, what it symbolized, a kind of American fortitude, especially military fortitude.”
https://www.expressnews.com/news/news_columnists/gilbert_garcia/article/Garcia-John-Wayne-bought-the-Alamo-myth-16291074.php

On Monday, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill creating “The 1836 Project,” designed to “promote patriotic education” about the year Texas seceded from Mexico. In other words, the law will create a committee to ensure that educational materials centering “Texas values” are provided at state landmarks and encouraged in schools. This comes on the heels of the “critical race theory” bill that has passed through the Legislature, which would restrict how teachers can discuss current events and teach history. The American Historical Association has described the bill as “whitewashing American history,” stating: “Its apparent purposes are to intimidate teachers and stifle independent inquiry and critical thought among students.”
https://www.texasobserver.org/forget-the-alamo-unravels-a-texas-history-made-of-myths-or-rather-lies/

Интервью с Джоном Уэйном, в котором он откровенно делился своими взглядами, было опубликована в журнале Playboy в мае 1971.

PLAYBOY: Isn't your kind of screen rebellion very different from that of today's young people?
WAYNE: Sure. Mine is a personal rebellion against the monotony of life, against the status quo. The rebellion in these kids—especially in the SDSers and those groups — seems to be a kind of dissension by rote.
PLAYBOY: Meaning what?
WAYNE: Just this: The articulate liberal group has caused certain things in our country, and I wonder how long the young people who read Playboy are going to allow these things to go on. George Putnam, the Los Angeles news analyst, put it quite succinctly when he said, "What kind of a nation is it that fails to understand that freedom of speech and assembly are one thing, and anarchy and treason are quite another, that allows known Communists to serve as teachers to pervert the natural loyalties and ideals of our kids, filling them with fear and doubt and hate and down-grading patriotism and all our heroes of the past?"
PLAYBOY: You blame all this on liberals?
WAYNE: Well, the liberals seem to be quite willing to have Communists teach their kids in school. The Communists realized that they couldn't start a workers' revolution in the United States, since the workers were too affluent and too progressive. So the Commies decided on the next-best thing, and that's to start on the schools, start on the kids. And they've managed to do it. They're already in colleges; now they're getting into high schools. I wouldn't mind if they taught my children the basic philosophy of communism, in theory and how it works in actuality. But I don't want somebody like Angela Davis inculcating an enemy doctrine in my kids' minds.
PLAYBOY: Angela Davis claims that those who would revoke her teaching credentials on ideological grounds are actually discriminating against her because she's black. Do you think there's any truth in that?
WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/Wild_Wild_Cold_War/files/2011/11/John_Wayne_Playboy_Int2.pdf

Интервью Уэйна удивительным образом перекликается с интервью, которое Playboy взял в 1966 у Джорджа Линкольна Рокуэлла, "фюрера" американской нацистской партии, послав для этого черного корреспондента. Интервью он демонстративно давал под портретом Гитлера с пистолетом под рукой.

Рокуэлл обратил на себя внимание в 1960, когда в нацисткой униформе пикетировал кинотеатр, где показывали фильм "Исход", что отразилось в сатирической песне Боба Дилана про John Birch Society.

Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy
Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy
To my knowledge there’s just one man
That’s really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus

Как и Уэйн, Рокуэлл в интервью ссылается на сочинения Путнама, правда другого. Он разоблачает идею расового равенства, как еврейский заговор, запущенный Францем Боасом и другими антропологами через американские университеты ради разложения белой цивилизации. Этот вариант теории заговора при всей своей абсурдности несколько более логичен, чем его более поздние мутации в "культурном марксизме" и "critical race theory".

Haley: The words superior and inferior have no meaning to geneticists, Commander—and neither does mongrelization. Every authority in the field has attested that the world’s racial groups are genetically indistinguishable from one another. All men, in other words—including hybrids—are created equal.
Rockwell: You’re bringing tears to my eyes. Don’t you know that all this equality garbage was started by a Jew anthropologist named Franz Boas from Columbia University? Boas was followed by another Jew from Columbia named Gene Weltfish. And our present Jew expert preaching equality is another Jew named Ashley Montagu. Any anthropologist who dares to preach the facts known by any farmer in the barnyard—that breeds differ in quality—is simply not allowed to survive in the universities or in publishing, because he can’t earn a living. You never hear from that side. But Carleton Putnam has written a wonderful book called Race and Reason, showing that there is plenty of scholarly evidence to back up my contention that the nigger race is inherently inferior to the white race intellectually. [Putnam, a former president of Delta Airlines, has no academic credentials in sociology, anthropology or genetics. Explaining its “Not Recommended” classification for his book—fully titled Race and Reason: A Yankee View—Book Review Digest writes: “At no time does the author show himself qualified to speak as a scientist.”—Ed.] This equality garbage is straight Soviet, Lysenkian biology—direct from the Communist Lysenko, who preached that by changing the environment you could grow one plant from another plant’s seeds. This is the doctrine that’s destroying our society—because it’s not true. You can’t grow wheat from corn by changing the environment.
Haley: You can’t grow wheat from corn by changing anything. In any case, we’re discussing human beings, not foodstuffs.
Rockwell: I don’t feel like quibbling. What I’m saying is that I believe the Jews have consciously perverted the study of anthropology and biology and human genetics in order to reach this phony conclusion—and thus destroy the great white race.
Haley: What phony conclusion?
Rockwell: The totally erroneous notion that heredity has nothing to do with why, for example, the niggers have lower scholastic averages and higher illegitimacy rates than whites.
Haley: According to geneticists, it doesn’t. In any case, how would acceptance of this notion lead to the destruction of the white race?
Rockwell: By deluding people into believing that the nigger is only “underprivileged” rather than inherently inferior; into believing, therefore, that he can be cleaned up and smartened up by letting him eat in our restaurants, study in our schools, move into our neighborhoods. The next inevitable step is to take him into our beds—and this would lead to the mongrelization, and hence the destruction, of the white race.
Haley: You said that the Jews are behind this plot. Since they’re whites themselves, how would they benefit from their own destruction?
Rockwell: They won’t be mingling like the rest of us. They believe they’re too pure to mix; they think they’re “the chosen people”—chosen to rule the world. But the only world they could rule would be a world of inferior beings. And as long as the white man is pure, they cannot succeed. But when the white man permits himself to be mixed with black men, then the Jews can master him.
Haley: How?
Rockwell: They already run the niggers. Except for the Black Muslims, the Jews run practically all the big civil rights organizations.
Haley: You’re misinformed, Commander. The key posts in all but one of the major civil rights groups—the NAACP—are held entirely by Negroes.
Rockwell: They’re just the front men. The Jews operate behind the scenes, pulling the strings and holding the moneybags.
https://alexhaley.com/2019/09/10/alex-haley-interviews-george-lincoln-rockwell/

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Старые предрассудки не умирают. Как и не умирает и мечта о всеобщем братстве.

В мае 1971, пока Джон Уэйн давал интервью Playboy, Джон Леннон начал записывать песню "Imagine".