Decade of the Damned Documented

The latest Ken Burns / Lynn Novick / Sarah Botstein documentary, U.S. and the Holocaust, was an often hard-to-watch yet essential historical document. They showed the antecedents to Hitler’s abomination alongside the ever-changing tides of America in that decade. Roosevelt’s progressive and humane principles were revealed as in a constant wrestling match with his instincts as a political player. He embodied a patrician noblesse oblige with empathetic interest in the welfare of the down-trodden all tempered by expediency and certain duplicitous missteps. In spite of his wrong-headed decisions regarding Japanese internment and a cowardly refusal to confront his own antisemitic State Department he gets credit for saving Democracy and guiding us through the war.

I came away reminded of how self-serving politics can become. Faustian deals are made. Constituencies are appeased. The plight of distant people is met with indifference. And all the time, winds of persuasion are shifting. Low information voters are moved by voices such as Lindbergh and then suddenly reversed in large numbers. What is it again that springs eternal from the human breast?

The arc of public opinion from nativism and isolationism to full international engagement and ultimate acceptance of European immigrants is the very chronicle of the American mind. And just when you might rejoice at the evolution of our consciousness there comes evidence of our devolution. Progress is a vast zig-zag.

The team’s writer Geoffrey Ward brings it all home with the parallel to today’s events which have been on our minds all along. Donald got his playbook from Adolph. One can only hope our latent somnambulism and attraction for simplistic authoritarianism is  corrected before they drink the Kool-Aid. The massive plunge into depravity is apparently universal even with Germany’s high culture of Beethoven, Kant and Goethe. One wonders if our pop culture and social media will save or destroy us.

One minor quibble: Never mentioned was the needless delay in opening a second front as a factor in furthering Nazi bestiality. There was, at some point, a suspicion that Churchill and other Western forces had tacitly encouraged Hitler’s attack on Soviet communism. This would have been an extension of assaults against revolutionary USSR in the 1920s. Of course, any such thoughts were dispelled when the Russians took the offensive and decimated the Nazi forces. From their perspective the war was won on the eastern front.

Perhaps the accelerated changes in technology have dislodged historical memory. To the extent we have become a country of amnesiacs Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are true national treasures. For over four decades they have become our conservators and teachers, our visual bards and hopefully our movers and shakers.