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Ken Burns Mega Documentary Thread

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  • 4 months later...
Beantown Express 2.0

Beantown Express 2.0 6559

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38 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

US and the Holocaust started tonight. I didn't get a chance to watch it yet, but it's recorded and ready.

I am watching it now.  Only about 30 min in but so far this should be required viewing for all Americans.  Not just about the Holocaust but immigration in general and the history of how that occurred in the US.  

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Beantown Express 2.0

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I am not sure if he did this on purpose but to me they are totally making parallels between the current world including the US and Hitlers rise to power which I thought was interesting.  Also, I never knew that Hitler and his men really admired and used the playbook from the US on how to treat the Jews with the way the US treated African Americans with Jim Crow laws to make them second class citizens.  Same goes for Hitlers views of the US western expansion and killing of the native Americans and how he wanted eastern expansion and thought he could kill the Slavs and Russians because they were a lesser race than his Aryan race.  Hitler was of course a mad man but he really took the worst things the US did and implemented them in Germany.  

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WhatTheBuck

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8 hours ago, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

I am not sure if he did this on purpose but to me they are totally making parallels between the current world including the US and Hitlers rise to power which I thought was interesting.  Also, I never knew that Hitler and his men really admired and used the playbook from the US on how to treat the Jews with the way the US treated African Americans with Jim Crow laws to make them second class citizens.  Same goes for Hitlers views of the US western expansion and killing of the native Americans and how he wanted eastern expansion and thought he could kill the Slavs and Russians because they were a lesser race than his Aryan race.  Hitler was of course a mad man but he really took the worst things the US did and implemented them in Germany.  

Well, it’s sort of hard to talk about the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930’s without noticing parallels to what’s going on today in some European countries and elsewhere. It was also hard not to notice some parallels in the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO and how they dealt with the disaster. As far as Hitler using American behavior as justification for his, authoritarians today are still doing that. Hasn’t either Putin or Xi brought up America’s invasion of Iraq in order to defend their actions and to say that we’re in no position to criticize them?

When I see the maps laid out showing Hitler’s expansionism it’s hard not to notice the parallels with Putin’s. But if anyone needs a documentary to notice that then they’re either very young or have just never studied their history. 

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Beantown Express 2.0

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1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Well, it’s sort of hard to talk about the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930’s without noticing parallels to what’s going on today in some European countries and elsewhere. It was also hard not to notice some parallels in the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO and how they dealt with the disaster. As far as Hitler using American behavior as justification for his, authoritarians today are still doing that. Hasn’t either Putin or Xi brought up America’s invasion of Iraq in order to defend their actions and to say that we’re in no position to criticize them?

When I see the maps laid out showing Hitler’s expansionism it’s hard not to notice the parallels with Putin’s. But if anyone needs a documentary to notice that then they’re either very young or have just never studied their history. 

I’m old and majored in history at UT so thanks.

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Dutch

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On 9/19/2022 at 7:39 AM, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

I am not sure if he did this on purpose but to me they are totally making parallels between the current world including the US and Hitlers rise to power which I thought was interesting.  Also, I never knew that Hitler and his men really admired and used the playbook from the US on how to treat the Jews with the way the US treated African Americans with Jim Crow laws to make them second class citizens.  Same goes for Hitlers views of the US western expansion and killing of the native Americans and how he wanted eastern expansion and thought he could kill the Slavs and Russians because they were a lesser race than his Aryan race.  Hitler was of course a mad man but he really took the worst things the US did and implemented them in Germany.  

Burns absolutely did.  He refers to a quote from Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

"It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at a church in South Carolina; white supremacists marching with flaming torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting 'Jews will not replace us!'; the killing of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021."

“ 'We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with antisemitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and nativism and eugenics,' he explains. 'We’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.'”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/19/ken-burns-interview-holocaust-docuseries

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Texzilla58

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To say the Nazis modeled their policies towards Slavs and Jews on slavery in the Us is simply bad scholarship. Hitler had practically no knowledge of the US, and slavery and antisemitism was brought here by Europeans.

Their policies toward the Jews was endemic in Euro history going back to the Roman Empire and continuing thru the early Catholic Church, the Inquisition, the segregation of them into ghettos, the Dreyfus affair in France, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti Semitism was deeply ingrained in European society for centuries, and simply remanifested after WWI as scapegoats for Versailles.

The conflict between Slavs and Germanic tribes and nations goes back 2000 years. Look at a sequential map of Central Europe for the last 1000 years and it’s in constant flux. The drive for Germanic “liebensraum” is older than the US itself and is a pillar of panGermanic belief, that Germany had to grow. Drang nacht Osted, Drive to the east, has been a cornerstone of German nationalism since the Mitterrand era in the early 1800’s.

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WhatTheBuck

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10 hours ago, Texzilla58 said:

To say the Nazis modeled their policies towards Slavs and Jews on slavery in the Us is simply bad scholarship.

Nobody said they did that. The Nazis justified their racist policies by comparing them to things like Jim Crow in the US. They mocked the West for protesting the treatment of Jews by the Nazis while not excepting all the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression.

To say that the documentary is claiming the Nazis modeled their policies towards Slavs and Jews on slavery in the Us is simply bad scholarship.

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bluto

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2 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Nobody said they did that. The Nazis justified their racist policies by comparing them to things like Jim Crow in the US. They mocked the West for protesting the treatment of Jews by the Nazis while not excepting all the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression.

To say that the documentary is claiming the Nazis modeled their policies towards Slavs and Jews on slavery in the Us is simply bad scholarship.

But he called it bad scholarship so he’s clearly an astute intellectual. 

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Texzilla58

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Nobody said they did that. The Nazis justified their racist policies by comparing them to things like Jim Crow in the US. They mocked the West for protesting the treatment of Jews by the Nazis while not excepting all the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression.
To say that the documentary is claiming the Nazis modeled their policies towards Slavs and Jews on slavery in the Us is simply bad scholarship.

Just responding to previous posts which stated this was the message they got from it. Burns work is usually top drawer.
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Biff Tannen

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So I ran across a lot of "outdoor" people on my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail this spring.  I was AMAZED at how many of them did not know who Burns was.  I didn't think it was possible.  But god damn, we need to find a way to make people watch his stuff.  I have a family connection to him, so I guess I'm just misinformed, but come on people.

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WhatTheBuck

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On 5/31/2023 at 3:49 PM, Biff Tannen said:

So I ran across a lot of "outdoor" people on my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail this spring.  I was AMAZED at how many of them did not know who Burns was.  I didn't think it was possible.  But god damn, we need to find a way to make people watch his stuff.  I have a family connection to him, so I guess I'm just misinformed, but come on people.

People are idiots. Most people don’t watch documentaries or educational programming of any kind let alone read a book now and then. 

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Jiggy-Z

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On 10/23/2023 at 10:02 PM, Texzilla58 said:

The genocide of the bison for the railroads was the catalytic event that completely nailed down the fate of native Americans on the plains. The Comanche were still indomitable and keeping the frontier stuck just west of Ft Worth until we’ll after the civil war.

...also would add the systematic conversion of the tall grass prairies to farm land as not only bad for the natives but an environmental catastrophe.

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billfromlaketravis

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3 hours ago, SimonBolivar said:

Bison is delicious and way better for you than cow too. We pretty much only eat ground bison these days in our house.

Yeah I don’t notice much of difference until you get into ribeyes and up. Ground bison and ground grass fed beef are damn near identical in taste.

Bison steaks cook very, very fast because of how lean they are. Sear, flip, sear again, and pull it. 
 

The old Petroleum Club of Houston served the best bison steak I’ve ever had. I think it was basically a bison strip sirloin in sauce. Slammed very hard. 

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Herpa Derpa

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On 10/17/2021 at 10:05 PM, atomheartbevo said:

If you are a Civil War fan, this was posted a few months ago - it's almost two hours of raw/unedited interview footage with Shelby Foote.

Really cool to see how Burns interviews, and how they got the clips that they did, and how many takes they would do (overhead aircraft were an issue, as was the film reels running out).

 

Shelby Foote was an inveterate liar spewing apocryphal bullshit and who would have sucked off Nathan Forrest at a Klan rally then swear with cum dripping down his chin that old Nathan was just a misunderstood genius.

 

 

Edit to add for thread contribution: I recently ran through the Vietnam doc and highly rec if you haven't seen it yet. LBJ really fucked his soul.

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The Ace of Aces

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17 minutes ago, Herpa Derpa said:

Shelby Foote was an inveterate liar spewing apocryphal bullshit and who would have sucked off Nathan Forrest at a Klan rally then swear with cum dripping down his chin that old Nathan was just a misunderstood genius.

Fuck Shelby Foote and all the Lost Cause shitbags. Sherman stopped too soon and Lee and Davis should have hung until dead and their bodies buried in unmarked graves.

 

Edit to add for thread contribution: I recently ran through the Vietnam doc and highly rec if you haven't seen it yet. LBJ really fucked his soul.

My grandparents and great grandparents in laws are all in Lee’s front yard. They were the most anti racist humans to roam the planet in the late 1800s to 1995 or so when they all died. Knowing Lee lost his land to house dead Yankees is very pleasing.  

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Biff Tannen

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45 minutes ago, Herpa Derpa said:

Shelby Foote was an inveterate liar spewing apocryphal bullshit and who would have sucked off Nathan Forrest at a Klan rally then swear with cum dripping down his chin that old Nathan was just a misunderstood genius.

 

 

Edit to add for thread contribution: I recently ran through the Vietnam doc and highly rec if you haven't seen it yet. LBJ really fucked his soul.

Foote has definitely been skewered.  I don't honestly know what his true beliefs were, but to me he was an interesting voice in the Civil War documentary.  He clearly has a soft spot for the confederacy, but from a historical perspective, it felt like he just treated the Civil War as a really interesting chapter of American history instead of a horrific chapter in human history.  I'm not excusing it one way or another, but that's just how he comes off to me.

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atomheartbevo

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2 hours ago, Herpa Derpa said:

Shelby Foote was an inveterate liar spewing apocryphal bullshit and who would have sucked off Nathan Forrest at a Klan rally then swear with cum dripping down his chin that old Nathan was just a misunderstood genius.

You'll get no arguments from me that he's got a soft spot/hard-on for the Confederacy, and hell he's buried next to Forrest (or his family).  

I was more interested in how Burns does his stuff, especially during the Civil War series. I don't even think they did a formal making-of during the Civil War series.  They did a series of videos on later series, including some solid ones about the Vietnam War.

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

Foote has definitely been skewered.  I don't honestly know what his true beliefs were, but to me he was an interesting voice in the Civil War documentary.  He clearly has a soft spot for the confederacy,

He made it clear that he would have sided with the Confederacy no matter what.  I preferred Ed Bearss (and there's a lot of him on YouTube), but Foote was interesting from the perspective of somebody whose grandparents' generation were around during the Civil War.

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

but from a historical perspective, it felt like he just treated the Civil War as a really interesting chapter of American history instead of a horrific chapter in human history.  I'm not excusing it one way or another, but that's just how he comes off to me.

I actually think it was more that he treated it as this almost-mythical event that defined America, for better or for worse, and I kind of agree with that quite a bit.  I think Burns captured that sentiment as well.  We ultimately would not have lost the War of 1812 (England could not have kept up a fast stream of reinforcement soldiers, because sailing ships) or the war(s) with Mexico, but the Civil War, that was make or break time.

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Biff Tannen

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57 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

You'll get no arguments from me that he's got a soft spot/hard-on for the Confederacy, and hell he's buried next to Forrest (or his family).  

I was more interested in how Burns does his stuff, especially during the Civil War series. I don't even think they did a formal making-of during the Civil War series.  They did a series of videos on later series, including some solid ones about the Vietnam War.

He made it clear that he would have sided with the Confederacy no matter what.  I preferred Ed Bearss (and there's a lot of him on YouTube), but Foote was interesting from the perspective of somebody whose grandparents' generation were around during the Civil War.

I actually think it was more that he treated it as this almost-mythical event that defined America, for better or for worse, and I kind of agree with that quite a bit.  I think Burns captured that sentiment as well.  We ultimately would not have lost the War of 1812 (England could not have kept up a fast stream of reinforcement soldiers, because sailing ships) or the war(s) with Mexico, but the Civil War, that was make or break time.

Absolutely. He was enthralled with it. 

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South Austin

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Recently watched The Central Park Five again.  What a great/horrific documentary that both made my blood boil and almost moved me to tears.  The imprisonment of innocent people due to lazy, incompetent, and corrupt law enforcement is bad enough, but I get especially ragey when it comes to children. 

I'm going to make my seventh-grade son watch this.  He's taking a criminal law class this semester and has expressed some interest in the subject.  

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