Ken Burns/PBS upcoming “US and the Holocaust” documentary. Beware the hidden message
Trump is Hitler?
Not exactly, says Ken Burns during an interview with the Daily Beast. Not exactly, but close.
At the last moment, Burns dropped a segment which would show Hitler campaigning with the slogan, “Make Germany great again.”
That would be too obviously a reference to Trump and his trademark,” Make America great again.”
So the film, “The US and the Holocaust,” running in three parts on PBS beginning Sept. 18, will focus on America’s failure to save the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.
That would be enough of a story if it stopped right there, except that Trump derangement syndrome strikes again!
The name “Trump” is apparently nowhere in the script, but it is there subliminally, if what we gather is correct from Burns’ interviews with the Daily Beast and CBS Sunday Morning.
We read that largely due to antisemitism, America closed its borders to the Jews trapped in Third Reich Europe.
This is entirely a fact, which the documentary covers in painstaking detail. Burns, we are told, spent four years digging until he came up with new information, from FDR on down.
Yes, America behaved badly.
America had closed its borders. Millions could have been saved if America had a heart, for the Jews.
From that, and from the rise of Israel, came the term “Never Again.”
That phrase was introduced as strictly bearing on the Jewish Experience, and yet it keeps being appropriated.
So that “never again” means never again closed or secure borders for…well, for example, for the millions walking in illegally through Mexico.
Beware such hidden messages within the total big picture, for which, the big picture, Burns deserves credit, if he had resisted the temptation to signal the Left.
Accordingly, the tag “White supremacy” keeps showing up as part of the project. Burns puts the blame on Protestants as wanting no Jews mixing in with their America.
True as that may be, the term “White supremacy” is of recent vintage. Language like that was never known or used back then, and only now are Americans categorized as such.
“White supremacy” is another way to whisper Trump and his MAGA followers, and to somehow link these days with those days.
Was this necessary?
There ought to be a law against use of the Holocaust for other means and other people. The Holocaust was a singular Jewish tragedy.
Using it is abusing it when it’s for something else. There was one Holocaust. Period. Survivors are not people who survived Honduras, but people who survived Auschwitz.
Yes, some of us are still around who know the story firsthand, indeed how America turned its back on the Jews.
When the ship Serpa Pinto docked in Philadelphia, the Survivors were commanded, by armed guards, to walk a wooden plank toward busses headed for Canada.
If you tripped, and “set foot on American soil,” you were to be sent back.
That’s the story from one family’s experience.
Ken Burns ought to be congratulated for taking up the cause. Generations who don’t know what happened should be taught.
Generations who know but forgot, should be reminded.
But the left-wing politics within the film is an asterisk on an otherwise noble enterprise.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
