Ken Burns is the most famous documentary filmmaker in America. He has made 35 films over the past 5 decades on historical and cultural subjects like the Civil War (which is the most streamed film in public television history), baseball, jazz, the Roosevelts, Jefferson, Vietnam, Benjamin Franklin, the Statue of Liberty, Muhammad Ali... and many, many more. But of his most recent film,
While I am extremely disturbed about the Holocaust, as is most everyone today, and would have been interested in seeing this film, I am completely turned off by what the described ending turned out to be. Another America bashing and right-wing fear mongering film. So disappointing!
The parallels made between the current right wing and the holocaust are fundamentally dishonest. There may be some small fringe groups on the right who are anti-Semitic but those groups have zero chance of gaining national power in the US. There is also no genocide or enslavement being committed against any group of people, in the US or the world, by the right-wing.
Also, trying to associate the current immigration issues to what happened back then is just disgusting. It makes me sad to know that the US could have done more to allow the victims of the holocaust entrance in our country and didn’t. I don’t know enough about the details of our current immigration laws but I am fairly certain that the laws have changed to allow asylum seekers to come here without question, which are probably the result of what happened back then. Those laws are now being mis-used by anyone wanting to come in. All anyone has to say to enter our country is that they are asylum seekers and they allowed in. I am for immigration but not open borders. People who have been trying to come here legally can’t come in but people who come here illegally can come in. That’s just not fair. Demonizing my opinion as being evil and racist is completely wrong.
From what I can tell, there is a much larger anti-Semitic movement happening on the left, on college campuses and by blacks. There are even open, celebrated, anti-Semite’s serving in our congress right now, not on the right, but on the left. I’m sure that was not mentioned in the film.
If the film was being pro-human, a more honest parallel of the theme of the film, where the world (America) knew what was happening and ignored it, would be the current treatment of Uighurs in China and North Koreans my the leader of their country.
Sooooo disappointing Bari. Why did you give the left a complete pass? Not a single question about the rise of antisemitism on our college campuses? NYU, a bastion of intellectuals, actively hating on Jews. Btw, he didn't mention Israel because he supports BDM and the Palestinians. Keep in mind Eugenics in 1920s USA was promoted by the intellectual left but no one even mentions that fact.
This was hard to listen to. Ken Burns repeatedly saying he wasn’t being political when he was being as political as you can get was pathetic. Lost any respect for him I had
I appreciate Bari for airing people with a wide range of viewpoints but am very disappointed that she didn't push back against Burns' overtly political and disproportionate conflation of Nazi atrocities with present-day conservative leanings. While the story he tells deserves to be heard, he destroys his own credibility by embracing tired, old, cartoonish caricatures of present-day Republicans and others who support the humane and sensible enforcement of immigration laws.
I truly appreciate someone who tries to simply present history for others to learn from, draw their own conclusions and find parallels in. But when you throw any sort of current event or political blip (onto the last 3 minutes no less) you can’t also sit there and claim you’re not pushing an opinion.
That Ken Burns is a brilliant filmmaker is without question. The interview was troubling, though, as he reaffirmed his elitist, unctuous credentials. He correctly points out instances of authoritarianism on the right, but conveniently ignores the issue of authoritarianism and anti-free speech behavior on the left: Government agencies during COVID; Big Tech's partnership with the White House to suppress free speech; Transition of legacy media from reporting to narrative; Speech codes at universities, etc. All of this leads one to wonder: Is Ken Burns shining a light on an important and tragic historical event, or is he leveraging this as a cudgel to advance his polemic political view?
I'm a long-time supporter of Honestly, appreciate Bari's courage and perspective, and enjoy Ken Burns at least some of the time. However, I was also SO frustrated with this interview. Echoing concerns already raised in the comments, I would add this (based on the described ending of the documentary): Having the documentary end in such fashion does a great disservice. THEY did not persecute the Jews in 1930s-1940s Germany, WE did. THEY did not enact racist policies in the US, WE did. We also opposed those movements and have generated slow, steady, and ultimately tremendous progress. We need to identify both with historical victims and persecutors and understand our own vulnerabilities and abject failures of courage. Sounds like Burns went right up to the line where he could have forced the audience to engage with real reckoning--AND HE BALKED. Yes civilization is fragile; we ought to remember this, be on guard for its faltering, and understanding the factors that contribute to its fragility. The illiberal extremes on both sides of the political spectrum are the greatest dangers right now. To the degree that freedom of speech and expression is being quashed from the Left, they/we are making our civilization more fragile. I agree that Jan 6 and Asheville were abhorrent examples of our vulnerability. But why does the montage include no images from Seattle or Portland? No images of antifa setting fires to cars? No BLM riots? No antisemitic rants from the illiberal Left? This "swerve" away from a direct facing of the risk allows the audience to depart with the numbing consolation that THEY, the other, are a threat and WE are the "good guys" who must remain on guard. "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Bullshit. He hobbled the potential impact of his own project. Shows which segment of the audience even he fears. That tight feeling in his gut as he assembled that montage should have invited some introspection. And if he had no ambivalence at all--even worse. Big fail.
Really disappointed in this episode. If you’re going to condemn the right (in most cases rightfully so) for using the Holocaust in political fodder, you have to call out the left too. How many times have we heard Trump be compared to Hitler and the Republican Party to Nazis by pundits on the left? I kept waiting for you to call out the double standard. Furthermore, the authoritarian actions of of the far right regarding immigration can be directly compared to far left’s failed authoritarian Covid mandates. You conveniently left that out of the discussion, too. Didn’t expect this type of hypocrisy from Honestly.
Ken Burns is one of my favorite storytellers. I have watched with interest many of his documentaries. I appreciate that this project did a deep dive into a history there is still, after all that has been written and documented, room for more examination. This includes the perspectives that influenced how and to what degree the US intervened. I am sure that I am not well versed in America's attitudes at the time.
However Mr. Burns blatant political bias revealed in this interview, and his tangling of the holocaust with today's current events left me wondering how much I could trust what he has included in the story. A shame really, that what could otherwise have been an important reveal of a different perspective on the holocaust, he chose to inject his world (US) view of the facts as he sees them. This is one of his documentaries that I plan to skip. And given what he revealed as his POV, I will watch his other documentaries with a more critical eye.
I wish you would interview Ruth Wisse who has a different perspective on the documentary (see _Why, Despite Good Intentions, Ken Burns’s "The U.S. and the Holocaust" Fails_ in Mosaic Magazine )
I guess we can give Burns credit for admitting he's a story teller, not a historian. Must be nice to be able to dismiss all those troubling facts and arguments that get in the way of a good story. ...Lord he was difficult to listen to but it served to shine a light on the left's thinking these days, not that it surprised me. So self aggrandizing and so dismissive of any accountability. So disappointing. And slippery, my God that man is slippery.
Bari: can you interview someone else to rebalance this discussion? I sensed that you wanted to push back harder but pulled your punches... I hope that is true..?
Burns' statement that the US government is murdering blacks today was especially infuriating.
The media too often conflates the really horrible ideas held by the Nazis, with their model of government, which we describe as fascism. Yes anti-semitism is horrible and it was practiced by Nazi fascists. It is also practiced by a fringe minority of white supremacists in this country; but they are not fascists. Idiots yes, fascists no. Fascism is a type of government in which several supposedly separate entities work together, “bundled” to a common purpose. Such actors include the state, the press, and corporations. By definition a minority faction of any sort cannot be fascist. Ironically, in this country, the organization that comes closest to fascism is the Democratic Party, in concert with the mainstream media and social media, and a significant number of “woke” corporations. Indeed it is only the republican minority that keeps these “democratic” authoritarians from running rough shod. See: the lockdowns following covid in blue states.
All this hand wringing about Trump and “right wing” conspiracy makes me puke. Bari should have pushed back against this garbage.
At about minute -14 Burns says: "When somebody disagrees with you and your fire them, ..." of what do you think. When I heard him say this I thought of cancel culture, the most powerful religious force in our society today. But not Burns, he thinks of someone fired for plausible cause by DeSantis. Perhaps Rebekkah Jones, fired in Florida for a history of violating DOH policy. Or perhaps Andrew Warren, the Tampa Bay prosecutor fired by DeSantis for ostentatious selective enforcement of the law. Of course, Burns vigorously promotes a partisan political agenda, it's obvious, and he's willing to twist history to support his agenda. I dramatically lowered my expectation that he's a remotely reliable documentarian.
Burns repeatedly trots out this tired trope that Trump rhymes with Hitler. I think that Trump rhymes better with the Gracchi brothers but your ear may hear things differently. More importantly, what is the most powerful authoritarian forces in our society? Take the anti-semitism on which his documentary focuses. Yes, we have some ridiculous white supremacists and we have the occasional (too frequent) white Nazi attacking a synagogue. But we also have frequent attacks on Jewish people by black haters aligned with the left, the Crown-Heights pogrom inflamed by the still popular Al Sharpton, and the casual anti-semitism of Ilhan Omar, a duly elected US Representative. Which source of anti-semitism is most powerful in our society today? In college classes some students still read Mein Kampf, do you think they read it with the same adulation and expectation of insight that they read the anti-semite writer James Baldwin? Who is more persuasive in modern America?
Alas, one could go on and on about the obvious failures of perception Burns demonstrated in the interview. Sadly, I now have to revisit my opinions about his other documentaries with my new much-lowered assessment of his capabilities.
Burns is not great with facts but he's an accomplished propagandist of the of left and sly anti-America proselytizer, his claims to love America notwithstanding. I found particularly grating Burns's lame attempt to connect current day Republicans to a nascent "holocaust" and his completely lunatic plunge to bring January 6th into the conversation. Bari should know better and her pandering to Burns's agenda is very discouraging. What is really amusing is his trashing of 1930s America as an anti-Semitic and racist backwater that supplied the Nazis with their lunatic theories. The fact that Coughlin had an audience is hardly evidence of an American kristallnacht because there was none. And the utter glossing over of the prejudices and inaction of Frankie D to even try to save European Jewry is truly comical How Roosevelt remains venerated by the majority of America Jews remains a mystery to me. A better and far more honest history of these sad times and Roosevelt's failure to take any meaningful effort to help the Jews - including the disgraceful SS St. Louis incident - is offered in Medoff's The Jews Should Keep Quiet.
“I’m just the storyteller, the onus is on you, the listener” just feels like a huge cop out. I knew what I would get before I hit play, I just wish Bari would have pushed back more. Perhaps she was just trying to avoid more random bizarre tangents about the state of Florida?
I just listened to this and so disappointed in Ken Burns and his inability to see the Holocaust as the realization of antisemitism and uniquely awful for Jews. His need to try and tie the Holocaust to his misrepresentation of Florida’s laws about teaching sexuality to young children and his repeated references to Fox News - just so awful. I have no words. This has completely changed my view of Burns and his work and how he seeks to promote his political agenda.
While I am extremely disturbed about the Holocaust, as is most everyone today, and would have been interested in seeing this film, I am completely turned off by what the described ending turned out to be. Another America bashing and right-wing fear mongering film. So disappointing!
The parallels made between the current right wing and the holocaust are fundamentally dishonest. There may be some small fringe groups on the right who are anti-Semitic but those groups have zero chance of gaining national power in the US. There is also no genocide or enslavement being committed against any group of people, in the US or the world, by the right-wing.
Also, trying to associate the current immigration issues to what happened back then is just disgusting. It makes me sad to know that the US could have done more to allow the victims of the holocaust entrance in our country and didn’t. I don’t know enough about the details of our current immigration laws but I am fairly certain that the laws have changed to allow asylum seekers to come here without question, which are probably the result of what happened back then. Those laws are now being mis-used by anyone wanting to come in. All anyone has to say to enter our country is that they are asylum seekers and they allowed in. I am for immigration but not open borders. People who have been trying to come here legally can’t come in but people who come here illegally can come in. That’s just not fair. Demonizing my opinion as being evil and racist is completely wrong.
From what I can tell, there is a much larger anti-Semitic movement happening on the left, on college campuses and by blacks. There are even open, celebrated, anti-Semite’s serving in our congress right now, not on the right, but on the left. I’m sure that was not mentioned in the film.
If the film was being pro-human, a more honest parallel of the theme of the film, where the world (America) knew what was happening and ignored it, would be the current treatment of Uighurs in China and North Koreans my the leader of their country.
Sooooo disappointing Bari. Why did you give the left a complete pass? Not a single question about the rise of antisemitism on our college campuses? NYU, a bastion of intellectuals, actively hating on Jews. Btw, he didn't mention Israel because he supports BDM and the Palestinians. Keep in mind Eugenics in 1920s USA was promoted by the intellectual left but no one even mentions that fact.
This was hard to listen to. Ken Burns repeatedly saying he wasn’t being political when he was being as political as you can get was pathetic. Lost any respect for him I had
I appreciate Bari for airing people with a wide range of viewpoints but am very disappointed that she didn't push back against Burns' overtly political and disproportionate conflation of Nazi atrocities with present-day conservative leanings. While the story he tells deserves to be heard, he destroys his own credibility by embracing tired, old, cartoonish caricatures of present-day Republicans and others who support the humane and sensible enforcement of immigration laws.
I truly appreciate someone who tries to simply present history for others to learn from, draw their own conclusions and find parallels in. But when you throw any sort of current event or political blip (onto the last 3 minutes no less) you can’t also sit there and claim you’re not pushing an opinion.
That Ken Burns is a brilliant filmmaker is without question. The interview was troubling, though, as he reaffirmed his elitist, unctuous credentials. He correctly points out instances of authoritarianism on the right, but conveniently ignores the issue of authoritarianism and anti-free speech behavior on the left: Government agencies during COVID; Big Tech's partnership with the White House to suppress free speech; Transition of legacy media from reporting to narrative; Speech codes at universities, etc. All of this leads one to wonder: Is Ken Burns shining a light on an important and tragic historical event, or is he leveraging this as a cudgel to advance his polemic political view?
I'm a long-time supporter of Honestly, appreciate Bari's courage and perspective, and enjoy Ken Burns at least some of the time. However, I was also SO frustrated with this interview. Echoing concerns already raised in the comments, I would add this (based on the described ending of the documentary): Having the documentary end in such fashion does a great disservice. THEY did not persecute the Jews in 1930s-1940s Germany, WE did. THEY did not enact racist policies in the US, WE did. We also opposed those movements and have generated slow, steady, and ultimately tremendous progress. We need to identify both with historical victims and persecutors and understand our own vulnerabilities and abject failures of courage. Sounds like Burns went right up to the line where he could have forced the audience to engage with real reckoning--AND HE BALKED. Yes civilization is fragile; we ought to remember this, be on guard for its faltering, and understanding the factors that contribute to its fragility. The illiberal extremes on both sides of the political spectrum are the greatest dangers right now. To the degree that freedom of speech and expression is being quashed from the Left, they/we are making our civilization more fragile. I agree that Jan 6 and Asheville were abhorrent examples of our vulnerability. But why does the montage include no images from Seattle or Portland? No images of antifa setting fires to cars? No BLM riots? No antisemitic rants from the illiberal Left? This "swerve" away from a direct facing of the risk allows the audience to depart with the numbing consolation that THEY, the other, are a threat and WE are the "good guys" who must remain on guard. "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Bullshit. He hobbled the potential impact of his own project. Shows which segment of the audience even he fears. That tight feeling in his gut as he assembled that montage should have invited some introspection. And if he had no ambivalence at all--even worse. Big fail.
Really disappointed in this episode. If you’re going to condemn the right (in most cases rightfully so) for using the Holocaust in political fodder, you have to call out the left too. How many times have we heard Trump be compared to Hitler and the Republican Party to Nazis by pundits on the left? I kept waiting for you to call out the double standard. Furthermore, the authoritarian actions of of the far right regarding immigration can be directly compared to far left’s failed authoritarian Covid mandates. You conveniently left that out of the discussion, too. Didn’t expect this type of hypocrisy from Honestly.
Ken Burns is one of my favorite storytellers. I have watched with interest many of his documentaries. I appreciate that this project did a deep dive into a history there is still, after all that has been written and documented, room for more examination. This includes the perspectives that influenced how and to what degree the US intervened. I am sure that I am not well versed in America's attitudes at the time.
However Mr. Burns blatant political bias revealed in this interview, and his tangling of the holocaust with today's current events left me wondering how much I could trust what he has included in the story. A shame really, that what could otherwise have been an important reveal of a different perspective on the holocaust, he chose to inject his world (US) view of the facts as he sees them. This is one of his documentaries that I plan to skip. And given what he revealed as his POV, I will watch his other documentaries with a more critical eye.
I wish you would interview Ruth Wisse who has a different perspective on the documentary (see _Why, Despite Good Intentions, Ken Burns’s "The U.S. and the Holocaust" Fails_ in Mosaic Magazine )
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2022/10/why-despite-good-intentions-ken-burnss-the-u-s-and-the-holocaust-fails
I guess we can give Burns credit for admitting he's a story teller, not a historian. Must be nice to be able to dismiss all those troubling facts and arguments that get in the way of a good story. ...Lord he was difficult to listen to but it served to shine a light on the left's thinking these days, not that it surprised me. So self aggrandizing and so dismissive of any accountability. So disappointing. And slippery, my God that man is slippery.
Bari: can you interview someone else to rebalance this discussion? I sensed that you wanted to push back harder but pulled your punches... I hope that is true..?
Burns' statement that the US government is murdering blacks today was especially infuriating.
The media too often conflates the really horrible ideas held by the Nazis, with their model of government, which we describe as fascism. Yes anti-semitism is horrible and it was practiced by Nazi fascists. It is also practiced by a fringe minority of white supremacists in this country; but they are not fascists. Idiots yes, fascists no. Fascism is a type of government in which several supposedly separate entities work together, “bundled” to a common purpose. Such actors include the state, the press, and corporations. By definition a minority faction of any sort cannot be fascist. Ironically, in this country, the organization that comes closest to fascism is the Democratic Party, in concert with the mainstream media and social media, and a significant number of “woke” corporations. Indeed it is only the republican minority that keeps these “democratic” authoritarians from running rough shod. See: the lockdowns following covid in blue states.
All this hand wringing about Trump and “right wing” conspiracy makes me puke. Bari should have pushed back against this garbage.
At about minute -14 Burns says: "When somebody disagrees with you and your fire them, ..." of what do you think. When I heard him say this I thought of cancel culture, the most powerful religious force in our society today. But not Burns, he thinks of someone fired for plausible cause by DeSantis. Perhaps Rebekkah Jones, fired in Florida for a history of violating DOH policy. Or perhaps Andrew Warren, the Tampa Bay prosecutor fired by DeSantis for ostentatious selective enforcement of the law. Of course, Burns vigorously promotes a partisan political agenda, it's obvious, and he's willing to twist history to support his agenda. I dramatically lowered my expectation that he's a remotely reliable documentarian.
Burns repeatedly trots out this tired trope that Trump rhymes with Hitler. I think that Trump rhymes better with the Gracchi brothers but your ear may hear things differently. More importantly, what is the most powerful authoritarian forces in our society? Take the anti-semitism on which his documentary focuses. Yes, we have some ridiculous white supremacists and we have the occasional (too frequent) white Nazi attacking a synagogue. But we also have frequent attacks on Jewish people by black haters aligned with the left, the Crown-Heights pogrom inflamed by the still popular Al Sharpton, and the casual anti-semitism of Ilhan Omar, a duly elected US Representative. Which source of anti-semitism is most powerful in our society today? In college classes some students still read Mein Kampf, do you think they read it with the same adulation and expectation of insight that they read the anti-semite writer James Baldwin? Who is more persuasive in modern America?
Alas, one could go on and on about the obvious failures of perception Burns demonstrated in the interview. Sadly, I now have to revisit my opinions about his other documentaries with my new much-lowered assessment of his capabilities.
Burns is not great with facts but he's an accomplished propagandist of the of left and sly anti-America proselytizer, his claims to love America notwithstanding. I found particularly grating Burns's lame attempt to connect current day Republicans to a nascent "holocaust" and his completely lunatic plunge to bring January 6th into the conversation. Bari should know better and her pandering to Burns's agenda is very discouraging. What is really amusing is his trashing of 1930s America as an anti-Semitic and racist backwater that supplied the Nazis with their lunatic theories. The fact that Coughlin had an audience is hardly evidence of an American kristallnacht because there was none. And the utter glossing over of the prejudices and inaction of Frankie D to even try to save European Jewry is truly comical How Roosevelt remains venerated by the majority of America Jews remains a mystery to me. A better and far more honest history of these sad times and Roosevelt's failure to take any meaningful effort to help the Jews - including the disgraceful SS St. Louis incident - is offered in Medoff's The Jews Should Keep Quiet.
“I’m just the storyteller, the onus is on you, the listener” just feels like a huge cop out. I knew what I would get before I hit play, I just wish Bari would have pushed back more. Perhaps she was just trying to avoid more random bizarre tangents about the state of Florida?
I just listened to this and so disappointed in Ken Burns and his inability to see the Holocaust as the realization of antisemitism and uniquely awful for Jews. His need to try and tie the Holocaust to his misrepresentation of Florida’s laws about teaching sexuality to young children and his repeated references to Fox News - just so awful. I have no words. This has completely changed my view of Burns and his work and how he seeks to promote his political agenda.