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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2389 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I just watched The Birth of a Nation (1915). Despite having a shredded attention span for movies typically, I found it pretty compelling and surprisingly watched it in just a few sittings (same thing I found with the Napoleon silent epic from the 1920s which was even longer). Just great expressive acting, scored well, with a story that flowed at a solid pace (and from a perspective that I can imagine inhabiting, but hadn't seen before). And I can guess how especially impressive some of it was for the time. Though the actors playing mulatto characters were maybe hamming it up too much as the villains, and seemed like they thought they were in a different movie (or maybe the director really wanted to sell that angle).

Given our forum members here, does anyone know of any heterodox witchy takes about the KKK? Are most people fairly accurate in seeing them as shallow dumb racist terrorists, lashing out while hiding their identities in cowardice? Or is that more like history being written by winners, where there was actually more to engage with, some higher theory of mind, like what this movie is trying to portray (revenge, fighting back, or maybe even beyond that)? Back in the day I had the basic high school AP US history, but apparently everything between the civil war and the great depression didn't make a lasting impression, because I find myself really not knowing anything about reconstruction, 'radical republicans', etc. In general I find that time period pretty interesting & appealing, with Monet impressionism, Dostoevsky & Arthur Conan Doyle books, and post-civil-war-set Westerns being most interesting. Just have no idea about the US South vs North around then I guess.

Or failing that, does anyone have any movie recommendations in any similar vein? I used to think of silent movies being mostly slapstick comedies which weren't even that funny, but these two epics I mentioned were great. Or related to this movie in other ways, I tried watching Gone With the Wind and Triumph of the Will, but got bored of both after 10-20 minutes (will give them another shot at some point). The 2012 spielberg Lincoln movie was great too, for DDL acting, and it seems like the Tommy Lee Jones character was rehabilitating the similar character in Birth.

Minor Heterodox take: The KKK mostly did nothing. They're just a particularly famous kind of Elks At their peak there were fewer than 200 lynchings annually in the USA, at its peak the Klan had eight million members.

Most Klan members never lynched anyone, or probably ever attended a lynching. They never saw, as it were, combat.

Can you name any other organizations that get close to 200 murders a year?

By your standard, most organizations mostly do nothing. They prefer legally and socially defensible activities like fundraising and complaining on Twitter. The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.

The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.

Which would be the normal framing of the Klan in history and pop culture! As an outright criminal gang, dedicated primarily to violence against black people. If you asked MoPs for historical peer organizations for the KKK, you'd probably get a lot of the Mafia, the IRA, Crips and Bloods, MS13, maybe Al Qaeda or ISIS. You typically wouldn't get a lot of comparisons to the Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Optimists Club, BSA Order of the Arrow, Knights of Columbus, the Campfire Girls. ((FWIW, the best comparison is probably the Black Panthers))

The former, on a murders-by-membership basis, typically run pretty close to even, if you say you're in La Cosa Nostra or a Cartel or in Al Qaeda I expect you to have been involved directly in acts of violence over the course of your career. The same could not be said of the typical KKK member: taking 200 as our upper bound (assuming KKK involvement in every lynching) and even taking a crazy number like 100 Klansmen involved in every lynching, that's only 20,000 Klansmen if they all only participate in one lynching. Over a ten year period, that's only 200,000 Klansmen who were actually involved in a lynching, as against 8,000,000 Klansmen nationally. Your modal Klansmen never lynched anyone. They may have participated in other, smaller scale violence, but that's a lot harder to track. By comparison, the Cartel membership estimates vs body count runs close to 1% a year; if the Klan ran that high at its peak we would have been seeing 70,000 lynchings a year.

Of course, the Masons aren't an entirely apt comparison on this basis, I would expect that most years the Masons have zero associated murders. But the experience of the average Klansman was probably closer to that of the average Mason than to that of the average Mafiosi.

I agree that cartels and international terrorists are bad comparisons. I’m trying to say that the Elks are also a terrible comparison.

The gap between “zero” and “200” is huge! There is a categorical difference between a club that refuses minorities and one that occasionally goes out and kills them pour encourageur les autres. Not incidental protests turned violent, not even organized patrols spoiling for a fight, but actual, premeditated murder. Putting them in the same category as some xenophobic philanthropists is doing the latter a disservice.

Hezbollah, the Muslim brotherhood, and the longshoreman’s union do extralegal violence. All of them have lots of members dedicated to the organizations other functions and not involved in personally doing terrorism.

I'm focused on the experience of joining and participating in the Klan for the average Klansman. Who never murdered anyone, though he probably approved of it pour encourager les autres.

The second wave of the klan(the one everyone actually remembers) actually did a lot of things, but there’s lots of actions short of lynching to engage in- from intimidation campaigns to beatings and vandalism.

The Invisible Empire did a lot more bake sales than beatings, and a lot more local parades than lynchings, and a lit a lot more grills than they did crosses. They were much closer on any given day to the Elks than to Al Qaeda, their existence and traditions and activities basically resemble that of any other fraternity, with the occasional addition of violence.

Their existence nevertheless suggested the existence of a vast body of white men willing to engage in racialized violence, but they didn't actually engage in it all that often.

A lot of their violence wasn't racialized. The klan believed it was a guardian of historic American protestant morality(in the process of shifting due to the first sexual revolution) and did a lot of busybodying.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

I would say the second Klan was more anti-Catholic than anti-Black. By the time the second Klan was founded in 1915 the racial issue had basically been won by the racists, Jim Crow was firmly in place, and there was no need for an extralegal anti-Black organisation similar to the first Klan. The strongest second Klan state organisation was in Indiana, where there were no Blacks to oppress.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

We're already seeing a much more nuanced Klan than we get in the average portrayal.

  • My grandparents grew up under segregation(albeit towards the tail end). They’re glad it changed, and don’t remember the rules having done anything good(or having been very strictly enforced in the general case). I have little nice to say about Jim Crow.

  • Reconstruction was an actual military occupation(this is what happens when you lose a war). The south was factually invaded and occupied and union troops factually treated southern civilians as enemies. Arbitrary measures to humiliate and break southern society were imposed- such as a ban on speaking French in public in parts of Louisiana. Union imposed governments were incompetent, corrupt, and full of radicals who didn’t particularly care how their ideas worked in practice. There is a reason the radical republicans were overthrown in coups which then wrote constitutions which were racist but mostly limited the governments ability to function. The Texas constitution has(literally) been amended over 500 times because it was such a mess. Granted, lots of these amendments are the sorts of policy changes that should be normal legislative matters, but that’s partly because the constitution requires it. Another way of saying this is that patching the constitutional restrictions on acting like a normal government required more words in constitutional amendments than in the actual constitution.

  • Perhaps related to this, the south was a low-state-capacity society for most of the solid south period; in low state capacity societies you get vigilante groups and secret societies with radical ideologies and those groups have actual supporters. Many Islamist groups in middle eastern shitholes are a present day example but the second wave of the klan definitely was one themselves; for all their racism a lot of the people they hanged were actual criminals that deserved it and in the roaring 20s KKK patrols regularly administered beatings to people who transgressed social norms, old school policeman style. Much less is known about the first wave of the klan but vigilantism has a long history in the south; the republic of Texas had a civil war over the issue and veterans of that war would have still been alive during reconstruction.

Interesting, thanks. Yeah the wiki article on Reconstruction era referred to "the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States into the United States" and various laws & amendments being passed nationally, which sounded like what I remembered. But what stood out was looking up what marked the end, the supposed compromise of 1877, simply being when federal troops were pulled out (so it was all an 'era' characterized by gunpoint).

Union imposed governments were incompetent, corrupt, and full of radicals who didn’t particularly care how their ideas worked in practice.

That's the wild part to me, which I somehow never learned or got through osmosis. I always had the connotation of 'carpetbagger' as economic opportunist, northern capitalists coming down to make a buck, a la 'shock doctrine'. Never knew that apparently northern white & black republicans literally went south and became congressmen & governors for a decade. The people who would actually pack up and move to a southern city to try to run/organize politics and government -- that's a mindset I'd also like to see portrayed from the flipside. If it was something other than a naked power grab, I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.

Much less is known about the first wave of the klan but vigilantism has a long history in the south

I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights. Then the revival in the 20s after this movie came out seems a lot more like a fanclub secret society, either larping or wanting more agency of 'you can just do stuff'. Admittedly, the movie poster artwork does look fairly badass, and makes me want to play dark souls or something.

I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.

Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed...

The difference between how reconstruction was taught to me in school in my state-mandated Texas history class and how it was taught in my American history class is striking; while the radical republicans can certainly be portrayed sympathetically, they were undoubtedly a disaster in practice.

I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights

Maybe a little bit, but what is known is that they were fairly explicitly using the robes and titles to try to convince freemen that their white former masters had magic powers- and it actually worked. The robes were intended to look like the ghosts of confederate soldiers(and had the added benefit of concealing accoutrements for magic tricks) and the wizards were supposedly their masters who summoned them.

The south in the nineteenth century was not a very literate or scientifically minded society, and black slaves were more superstitious than most. A lot of the theater has very different effects on us than it did on illiterate, unfree subsistence farmers who unironically believe in witches- it’s plausible that although Islamist movements are a better metaphor for the second wave of the klan(and it’s underdiscussed the extent to which the 20’s era klan saw themselves as a bastion of white Protestant morality being eroded by the then-ongoing first sexual revolution, for which they blamed foreign influence), the oprikhniki is a decent analogue for the first wave.

This, along with the numerous references to confederate relatives, has left me wondering if Scooby Doo was inspired by the KKK. They were literally Scooby Doo villains, disguising themselves as ghosts to scare people away.

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