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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   2395 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.

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.

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