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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.
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.
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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.
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