Image of the Day

(FinalCall.com)
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln opened last week, and many have flocked
to see this Hollywood version of one of the nation’s most tumultuous
times the American Civil War. The film purports to recount the last months
of the life of Abraham Lincoln as he lobbied to achieve the passage of the
13th Amendment to the Constitution, which is said to have ended legal
slavery in America—at least on paper.
Spielberg is the master of American propaganda, and there is no one
since the notorious director D.W. Griffith who has more successfully
exported to the world a utopian vision of America as a Caucasian paradise.
And while his White characters—from Jaws to ET to Amistad—show a
range of virtues, his Black characters have been limited to cardboard
portrayals of simplistic and racially clichéd stereotypes.
This is the inescapable context with which one must approach
Spielberg’s Lincoln, a film that is no more accurate in its depiction of a
critical period in history than George Bush was about the so-called
weapons-of-mass-destruction lie that brought a world of nations to endless
war.
First, let us take a couple of paragraphs to dispose of some wellentrenched
historical myths. No war in the 6,600-year history of the White
man has ever been fought for the benefit of Blacks—never has happened
and never will. If the North fought to “free the slaves,” then why did the
war start with the slaveholding South attacking the Union at Fort Sumter?