[stainlessbanner]

Comments?

if you want on/off the list, just FReepmail : )

[lentulusgracchus]

When one of those historians, Barbara J. Fields, is asked today to describe how she judges the film's historical success, she uses the word "dissatisfaction." Fields, a Southern historian at Columbia University, captured a nation's imagination with her on-camera eloquence, repeatedly asserting the central role of slavery and emancipation in the war and its legacy.

Well, her comments are more evenhanded than the "four legs good, two legs bad" school we've been hearing from the McPherson defenders, but the emphasis on "liberation" and anti-slavery is essentially the Marxian influence again.

Burns had it right -- the Civil War was far too large to get one's arms around with a couple of theses. That kind of self-interested, dumbed-down didacticism is precisely the mung that the Left spreads on history, obscuring and disfiguring it just the way centuries of Catholic orthodoxy obscured and distorted the history of the Catharist movement in France.

[Twodees]

"We, as filmmakers, had no set agenda," Burns wrote in answer to his critics. "We felt that slavery was bad, George McClellan timid, but that the rest of the war, North and South, male and female, black and white, civilian and military, was a vast and complicated family drama."

Malarkey. Burns has to go into every one of his projects hamstrung by his own Marxist views. He starts his "The Civil War" as a Lincoln worshipping commie and advances that view above every other all through the overblown production.

A successful Ken Burns without PBS would be impossible. He's a talentless turd who needs government money to survive.