Saw this in a New York Times piece about philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger’s place in academia and thought it was interesting.
In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D.W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of his own beliefs. While he doesn’t dispute Heidegger’s place in the intellectual pantheon, Mr. Faye reviews his unpublished lectures and concludes his philosophy was based on the same ideas as National Socialism.
Seems a number of scholars are after having Heidegger’s work reconsidered as hate speech instead of philosophy, and reclassified as such in libraries and university classes. So, is Heidegger’s work philosophy or is it hate speech? That’s a fair question, but I’m more curious as to why D.W. Griffith should be exempt. Griggith’s best known film, The Birth of a Nation, is, after all, an explicit glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Why is it separable from the creator’s politics and not Heidegger’s philosophy? Is it because it’s film and not literature? Or is the argument that Heidegger has contaminated other discourses in ways that the The Birth of a Nation has not? I find that hard to believe, given the history of racism in American film.
The Birth of a Nation hinges on one scene where a white Southern Belle by the name of Flora throws herself off a mountainside to avoid rape by the black soldier Gus, which would be, as the title card puts it, “a fate worse than death.” This scene initiates several similar scenes of sexual terror as blacks threaten to overrun Southern whites. Fathers stand ready to murder their daughters rather than let them be taken by the blacks, etc. It’s not a real subtle message: e.g., racial cleansing by groups like the Klan is necessary to save white woman from defilement by bestial blacks. And the Klan does, wiping the screen free of blacks.
What’s interesting about the scene is not how racist it is, but that it became a film staple, resonating with white audiences for nearly eighty years. It was pilfered by Philip Dunne, who penned the 1936 film adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, Last of the Mohicans, with the white Munro daughter Cora hurling herself off a cliff to avoid captivity by Magua, and the message was no less clear. Nor was the message any muddier in Michael Mann’s 1992 adaptation, which was almost entirely lifted from Philip Dunne’s screenplay:
Meaning, this one scene, wherein white women must tragically forfeit their own lives to escape rapacious brown-skinned savages was repeated for nearly a century. A century in which thousands of black people and, lest we forget, American Indians, were killed in the name of defending white women’s virtue.
How is that different?
For that matter, how is James Fenimore Cooper’s book different? Granted, Cora doesn’t throw herself off a mountain in the novel, but the depiction of American Indians – all but two of them, anyway – as bloodthirsty, rapacious savages is just as clear, and this at a time when extermination policies were being enacted throughout the United States for just those reasons. Or, if not Cooper, how about his contemporary Robert Montgomery Bird? Or how’s about vehement Indian Hater, Mark Twain? Or, avowed exterminationist, L. Frank Baum? Or the father of American history, Francis Parkman, who explicitly advocated genocide in defense of the white race? Or his acolyte, Teddy Roosevelt who did the same? Should each of their works be reclassified?
If not, why not?
Update: You can watch Philip Dunn’s Last of the Mohicans in it’s entirety on Hulu. The cliff jump occurs about 1:11:10.
Update II: Usually in Hollywood Indian Hating movies there’s some complex hierarchy of subtle visual motifs by which one can, when equipped with the proper theoretical tools, discriminate between good Indians and bad Indians. One of the things I like best about Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans is it makes it easy for the viewer: good Indians wear shirts; bad Indians don’t.
