Isn’t most cultural/societal change mob appeasement. Get a large enough loud enough group to pressure companies and politicians into changing policy. Gone With the Wind is hardly the first movie with a historical revisionist backdrop to receive criticism. But like you said, GWTW is one of the greatest/famous pieces of american cinema… seems like an awfully appropriate place to focus attention, right?
Also, i don’t see the problem with being reminded and remaining cognizant of our countries horrifically racist past… Especially when a romanticized version of that past is presented as a context and backdrop for a story plot line.
This is an interesting concept to think about, but I don’t think it is. It only applies to the kind of changes that can stand in the light of day and be accepted over time by the entire mob. Don’t treat people like shit because they’re gay or black, for instance. This still seems like a very, very popular idea to me, but we’re now being told that it’s not. MLK was wrong about judging on the Content of Character. It turns out skin color is a really big deal again.
Truly shitty ideas need to get shoved down people’s throats whether they like it or not, and that’s why you need a credible threat to remind people that you mean business. That’s what the Red Guard was, a bunch of young students wrapped up in their own excitement and belief that they were unerringly right in everything they were doing, even as they were cynically exploited by people in power who did not share their human concerns at all.
Woke-splaining classic cinema probably isn’t a very popular idea. Maybe it is and I’m out-of-touch, but I don’t think whatever HBO comes up with would end up polling well if you asked most people if it adds to their viewing experience or kept them safe in any way whatsoever. Maybe HBO knocks it out of the park, who knows?
“I was ready to lynch my black neighbor by the end of the film, but the person from HBO explained why that was bad.”
This is just another way in which our American Red Guard trying to sprout wings. An expected outgrowth of the ideology that continues to increase its hold. HBO can bend the knee in this easy way and hopefully stay out of the woke path of destruction for a relatively small capital investment in high-end virtue signalling.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
Getting way off-topic in the stupid thread, but the last American citizen to be collecting a Civil War pension just died the other week. Her father fought for both sides of the war and she died in 2020. Crazy.
Hasn’t american society evolved to become much more tolerant over time? Or is this argument that intolerance of intolerance has led to the to ever increasing tolerance?
Any societal change - positive or negative - is driven by a stubborn vocal minority that is intolerant of opposing views. Eventually, they prevail because for the majority it’s easier to accommodate them. The article is worth a read.
Over the long term society either accepts the change, like getting rid of slavery and granting equal protection under the law, or not, like alcohol prohibition.
Meaning in the USA. We’ve trended in a good direction for almost our entire history, in my opinion. Lots of self-correcting behavior over just a few short lifetimes.
We will, won’t we? There’s a lot of momentum with some really fringe ideas right now, an interesting time for sure.
Still, none of this mayhem has made its way out of our de-facto safe spaces for mayhem. Lots of bark but I’m not so sure how much bite these guys have. It’s almost like the rioting’s only good when the rioting is easy.
Agreed. Wouldn’t you say though that a lot of this has been strongly influenced by those who “upset the apple cart” or advocated against the status quo?
I don’t buy that we would have just magically got where we are now in racism, women’s rights, gay rights, etc because we just magically trend in the right way with no prodding. No I think it’s taken active and consistent efforts by groups of people who have often been vilified or harmed for those stances to sway that public opinion.
Yes, sorry if I wasn’t clear. I think the article loppar linked explains a lot of this well, and I agree with the concept of an “intolerant minority” changing the way a system operates via intolerance. This can work in every direction you can imagine, but over time that change is either swallowed or spit out unless you force it on people somehow.
That’s what the KKK keeps trying to do, light that spark of change. They just suck at it because their ideas suck, nobody likes them and I can’t even name one person in the organization today, they’re that insignificant. They have no power because of the slow (but actually very rapid, historically-speaking) march of society that started with people bitching about slavery at some point LONG before we fought our deadliest war to end it as an institution endorsed by the law of the land.
It is hard to imagine many other organizations with more social stigma attached to it aside from flying a Nazi flag. Yet our society is racist to the core somehow?
Compare the KKK to BLM, which is also a race-based political organization with race-based policy goals stated in plain English. Here’s my local BLM’s demands. I’d be happy to engage anyone from th is organization in a respectful debate where I make my case, in as polite of terms as I can muster, of why their ideas suck too.
I realize that makes me a racist, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay for not being a coward.
