Yesterday I watched this BlacKKKlansman movie. What to say about it?
What is the KKK?Let’s go back to Sherlock Holmes stories. The old stuff is usually more reliable than the new on these type of issues. Arthur Conan Doyle published the story The Five Orage Pips in 1891. In this story a person receives a letter with five orange pips from the Ku Klux Klan. It is a reminder to the receiver that the KKK will revenge betrayal by death, and it did so in the story. That was Doyle’s image of the original Ku Klux Klan, which flourished between late 1860s and early 1870s. This KKK persecuted blacks and murdered people. Nothing positive to say about it.
The second KKK was was created in 1915 partially inspired by the movie The Birth of a Nation. This KKK was parading and burning crosses. The second KKK opposed blacks, Jews and Catholics. It had millions of members for a short time, but it died out in later 1920s.
Spike Lee’s movie BlacKkKlansmen (2018) is about the third and current KKK and especially of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK) which David Duke founded in 1975. In 1979 the KKKK had 1,500 members and 10,000 supporters. Next year there was a skism in the group and David Duke left the KKKK. Currently the KKKK has some hundred of members.
In 1979 a black police officer and detective, Ron Stallworth, infiltrated a newly established Colorado Springs chapter of KKKK in 1979. Stallworth published a book Black Klansman about it in 2014. The infiltration lasted seven months. It led to no arrests. The KKKK had established contacts with neo-Nazi groups and Sallworth did get information of a bomb attack in a gay bar that a Neo Nazi group was planning on doing, but as also that information did not lead to arrests or a realized bomb attack, the infiltration apparently did not reveal illegal activities.
David Duke’s KKKK did not advocate violence but other modern KKK groups did. In 1963 four KKK members bombed the Birmingham church killing four young black girls and in 1964 White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Missippi and Lousinana murdered three civil right activists. They also burned churches, made bomb attacks and were responsible for many beatings. In 1980s a neo-Nazi group The Order raised funds with armed robbery and performed terror strikes. Stallworth’s investigation on David Duke’s KKKK did not find illegal actions but the same cannot be generalized to the whole American far right.
The true story did not have the bomb attack that the movie includes. There also was no Jewish Flip Zimmerman. Ron Stillworth did contact the KKKK giving his own name and he did use a white detective with the name “Chuck” to contact the KKKK in person as Ron Stillworth, but Chuck was not Jewish, the KKKK members never pointed Chuck with a gun or put him into a lie detector. David Duke did not come to the town in a limousine accompined with Harley Davidson motorcycle gangsters. The initiation of a new member was not in a church but in a house of one of the members and Holy Water was not used, and the dinner after the initialtion was a much smaller event than in the movie.
I was a bit disappointed with this movie because of these deviations from the book: I would prefer stories that are based on true events also would follow the true events. In American movies this is usually not so, and for that reason these movies feel like propaganda.
So, what in reality happened? Ron Stillworth joined a newly established chapter of the KKKK. Apparently nothing illegal happened there as there were no arrests. Stillworth tells that the KKKK members were so stupid that they never noticed that there were two people acting as Ron Stillworth and though that these two people had quite different voices nobody noticed it. I would imagine that they probably did. The KKKK members understood that the chapter is being investigated by the police and they just allowed the investigation to proceed without finding anything. I would imagine it must be so since Stillworth had given his real name and the name and the address was in the telephone book. The KKKK could easily check who lived in the address, like they did in the movie. I think they did check and they did know that “Chuch” was a police infiltrator. In the end the KKKK proposed Ron Stillworth to be a leader of a chapter, which forced Stillworth to resign from the KKKK: it would not have been good publicity to have a police officer as a KKKK leader. A diplomatic ending to the infiltration attack. If it was like this it was one of the less successful infiltration operations.
But the movie has more action. In the movie there is a right wing crackpot who also is an anti-Semite and a holocaust denier. Of course, this holocaust denial issue had to be in the movie as David Duke is said to be a holocaust denier, but I simply refer to my calculations of the holocaust death toll in another category in this blog.
David Duke’s KKKK had connections with neo-Nazi groups. I think that neo-Nazis are quite wrong about Nazis and Hitler. There are enough arguments to conclude that Hitler wanted to move European Jews to Palestine, which fulfilled the Masonic goal, but as I have already written the agruments in another post they can be omitted here.
The movie also had a political goal: to oppose Donald Trump. David Duke supported Trump and Trump, like Duke, wanted to stop illegal immigration to the USA over the Mexican border. The movie presents everything as white racism, but large scale immigration is problematic. In early 1980s I lived in Sweden for a year or two. At that time Sweden was a nice peaceful country. Maybe they did not like Finns too much – and nothing wrong with that, there were some Finnish criminals, one Valjakka I remember – but they took a large number of refugees from Central and South America. I did not see any racism. It is different today. Swedes maybe did not so much like Finns so much at that time as Finns had been there already for some time and had created certain problems, though Finns and Swedes are fairly similar people. The refugees had not yet been there long enough, but after some time problems appear. Today some Swedes seem to be counting how many rapes have been done by foreign born men. It kind of reminds me of The Birth of a Nation. That is, these problems appear in countries that did not have the problems and it seems to be a general rule.
I have been reading The Unz Review and it looks like many American white men feel they are under an attack and they just want to protect their home. That is natural. In old times in Finland it a group of boys from a neighboring village came to catch the local girls, the local boys made a fight. Both groups were from the same race, quite closely related. That is natural. Mammals have the X,Y system of sex chromosomes. As Y is single, it easily accumulates deleterious mutations. One has to select the best males for breeding, or the population will face a mutational overload. Most mammals have some kind of male competition. Either they protect a territory, or their females, or the group. The closest human relatives protect a group, as they are social animals. Rabbits do not protect anybody. They use another strategy: multiply as fast as you can and their natural enemies kill the less fit. That is not any better system. So, we agree that you should have male competition in the X,Y system. Then you have this effort to stop the outsiders from breeding with the females, but it does not stop the best of them. Depending on the species it may be males who drive away the outside males. In species where females select, the male selection results to females being more discriminating of outsiders. It is so with humans. Men accept any partners, women have a strong preference to select a partner from the “own” group. I would not this natural mammalian mechanism racism as it is against any outsiders, even from the same race.
Is there something why this mechanism should discriminate more those who are more different? It does, but what is the evolutionary reason? The more different behave differently. Wolfs kill dogs, though dogs derive from wolfs. It is because dogs have lost the behavior patterns. Therefore the more different is more unpredictable and for that reason dangerous.
There seems to be also an ecomonic reason against immigrants from the third world. It is something like that if the population turns to a similar mixture as is seen in Latin America then the economy would also become similar. This is based on some Lynn-Vanhanen argument that there is a positive correlation with the average IQ and the GDP. The argument may be to some extent true and it is called racistic.
Calling everything racistic is incorrect. It may be quite fine to make fun of the KKK and the Nordic Aryan blood, and Afro-Americans have the right to do so as they were brought to the USA as slaves. They have every reason to hate white supremacy, and at some point there was white supremacy of the colonial powers. But many things are grouped together to white supramism though they are not any supremism. I think that the movie mixed up many issues. There are these Hitler loving skins who would like to kill all minorities, and then there are quite understandable arguments why globalization may not be good. What is happening today is a reaction to a plan that is being pushed through, and this plan is just another stage of the same very bad plan. The script of the movie falsified facts and tried to tie together things that are not the same. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film that is not propaganda. This ranked about to the same level as The Birth of a Nation.