It’s Time to Lose the Lost Cause

Don’t miss Tom Hanks’ latest, in which he plays a “doggedly heroic” former Nazi officer who rescues an abducted child whose Jewish protector has been lynched and a “No Jews: This is white man’s country”” sign affixed to his shirt. 

Just kidding.  Of course Tom Hanks isn’t cast as a Nazi.  In "News of the World," he plays a former Confederate officer.  The lynching victim is a Black man charged with delivering the abducted child.  The sign in the movie reads: “Texas says no . . .This is white man’s country”.

One reviewer called the plot of “a daring move in a politically correct world.”  I call it the latest example of pro-Confederate Lost Cause propaganda.   This insidiously effective disinformation campaign has been in successful operation for some 150 years.  It is responsible for many of American culture’s most persistent and malign untruths, promoting  nostalgia for a past that never was.  

The Germans came to reject their horrific Nazi past, although it took a generation or so. They were made to feel shame at what had happened, by the international community and ultimately by their own children.  Today you would not find a beloved German actor playing a sympathetic ex-Nazi in a German film.  Americans need to make the equivalent and long overdue cultural shift.