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In reply to the discussion: "Gone With the Wind" pulled from HBO Max library for now [View all]thucythucy
(8,069 posts)it was done by the writers of GWTW and their contemporaries.
David Blight's, "Race and Reunion" is an excellent exposition of how the actual history of the Civil War and Reconstruction was all but suppressed by southern apologists, beginning almost immediately after the war ended. By the 1940s the genuine story of Reconstruction--including the white terrorism that essentially re-enslaved emancipated blacks--had been totally expunged, not only from mainstream media, but from most every library and private bookshelf. The actual causes of the war--and the brutality of white supremacy--were misrepresented to such an extent that popular historians such as Bruce Catton swallowed it all hook line and sinker. That's a genuine instance of "the re-writing of history" which wasn't challenged--except by a very few black scholars--until well into the 1960s, a good hundred years of communal amnesia.
And GWTW is hardly in danger of being tossed down a memory hole. Unlike the actual history of racism in this country, which in fact HAS been suppressed. The consequences of said suppression are manifest today in how African Americans continue to be treated by society in general, and white cops in particular.
I see GWTW as a high budget, glossy piece of white supremacist propaganda. I place it in the same category as "Birth of a Nation," "Triumph of the Will" and "The Eternal Jew." I wouldn't want government to take measures to suppress any of these slanders, but I sure as hell don't mind if they aren't offered as "entertainment" by major media outlets such as HBO.