← Independent Americans with Paul Rieckhoff
Independent Americans with Paul Rieckhoff
313. Ken Burns Replay. The Master Documentarian on Extremism in America, Ukraine, The Importance of The Midterms, Doing a Film on Iraq & Afghanistan, His Dog Chester.
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying your Festivus, your Hanukkah and your Christmas and whatever else you're doing. Here is a special replay of one of our favorite episodes for 2024. Look for new episodes in 2025 and check out more at IndependentAmericans US. You can also follow us on every platform and get video on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays and thanks for being a part of this movement. Stay vigilant. Ladies and gentlemen, Independent Americans around the country and around the world. Election season is here and we are in the middle of so many important issues colliding in America and around the world. And I am very happy, honored, and privileged to bring to you maybe the guest that I am most excited to have Joining us in 195 episodes, a man I have been privileged to know, a man whose work I admire. The great and powerful Ken Burns is here with us on Independent Americans. Welcome, sir.
- [01:06]
B
Thank you, Paul. It's great to be with you.
- [01:10]
A
It's so great to see you via Zoom. I think the last time I saw you in person was at one of the premieres for the Vietnam documentary.
- [01:17]
B
Right. So that's 2017. So we've got a lot of catching up to do.
- [01:20]
A
Absolutely. And I'm really looking forward to it. What is Halloween like for Ken Burns? What do you dress up as? How was your Halloween, and what was that week like for you?
- [01:31]
B
You know, I have four daughters, the youngest of whom is 12. The oldest is 40. So Halloween is beginning to recede. It's never been a favorite of mine, except when I was in college. I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in the early 70s. And we kind of invented Halloween. You know, we had, at that point, Halloween was just kids going out and maybe some teenagers causing some. Some tricking. But we invented the whole party thing and made Halloween, I think, like the second biggest holiday on the thing. But I was actually working. I live in rural New Hampshire. You know, I didn't turn the lights off, but nobody stopped by. Our editing house is down off the town green. And if we had been working, we would have had the lights on and bowls of candy out. But I was just, you know, up here in the loft of my barn in my, you know, my Covid protection zone. We're just working on the various seven films that we've got going.
- [02:26]
A
But one of the many connections you and I have is you've been very generous in sharing your connections and experience at Hampshire. Especially last year when I was teaching down the street at Amherst. And I always remember Halloween at Hampshire was very special. There was a party they used to have called Trip or Treat, which was a very uniquely Hampshire thing.
- [02:46]
B
Yes, it was. And I have one daughter that's applying to Hampshire. So I don't want to talk anymore. I don't want to give her too many ideas in advance of what happens.
- [02:56]
A
Well, I think the history of that area may guide our conversation. I'm hoping we can talk about your latest work, about what you've got coming up about this moment in America, the new PBS documentary that I think is a must watch for everybody in America, in the world, your new book. But just to kick us off a little bit further, Ken, a question I do ask everybody. Where are you in America and how are you?
- [03:21]
B
I'm in Walpole, New Hampshire, where I have lived for the last 43 and a half years. I fled New York thinking that becoming a documentary filmmaker in American history was a vow of anonymity and poverty. I'm happy that they haven't turned out. But the great smart thing that I've done, probably the smartest thing I've done, was to stay here and to work and give the kind of insulation these deep dives into history require. I'm in a barn that I built in 2012 that we use for screenings. And they're in place of horse stalls. We have bedrooms for visiting producers and advisors. And in Covid, I left my office where I had several other co workers just to thin things out and moved up here. And besides my kitchen table in the house where I've slept for 43 years and where my first two daughters were born, in my bedroom at my kitchen table, I do a lot of work and I do a lot of work here. We have zoom editing sessions and mix, even mixing sessions, and a lot of stuff I'm doing well. I had a very productive time. I know a lot of people went crazy. I still get in a lot of work with Chester, who is trying to be a polar bear on an iceberg, but a golden doodle that I've had for nearly eight years. And he and I do lots of walking out in nature, but I've been able to work and get a lot of done films done, in fact, more films in a short period of time than any time in my professional life, which is sort of crazy to be 69 and being engaged in more stuff than ever before. But I. I love it. I love it.
- [04:56]
A
Well, you continue to be amazingly productive. It's no surprise that Chester looks tired just trying to keep up with you.
- [05:01]
B
You've already done five miles today.
- [05:03]
A
So for folks that maybe haven't watched the show on YouTube, I recommend you check it out because you'll get a look inside of Ken's loft. You'll get to see Chester behind him. Ken, we're, we're a week away from the election. Every election is framed as the most important election of our, of our lifetime. Using your unique and powerful vantage point, can you zoom out and help us understand this moment, not just the election, but all of it, coming together with global affairs, with extremism, with this election, with COVID with the. How do you frame up this moment we're experiencing now in American history?
- [05:42]
B
Well, let me be boringly redundant and say that this is the most important election. I think right now. I felt that two years ago and at various other stages, you could say in 1864, when Lincoln was reelected, when it thought he wouldn't, that a country tired of war would elect his Democratic opponent, his former general who he had fired McClellan and turned out most of the, you know, the US army voted for their commander in chief and not their ex general who took pretty good care of them but never engaged them and, and, and sort of lost a. That was important. Lots of other really, really critical stuff. But, but let me just tell you by way of what I've been doing. In September we released a film, a three part six and a half hour series miniseries called the US and the Holocaust. It was scheduled for 2023, comfortably doing it about a year and a half ago. I looked at my co directors, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, and by the way, you know, everything you like about our films are the people who work on it. If you don't like them, it's all my fault. And I just said, we got to accelerate this. We have to be part of the conversation. Because everything that was going on then in the decades leading up to the 1930s, you know, anti immigration sentiment, xenophobia, nativism, racism, anti Semitism had been on the rise. There had been this flirtation with a pseudoscience called eugenics that believe that there is a hierarchy of races that people that, you know, very famous, very good people subscribe to, which is bunk. People like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were promoting at various times unbelievably racist, anti Semitic tropes. And the country therefore was not in a position to want to help the Jews trying to flee Nazi terror. As it developed over the 30s and then as it segued into what we now call the Holocaust, we knew it what was going on. It's not like, oh, we liberated the concentration camps in 45. And then we discovered to our horror what was going on. We Knew There were 3,000 articles in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power in late January alone about discrimination against the Jews. And then it only got worse. But you know, the spirit of the people was steeped in anti Semitism. The Congress had passed a hugely restrictive immigration law in the 1920s that had quotas. They didn't mention Jews or Catholics, but they specifically had small quotas for those countries that had large Catholic or Jewish populations and big quotas for northern European, white, Protestant. Hitler would say Aryan Nations. And so there's, you know, when we began the project in 2015, there were of course, as every film we've made, lots of rhymes, as Mark Twain would say with the present. By the time we were halfway through editing, every sentence was rhyming and not in the right way. And so we, we wanted to get it out because we are at a critical moment. One of the characteristics of that period was a, a movement toward authoritarianism. We're seeing it here. You know, playbooks of people follow the authoritarian playbook. You, you make an a them of somebody, you, other people. Jews have had the longest experience of that because until 1948 there were people without a country for a few a couple of millennia. And that, that has made them an easy scapegoat. We know clearly our own history of the extermination and the isolation into reservations of our native population, something Hitler admired and he admired Reid Immigration act that limited restriction. And the Germans studied our Jim Crow laws to fashion their anti Jewish discriminatory law. So we're not responsible for the Holocaust, but it's a reckoning we have to have. And I think people forget. And Jefferson warns us in the Declaration, he says, you know, that people are willing to suffer tyrannies while evils are sufferable. He writes, meaning, look guys, this new thing, democracy or a republic is going to take effort, extra work. And what we find in a media culture like today, with all the lying and the places where you can hide and self select your news, there's a kind of laziness develops. And you know, as they used to say, now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. We need to be fact based. We need to understand what the truth is. We need to try to say that certain things like antisemitism, hanging banners from highway overpasses in Los Angeles and Jacksonville or Hacking into Jumbotrons in Jacksonville with anti Semitic tropes or having an ex president promote some of those things are not right. That the violence that is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, the way they scare you is not right. The making of other. Look, I've made films about the US for almost 50 years. I've also made films about us. Paul, that's the lowercase two letter plural pronoun. And I can tell you it's a great privilege to do that. All of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction and even the controversy of the United States. But what I've learned was that there's only us, there's no them. And when anyone tells you there's a them, you gotta run away. It's like the people who are most afraid of immigrants don't have any contact with immigrants. And the people who are most in contact with immigrants wholly understand that they enrich us. Just the way many metals make a much stronger ally alloy. And if you want to go back to some singular thing, you have weakened what is great about the United States. So this is as, as real and as important as it gets. And at the heart of it is not even all these separate issues and discriminations and stuff, it's just what do you believe, one plus one equals two or something else? Because we are being told, and lots of people are believing that, that you know, one plus one is 14, you know, and they're living their lives in that the shadow of this disinformation, which is part and parcel of the beginning of the decline of any institution. And so the things we have counted on in the three great crises that, that preceded this crisis now, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II, that is to say the free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, the independence of the judiciary, are all up for grabs right now. So this is what makes this a critical moment. And nearly all of my films have addressed the complexity of the United States, the contradictions even, but still celebrated its exceptionalism. If you still want that exceptionalism, you want to be the greatest country on earth, you avoid the nativist, the anti Semitic, the racist, the xenophobic tropes that are now all around us and helping to fuel these completely ridiculous conspiracies. I heard that the last president President said that Paul Pelosi's windows had been broken from the outside in. As if again you could just throw the false flag thing into the midst and disrupt it. And if we're that susceptible or the person who's purchased Twitter is, is willing to suggest that there's an alternative fact having to do with male prostitutes. You know, we're in a big trouble if suddenly that isn't just shouted down as in the, in, in the lead up to World War II, Charles Lindbergh, our great hero, second only in fame to the president Franklin Roosevelt, crossed the line with anti Semitic tropes in Des Moines one evening in giving an America first. America first. You can't make this stuff up. And, and he, and finally everybody said, no more. Right? You know, the voice is Lindbergh's, the words are Hitler's is what people said. And Ken disappeared.
- [13:46]
A
This is why we needed to hear from you now to frame all that up. But another constant theme of everything you do is national security and global security. And that's something we've always focused on in this show and I think is kind of a piece of this that folks underestimate. So given your deep understanding of national security threats, can you frame up this extremism we're seeing now versus extremism we've seen in the past? How severe is this as a national security threat?
- [14:17]
B
So it's hugely important because it used to be the trope was that everybody's partisanship ended at the border and then we sort of share, shared a vast middle of how we related to the rest of the world. You could argue in the case of Vietnam, we're not going to police here, we shouldn't be policing there. And people, reasonable people can disagree. But now you have a situation where you have one of the most threatening entities in China in both our business world, but in our national security. And you have people who are admiring the dictatorship of Xi in China. More importantly and more immediately is of course, what's going on in Ukraine. And you have the speaker, the possible future speaker of the House, saying, you know, this is not a slam dunk for supporting Ukraine now. What we have done is we have reunited the NATO alliance, which has had its own stresses and strains over the years, and the last president did his best to undermine it in support of dictators like Putin and Viktor Orban. But in Hungary, and they have, Italy has just switched to a far right government. There's lots of stresses in Britain and in France and other places. Sweden just had that. But we've been able to hold it together, understanding that by stopping the Russian aggression in this. And by the way he is referring to Putin, is referring to the Ukrainians as fascists, which is unbelievably orwellian and it's disinformation, because, of course, they have a Jewish president, and they've done magnificently, and we have been. And one of the reasons they've done magnificently and the great anxiety, I believe, not just in the United States, but in the world, is if we create another vacuum of leadership, as we had between 2017 and 2021, that we will lose the momentum that we've gained in so many places, the ability, as we've always been able to do, to muster a kind of democratic spirit of things. And if you are now having people throughout the country, from dog catcher, president of the United States, talking about, well, maybe it's democracy's not the way, we're in big, big, big trouble. This, you know, Franklin said at the end of the Constitutional Convention, you know, when asked, what have you created, a monarchy or a republic? He said, a republic, if you can keep it. And 246 years, it's never really been, even during the Civil War, whether you could keep it. Right. Because all of those institutions, like free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power and independence of the judiciary would just kind of. Yeah. And there have been cr. And people have been discriminated. African Americans have had a wholly different experience on this continent than anybody else, even different slightly than the Native American people having been slaves, enslaved in a supposedly free country. If you have an experience of being unfree in a free land, man, you have to improvise even more than Americans already improvised. So we've got a complicated moment right now that we have to address, and the stresses are from outside and from inside. And I think we have to go back to where we used to be, where a vast middle, whether it was Republican or Democrat, understood national security issues, understood domestic stuff, and could come together like the Civil Rights Act. A lot of Republicans voted for it when a lot of Southern Democrats did not. And that made that possible. And now you have ideologues appointed to the Supreme Court who are undoing the sort of fundamental improvements that were made to the flawed nature of our republic. So, you know, we don't want to go backwards. And the idea that you could go backwards is regressive in every sense of that word.
- [18:09]
A
Ken, you've covered so many things I wanted to get to over the course of this interview. And you're weaving it all together in a way that maybe only converts can. And I want to pull out one part of it. I want to come back to the division in America. This is independent Americans. I want to get your thoughts on the Political dynamics and the opportunity for moderation and independence and unaffiliated. Before we get to that, I want to stay on Ukraine. Ukraine for a second. Because you're such a. You're the master storyteller. What is the story of Ukraine right now? Because for us, I think for me, and for many other veterans especially, it almost feels like Ukraine is more American than America is right now. And it's got this spirit that's galvanizing and motivating the world. But how would you describe the story of Ukraine right now?
- [18:50]
B
Yeah, I think that's it. It's a really good way to describe it, Paul. It's a David and Goliath. And we presume, going into the battle, you know, we've somehow just in the last few years. I think it's because of the way the NFL has capitulated completely to the gambling industry that we. Everything is in odds, right? So the odds of David versus Goliath are, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna not even take the points, you know, whatever that means. And here they are, and they have, effectively, even before we started, come in, checked. I mean. I mean, you know, Putin really thought he'd be in Kiev with zelensky dead in 48 hours. Well, here we are. That was February. We're in November, and that's not happened now. A lot of it is the muscle that we've been able to exert. But, yes, the spirit of Ukraine, it's insistent on demo. They have something to fight for, and they're fighting for democracy. They're not fighting for some conspiracy theory that doesn't exist. They're not fighting for a lie. They're not fighting for that. And that's where a good deal of the energy of the United States has been dissipated. In this kind of binary division between, you know, deniers or acceptors or whatever, there's. There is a truth. You know, it was, as his own election guy said, the freest and fairest election of all time. And he lost by 7 million votes. Admitted, as we know from lots of evidence, that he knew he lost, but nonetheless has done what people have done throughout time time. Human nature doesn't change. The Bible tells us this. You know, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. That's Ecclesiastes. That's the Jewish part of the Bible. Right? That's, you know, and let's remember, Jesus Christ was and never left being a Jew, Right? He didn't want to Start a religion. People founded a religion for him, him, but he was a Jew. And so as we look at the anti Semitism which is part and parcel of the, you know, the easy, facile, authoritarian moves, you know, it's just not true. Human nature doesn't change. And these, and these forces have to be defeated by the forces of light. And though they don't have any, as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and other brave folks, this is not anything having anything to do with party labels. There's nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It has to do with people who've read the Constitution and agree with it or really think that, that all of that just to keep America white or pure or whatever the argument is. You know, it's just, you know, in that, in that it's eugenics again, only it's just now named it. There's no hierarchy of races. There's only one race, Paul, and that's the human race. And everybody's the same. Somebody from Uganda loves her kids as much as somebody el somebody from another country is going to be, you know, try to cheat and steal or embezzle. Another person's going to tell lies. Another person going to be virtuous. Another person's going to be self sacrificing. There's no nationality or no race that has a majority claim on any virtue or any vice.
- [22:09]
A
And we've, we've unpacked a lot of conflict and war over almost 200 episodes on this show. We've had a lot of Vietnam veterans, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Wayne Smith was on this show who was a part of your brilliant Vietnam documentary. You mentioned Adam Kinzinger. I talked to folks, you know, in advance of this and said I'm going to be talking to Ken Burns and about, you know, a huge percentage of our audience are post 911 veterans. Half of those veterans are independents. And a question I get often is, can you ask Ken Burns when is he going to do a film about our war? So, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan are still, you know, unresolved for many of us. And I know your Vietnam film brought kind of closure for many people and helped them communicate what they couldn't communicate themselves. So what are your thoughts on something on the post 9 11?
- [23:00]
B
I'll do it, God willing. You know, I'm 69 years old, I'm not retiring. But you know, let me just say one thing, is that the Vietnam thing, if I'd done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon, in 85, America's in a recession People are talking, Japan is ascending and they're talking about the Pacific Rim. America's best days are behind it. Vietnam is a ball in a chain. We're going to drag around until we don't exist anymore. Right. If I'd done 10 years, 20 years after the fall of Saigon, in 95, we're the single sole superpower in the world. We're in the midst of the largest to then peacetime expansion, economic expansion in the history of the United States. We have just won a first Gulf War with a coalition of, of dozens of states with one arm tied behind our back. If I'd waited 30 years until 2005 where we're bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq because of 9, 11, we would, we would began to make parallels. So this is a lot like Vietnam. This is why it's not like this is what it is. Yeah. So by bringing out a decade, 12 and then plus two years after that, you have the ability to, to see things from the different peaks, the different perspectives. Right. And so we think that the past is fixed. It's unbelievable, malleable because think of the film I'd make in 85 or 95 or 2005. But we didn't. Right. It came out in 2017. And so it was able to average these things and not become susceptible to one view. So the passage of time gives you the perspective to more. You know, in astronomy is triangulation, right. You can find out out the distance to a place more easily if you know several distances. So we triangulate. And so I would say just give me some time to get a distance from it and then I'd be able to look back and talk about your war.
- [24:49]
A
I can't wait. And because I know you will be able to communicate what our generation has struggled to communicate for ourselves. And I know you'll channel our voices in doing that as only you can. We talked about this piece of the cleavage in America that exists in our politics. This is independent Americans. We talk a lot about the rise of those who want not just something moderate, but none of the above who reject the two party duopoly. You have this amazing perspective on the history of America. Can you talk about this political moment for those who feel politically homeless, for those who reject the Republican and Democratic Party? I know you've supported candidates in the past, you've been outspoken. But historically, how do we see this opportunity for, for everyone else who feels politically homeless to rise up or unite or have an impact in the next few years?
- [25:39]
B
Yeah, that's a super Important thing because of course how our political system has evolved is into essentially a two party. It's not always been the case, but it's been for the most part a two party thing or in essence a binary stuff, right for or against. And we've been able to make decisions like that. But there is a sense for a growing number of people that neither party has represented them. One party has been more effective in, in, in harnessing that disaffection to energies that are malevolent, that is to say, that are not based in fact or truth. And so traditional associations have ceased to exist. So you can see a Liz Cheney and an Adam Kinzinger kind of exiled from the party of conservatism by a much more dominant radical thing, which is in no ways conservative, asking to save nothing except self interest. And, and that's what's being sold. And quite often at the heart of this, as I've described, but not use the word, but I'm sure you have, and, and, and people that have, that you're talking to is the idea of grievance. When you feel unheard, it is, you are so susceptible to having someone animate your grievance in which you say it's them that did that to me, you know, it's black people, affirmative action, it's, it's the border, you know, it's this, it's that, it's, it's corrupt. And so what happens is, is you got a huge disproportionate number of one party that believes that the other party isn't just wrong on something, that they're even evil, that they are pedophiles, that they are sucking the blood out of young. I mean this is, you couldn't, if you told people that this is what happened. And by the way, that party filled apparently with these vampires, pedophile vampires, got 7 million more votes than the other party, which is, says we're drowning and we're being locked out. So it is in the authoritarian playbook to do accuse your enemy of what you in fact are doing. And that's really important. And what happens is people with legitimate grievances who feel exiled from process, forget that there's only one really one process. In a democracy, it's singular. You vote and you vote not your grievance, you vote the facts, right? People have been voting for in the last three or four decades against their self interests in such startling numbers that you have to say, yes, I understand you're disaffected. Yes, I understand that makes you susceptible to the grievances and the blame that can be attributed to X party, that party or that party. But no, look and see what the real record is. And what happens is that grievance excuses a kind of laziness. If you want to know what's wrong, the grievance is only in the mirror. That's what our religious faith tells us, us, you need to look in your mirror. Like what's wrong with you has not been done by anybody else. It's there. And some people are better off than others. And that is a fault of a system that, that skews towards people who are rich in both parties. And that's, that's a huge problem, you know, and so now everybody's going to say, well, when we get back into power, we're going to eliminate the, we're going to end the taxes. Well, the taxes have been lowered for the people who are, have grievances. They've been been raised for the people who can afford it. And if you take it away from them, that same old discredited trickle down thing will again not work to bring prosperity. So you've got to be able to study the issues. And the problem is that grievance and conspiracy and misinformation and disinformation interposes itself between, like that, between me and you. And what we have to do is, you know, this as, as. I don't mean to go so biblical on you, but the scales from our eyes need to fall off. You know. You know, my ancestor, the poet Robert Burns said, oh, would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. And we are now in a media state where everything we feel is fine. Every moment is to take a picture of me not out in the world. And so we've lost a little bit of our ability to come together as community. Let's just, let me, let me just put the finer point on this by saying social media isn't, it's not social. You know what it's like to go into a room of adults or teenagers or whatever it is and what are they all doing? They're all on their individual. That is not social. Right. I'm into community. I live in a tiny town where we see each other, we go to the post office, we wave. And maybe they are opposite of my political beliefs, but that doesn't matter. We're still Americans. We still want the best for our kids, the same thing. But we've become too fractured because of the way those grievances have been misused by people with only malevolent intent.
- [30:52]
A
Ken, that is such a powerful focus for folks to understand. The unpacking of grievance and the power of grievance is so important and urgent right now. I know you've offered to stay around for a couple of quick fire questions for our Patreon members. Thank you for doing that. Thank you to them for helping make this happen. Stick around for that if you're part of that group. But a final question, Ken, before we wrap here. I'm so glad you're the guy we're talking to before the election. So this will drop a week before the results. A week from now, half the country will be will have grievance because they will have lost or won. Do you have a message because you have a unique ability to reach people of all background backgrounds. Do you have a message for America this election?
- [31:38]
B
Well, you know, there's the best words that are the person who understood who we were, our, our defects as well as our, our great exemplary aspects was Abraham Lincoln and his first inaugural. You know, he looks at this mostly southern audience, weeks away from a civil war. His own words can't. These words can't stop. But he said, we must not be enemies, we must be friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not bake break our bonds of affection. And then this poet president went on in this last sentence, the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. Mystic chords of memory. Better angels of our nature. And those chords are not ropes that bind us together. They're musical chords. It's a kind of harmony of working together. If you want to continue to play your single note, have at it. But you won't have that republic around to tell Benjamin Franklin. Yes, we kept it.
- [32:49]
A
Ken, you are a national treasure. You are a great American. You are a patriot in the best sense of the word. You are so generous with your spirit and with your time and with your talent. Thank you for spending some time with us. I hope you will come back and I hope that we can all remember your words throughout these next couple of months. Everyone should definitely check out the new book Our America and go watch the PBS series, The US and the Holocaust. It's a must for every American and everything you say and do is a must for all Americans. Thank you, my friend, for all you do. And thank you to your dog, which is somehow, who somehow still sleep and resting.
- [33:28]
B
He's yet to disrupt something in. In almost three years of. Of being up here.
- [33:35]
A
Thank you, my friends. David, thank you.
- [33:37]
B
Great to see you.
- [33:45]
A
Power by righteous media.