Looking Back in Anger [STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH]

From the Chicago Reader (February 27, 2004). On February 12, 2018, Ken Jacobs sent me the following email: Dear Jonathan, I first came upon writing on STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH a week ago. Sorry. Appreciate what you had to say except, naturally, for your take on my Muslim comment. So I must’ve failed to make clear my despising of all religions with their bloody track records. I go so far as to consider the to-do about Nazis overblown: a momentary political organization that, employing Ford up-to-date industrial methods, accomplished the actual near-fulfillment/”final solution” to 2 000 years of strenuous Christian degradation, torture and outright slaughter of Jews. “Race” had just been invented maybe a century earlier but murdering Jews was an enduring Christian project. (Nor were Nazis killing any other “race”.) A fact to remember about WW2: Christians murdered Jews. A land war coupled to a religious “war” and the war they were allowed to win by USA as long as they could keep costing the Soviets. Don’t get me started…. I’m remembering one line in the film about “a bedtime story gone amok”. That is my take on these force-fed beliefs given helpless children wired up to believe, needing to believe if they’re to survive (“no, you can’t run into traffic”). Read more

Mar 11, 2025 - 19:43

Looking Back in Anger [STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH]

From the Chicago Reader (February 27, 2004).

On February 12, 2018, Ken Jacobs sent me the following email:

Dear Jonathan,

I first came upon writing on STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH a week ago. Sorry.

Appreciate what you had to say except, naturally, for your take on my Muslim comment. So I must’ve failed to make clear my despising of all religions with their bloody track records. I go so far as to consider the to-do about Nazis overblown: a momentary political organization that, employing Ford up-to-date industrial methods, accomplished the actual near-fulfillment/”final solution” to 2 000 years of strenuous Christian degradation, torture and outright slaughter of Jews. “Race” had just been invented maybe a century earlier but murdering Jews was an enduring Christian project. (Nor were Nazis killing any other “race”.) A fact to remember about WW2: Christians murdered Jews. A land war coupled to a religious “war” and the war they were allowed to win by USA as long as they could keep costing the Soviets. Don’t get me started….

I’m remembering one line in the film about “a bedtime story gone amok”. That is my take on these force-fed beliefs given helpless children wired up to believe, needing to believe if they’re to survive (“no, you can’t run into traffic”).