Birth Of A Nation Ideology

Birth of a Nation uses its histrionic plot to show how tangled destinies of a southern and northern family before and after the Civil War. It willingly portrays southern blacks as spiteful and uncivil, the northern whites as crafty, dishonest, and conceited, and the film’s southern whites as anguish recurrent radical and erotic mortifications at the hands of white northerners and black southerners before factually being saved by the thoughtful, Ku Klux Klan. The film is divided to show the different aspects of those two sides during this historical time. During this time Africans were coming to America and it started the reconstruction on our country. D.W. Griffith made this film to show us the reality of racism at this point in time.

     The Vietnam conflict has been known for being the most unpopular war in the history of the United States. The war of 1812, the Mexican war and the Korean conflict of the early 1950's were also opposed by large groups of the American people, but none of them generated the emotional anxiety and utter hatred that spawned Vietnam. The Vietnam war caused people to ask the question of sending our young people to die in places where they were particular wanted and for people who did not seem especial grateful.

“D.W. Griffith was the first American director to be as well-known as the films he directed, and he was among the very first to insist that filmmaking was an art form” (Lewis 53). This statement is very true. However, the inherent discriminating content in some of his movies also made him one of the hardest to appreciate. One of the most famous examples was The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was in favor of the Ku Klux Klan. After a few more controversial movies, he finally tried to redeem his reputation with Broken Blossoms (1919). Broken Blossoms is Griffith’s attempt at an apology in the portrayal of minorities and the idea of miscegenation within The Birth of a Nation in the midst of a troubling society heading towards the anti-miscegenation law.

Although the war was ten years old in 1965, there was no sign that North Vietnam would be defeated. By this time many Americans became opposed to the war. Some thought a war in Vietnam was not America’s concern. They were angry to see young Americans die while fighting for another country. Others were just generally opposed to human beings killing each other. Vietnam War protests became common in America.

“When the U.S. began its military involvement in Vietnam in 1964, not many Americans opposed it. The States had been in the Cold War with the

The American involvement in the Vietnam War was a very controversial decision, with many people being for the war, however many people in the United States were also against the war. The Vietnam War was the longest lasting war in the United States history, before the Afghanistan War, in which most people felt strongly about, be them United States citizens, Vietnamese citizens, or just the global population. In order to better understand the ideas of those American citizens that are either for or against the war, one would have to look at the reasons that the United States was involved in the war, the impact of the Vietnam war on the American society, and the impact on the United States foreign policy.

The Vietnam War was one of the most hated wars in United States history, for the primary reasons that we did not win and the draft destroyed countless men, physically and mentally. The end result of the war did not justify the means and this made a lot of people very upset. This war was also the most televised war, showing incredibly gruesome, uncensored images on the evening news at dinner time. The political protest for the

Was the Vietnam War an unpopular war? The soviet union winning a war caused a greater separation between communism and democracy or capitalism. The Americans joined the Vietnam war to support southern Vietnam in fighting against the communism in northern Vietnam. The Vietnam war was a very unpopular war because of economic, political, and social reasons.

In a film, ideology plays an important role in connecting the film to the society and allowing the audience to have better understanding of the film. According to the German philosophers Marx and Engels, (1978) ideology is identify as the relative systematic body of ideas, perception, and the actual subconscious though of a given class, or group of individual in a certain time and place. In their statement, there were four criteria to this definition, ‘Marx and Engels always considered the state, politics, education, religion, the law and other activities not directly a part of material production to be ideological forms or manifestations of ideology’. The second criteria is the highest authority class will often have strong influence in any society, also ideology represent an ‘incomplete, inaccurate, distorted understanding of social reality’, there are 2 main reason where ideology indicate the interest and point of view of a class. However, normally that class will represent as always true and valid and ‘ideology depends for its clarity on the corresponding clarity of the social relations extant in the society'. Lastly the fourth criteria is each specific expression of ideology is mediated, which can be explained as between the overall ideology and its expression, there were experiences, creativity, individual thought and many more.

The Vietnam War certainly left a distaste in the lives of many who have been affected by the war; scholars have become increasingly interested in the interaction between war and public opinion. There have been many scholarly works published on the Vietnam War, but the issue that will be analyzed here is how public opinion changed the course of the war. The first article by Scott Gartner and Gary Segura is titled, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion in the Vietnam War,” it examined how the diverse races within America in combination with the atrocities in the war led to the formation of opinions that were similar in one race but were different in another race. The second article by Paul Burstein and William Freudenburg titled, “The Impact of

American Public Opinion of the Vietnam War At the beginning of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in 1965, the American Public favored the idea of war because they feared the threat of communism. Polls conducted in 1965, showed 80 percent of the population agreed with President Johnson and were for the war (Rousseau 11). The U.S. got involved with the war to stop communism from spreading throughout South Asia. Americans were afraid if one country on South Asia turned to communism, it would extend to other countries, which is known as the "Domino Theory".

This is what eventually leads to the social unrest among the American people over current issues, specifically in Vietnam. Throughout American history, wartime against a foreign threat was a period where the nation traditionally felt the most united. It was a time where young men felt pride and responsibility in signing up for the draft because it was their duty as an American citizen to not only fight to defend their country but to also defend their freedoms and loved ones. When the US pressed themselves into Vietnam however, much controversy arose as to the moral responsibility to wage violence in a seemingly political war on the threat of communism. Following the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the American population didn’t feel as comfortable putting their faith in their government to do the right thing for the interests of the American people.

Majority of the American public criticized the war because they believe that as powerful as the US is, bombing an underdeveloped small country like Vietnam

Ideology is a set of beliefs and ideas adopted and practiced by a specific group, whereas hegemony is the dominance of one group over another. These two concepts work hand-in-hand. Typically, the relationship of power is created through the contrast of ideology between two particular groups. This difference in ideologies often create a conflict in film. There is a large effort to transform cultural structures as natural ones; groups attempt to make their “partial and particular” ideologies “universal and legitimate”.

“The American people were pro war due to Cold War propaganda against the US; however, due to conscription of young men the support decreased” (Bottaro, 2012:52). Americans supported the involvement of the US in the Vietnam War because of the propaganda which was against the US due to the Soviet Union. Also, they supported the fact their country was preventing communism take over in Vietnam. However, things changed after conscription of young men to fight and media coverage of the war. “The Vietnam War was complicated by factors that had never before occurred in America of a war, because the American media had come to dominate domestic opinion about its purpose and conduct” (Hallin, 1986:3). Since the Vietnam War was the first ever televised war, Americans and the world were able to see the destruction caused by the US soldiers on Vietnamese land and people. Americans did not understand why the US government allowed soldiers to continue a war America was clearly losing. “Along with the Civil Rights movement campaigns of the 1960s, the anti-war movement was one of the most diverse forces in the 20th- century in US history” (Halstead, 1973:22). Despite the increase in anti-war protest, poverty decline in the economy and the Civil Rights movement situation were happening in the US during this period in America, the government still did not