I just viewed at the cinema Dinesh D’Souza’s new epic agit/prop documentary, Death of a Nation. It is probably the best work of its kind since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The film is bold, audacious, and incredibly flawed in several major aspects of its portrayal of history, particularly its deification of Abraham Lincoln as savior figure, much as Riefenstahl deified Adolf Hitler as the German messiah. The film begins with a brief review of fascism and national socialism in the early 20th century, of their origins and ideological basis, and how these left-wing totalitarian movements came to power in Italy and Germany. It explores their commonality or mutual admiration for FDR’s New Deal. This powerful section of the movie will prompt the viewer to stand up and cheer for revealing deep truths hidden from the vast majority of Americans. But D’Sousa then tries to portray 1930s “progressives” on the left as proto-Nazis and supporters of the Third Reich. This is absurd. Yes, in some aspects Nazi Germany was a state modeled upon ideas first put forward by American Democrats such as segregation, ethnic cleansing of native Americans, eugenics and the war collectivism during WWI. But during the thirties progressives, fellow travelers, and prominent liberal Democrats were members of the communist-created Popular Front against fascism. Accordingly, one powerful image that does not appear in the film is posted above. It is the massive 1939 Chicago rally of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in September (just after World War II erupted in Europe). A giant iconic image of Lincoln dominates the stage. This was when the Party, led by General Secretary Earl Browder, was pushing the slogan, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” Who better to choose than the Great Emancipator as the symbol of their duplicitous campaign of subversion and class warfare because Lincoln, as the destroyer of the decentralized federal republic of sovereign states created by the American Framers, precipitated the murderous War Against Southern Independence. The triumphalist epic closes with a choir singing in a sanctuary that bloody anthem of Northern genocide, The Battle Hymn of the Republic (authored by the wife of one of “the Secret Six” financial angels of the homicidal terrorist John Brown).

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