12 years a slave – DS https://www.anglinarchive.com Daily Stormer Historical Archive Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.0.17 https://www.anglinarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/cropped-favicon-32x32.png 12 years a slave – DS https://www.anglinarchive.com 32 32 The Academy Awards or The Anti-White Awards? https://www.anglinarchive.com/2014/03/07/the-academy-awards-or-the-anti-white-awards/ Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 Benjamin Garland
Daily Stormer
March 7, 2014

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“Possibility No. 1: 12 Years a Slave gets best picture. Possibility No. 2: you’re all racists.” – Ellen Degeneres, the militant lesbian host of the 2014 Academy Awards, in her opening speech.

You would be hard pressed to find anything that illustrates the anti-White agenda of the Jews as clearly as the Academy Awards, also known as the ‘Oscars.’ Many films that have been extremely destructive to our people have been heaped with these awards over the years.

Teaching us Whites to feel guilty while simultaneously teaching non-Whites to hate us is a very “Oscar-worthy” endeavor in Jewish Hollywood.

This year’s big winner was 12 Years a Slave, a film depicting slavery in the antebellum south. It portrays Blacks as helpless victims being psychologically and physically abused relentlessly by their vicious, whip-cracking White slave masters.

In reality, most Blacks were treated very well by the White Christian southern slave owners, and many were worse off after slavery was abolished.  They had already been enslaved in Africa by rival tribes and ended up with an exponentially better life here in America than they could have ever even dreamt of in Africa.

The practice of slavery is in no way exclusive to the White race. Every race has done it at one time or another. Some are still practicing it to this day, including the Jews in Israel and the Blacks in Africa.

Movies like 12 Years a Slave incite hatred in Blacks, encouraging them to brutally attack, murder and rape Whites on a daily basis. The Jewish run “politically correct” liberal mass media deliberately covers up as many of these hate crimes as possible, while emphasizing every story of a White on Black crime they can find.

Blacks and Jews both realize that they benefit from making us feel like we owe them something, so they will never quit making movies like this until we stop falling for the propaganda contained in them. They will continue to beat us over the head with what we supposedly did to them in the past until they have taken absolutely everything that we have. We are almost there already.

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“Thank you to the Academy for this incredible recognition. It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s. And so I want to salute the spirit of Patsey for her guidance.” – Lupita Nyong’o to tens of millions of guilty feeling Whites in her Best Supporting Actress Oscar acceptance speech for 12 Years a Slave.

Here I will list a few more of the anti-White films that have received Academy Awards throughout the years. It should prove useful for showing people who don’t want to believe it that the Jews in Hollywood have an agenda that is deliberately harmful to us.

Way back in 1966, the film adaptation of the popular stage play West Side Story received 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. West Side Story is about American Whites in New York that don’t want Puerto Ricans pouring into their neighborhood. It is supposed to be a social commentary on how racist and intolerant White people are toward “people of color.”

The story was penned by the Jew Arthur Laurents, with the music provided by Jews Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. The original conception of the play involved Catholics fighting with Jews, and contained heavy references to the alleged Holocaust. The adaptation was directed by Jews Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.  The Jew Stephen Spielberg is presently working on a remake of it.

The clear agenda behind the movie is to get us White people to feel guilty for objecting to non-Whites overrunning our living space. This theme of White “racism” being evil and irrational is a very common and consistent message of anti-White Jew Hollywood.

Many Whites are afraid to even think racial thoughts anymore because they have been so programmed to feel ashamed of them. Even as they witness with their own eyes the damage being done by the non-White hordes moving in on their territory, they suppress their natural instincts and accept it, thanks to propaganda films like West Side Story.

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Puerto Ricans in West Side Story
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Puerto Ricans in real life.  Accepting them into our neighborhoods in any significant numbers guarantees – without exception – a rise in crime and the lowering of living standards. No amount of liberal Hollywood brainwashing will ever change that fact.

Produced by the vile Jewish Weinstein Brothers, Inglourious Basterds is a violent, over-the-top, anti-German “revenge” film that features American and Jewish soldiers sadistically butchering Nazis during the second World War. It was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and won two – one for actor Christopher Waltz who played the main Nazi villain, one for Quentin Tarantino for Best Director.

The Jews constantly remind us of the so-called suffering they went through at the hands of the Nazis during World War II – a complete inversion of the truth – in order to make us feel sympathy toward them and feel guilty for being White.  Many Whites have been propagandized to the point where they can watch a movie like Inglourious Basterds and actually cheer on the slaughter of their own people.

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“I have a message for Germany. That you are all going to die. And I want you to look deep into the face of the Jew that is going to do it!” – Jewess on a movie screen in Inglourious Basterds right before a theater full of Germans are indiscriminately burned alive.
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“As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, congratulating him after reading the first draft of Inglourious Basterds.
“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling. My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day." - Jewish 'Torture Porn' director/actor Eli Roth on his role as the "Bear Jew" in Inglourious Basterds
“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling. My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day.” – Jewish ‘Torture Porn’ director/actor Eli Roth on his role as the “Bear Jew” in Inglourious Basterds
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“The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” – Quentin Tarantino on his anti-German hate film Inglourious Basterds

In the second (but apparently not last) kill whitey film by Jew-lover Tarantino, instead of White Germans being brutally slaughtered by Jews, we see White American southerners getting brutally slaughtered by a former slave.

Christopher Waltz (whose son is a Rabbi) won an Oscar yet again for playing Dr. King Schultz, the only positively portrayed White in the entire movie. Schultz helps Django become free and then he and Django proceed to kill every single White person in the movie, all of whom are shown as being cartoonishly evil and backwards.

If there was one way to gauge how far we have fallen as a people, the fact that this movie was even allowed to be made would be it. Not only was the movie made, it was not even met with any outrage. On the contrary – a large portion of the American population of self-hating, brainwashed White idiots actually paid to see it and thought it was hip and edgy.

The power of Jewish propaganda is mind-blowing.

"I kill ALL the White people in the movie. How great is that?" - Jamie Foxx to a cheering SNL audience on his role in Django Unchained.
“I kill ALL the White people in the movie. How great is that?” – Jamie Foxx to a cheering SNL audience on his role in Django Unchained.

The character Minny Jackson in the movie The Help bakes her own feces into a chocolate pie and then feeds it to a White woman. This performance landed Octavia Spencer the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2011.

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“Eat my shit. Eat….my…..shit.” – Minny Jackson to the White person that she had just literally fed her own shit to in The Help.

Daily Stormer columnist Clement Pulaski has pointed out that the movie about a White/Black interracial relationship called Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? has played a crucial role in tricking American Whites into accepting (and even miscegenating with) Blacks:

Instead of presenting non-whites as they really are, we are given an idealized black man, acceptable and likeable in every way, different from us only in the color of his skin. Of course this does not come remotely close to the truth about the Negro race, as is obvious to anyone who has driven through a black neighborhood. But in our modern world of mass media consumption, the representation of reality seen in TV and movies overpowers our own personal experiences. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is one of many instances of the “perfect black man” character, a media illusion that was absolutely essential to bringing about the full acceptance of blacks.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Screenplay and was nominated for 8 others awards.

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Sidney Poitier in the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
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Typical American Blacks in real life.

On top of the anti-Whtie hatred coming out of the film industry, the Jews also attempt to force their own sexual values upon us.  In Hollywood, there is an unholy alliance between Jews and homosexuals (all Hollywood studios are run by Jews or homosexuals – or homosexual Jews).  Both have it in their groups best interest to destroy our society by undermining the traditional morality of the White Christian majority. They have been using their influence in Hollywood to do just that for a long time now, a fact that should be painfully obvious to everyone at this point.

Once they turn us all into a bunch of degenerates, completely disconnected with one another, the homos will be able to flaunt their butt-buggery in the open without anybody giving them a second thought and the Jews will be able to rule over us with an iron fist because we won’t be able to organize well enough to compete with them. We’re pretty much at that point already.

Try to organize for White interests and you are branded a White supremacist, Nazi who wants to kill six million Jews. Hurt a queer’s feelings and you are smeared as an intolerant, hate-filled bigot.

Tom Hanks as an AIDS-riddled queer with lesions all over his body in Philadelphia. Won Academy Award for Best Actor - 1995
Tom Hanks as an AIDS-riddled queer with lesions all over his body in Philadelphia. Won Academy Award for Best Actor – 1995
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Philip Seymour Hoffman as a flaming queer novelist in Capote. Won Academy Award for Best Actor – 2005
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Sean Penn as flamboyant, child-abusing, homosexual politician in Milk. Won Academy Award for Best Actor – 2008 (they forgot to mention Harvey Milk’s pederasty in the film).
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Jared Leto as mentally deranged transexual freak who befriends the ex-racist, AIDS-inflicted Matthew McConaughey and shows him how great it is to be “tolerant” of degenerate perverts, in the movie Dallas Buyer’s Club. Won Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – 2014.

Schindler’s List, winner of 7 Academy Awards, was directed by the Jew Steven Spielberg. It is a depiction of an historical event that never actually really happened – the so-called Holocaust of the Jews.

The Holocaust story is simply a fairy tale, roughly based on allied propaganda conjured up at the end of the second world war as a way to justify the deaths of 80 million people and the destruction of National Socialist Germany.  Europe was still littered with the corpses of tens of millions of the best of our people when the Jews began rewriting history to portray themselves as the primary victims of the war.  The initial fantasy was solidified at Nuremberg and they have since had to continue to expand this mythology in order to justify their ongoing victim status.

Schindler’s List is probably one of the most insidious pieces of propaganda ever created. Most of what people think they know about WWII they got from Hollywood productions such as this: Evil Nazis killed a whole bunch of poor, defenseless Jews.

Never mind the fact that no such list as the movie shows ever existed, or that Oskar Schindler’s wife and pretty much everyone that knew him said he was actually a scumbag and that the movie is nothing but lies.

The Jews understand well that emotionally-driven propaganda is much more powerful and effective than books and cold hard facts for brainwashing masses of people.

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“What did I think? I’ll tell you. Scheisskopf [shithead].” – Emilie Schindler on her late husband, Oskar.

Lincoln is another anti-White film by the vicious enemy Jew Steven Spielberg. It won two Oscars, including Best Actor for the Jewish actor who played Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis.

Of course, Lincoln and his Yankee cohorts are shown in the movie to be bastions of morality, while the south is portrayed as a sea of racist White bigots. In reality, Lincoln was a hardcore racist who saw Blacks as inferior to Whites and wanted to send them back to Africa.

From Lincoln’s fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.

Slavery was just the excuse used to invade and destroy the Confederacy for resisting the tyranny of the Federal Government. The states had already begun phasing out slavery anyway, and the Blacks would have been much better off being slowly assimilated into society rather than being thrown out on their own while the majority of them were still illiterate.

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“I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” – Abraham Lincoln at Ottawa University, August 21, 1858.

Then we have Dances With Wolves, a movie about a decorated Civil War soldier who defects to an Indian tribe and begins to shed his “White man’s ways.” It’s the same pattern all over again. You are meant to feel sympathy for the Indians and disgust at the your own people for defeating them and “taking their land.” Dances With Wolves won 7 Oscars and was nominated for 12.

Feeling guilty for winning a war is an absolutely unprecedented, suicidal psychosis that is exclusive to the White race in modern times only. No other race has ever felt guilty for defeating another race in a war, and it would be probably be impossible to make them do so.

At the 2012 American Renassiance conference, David Yeagley, great-great grandson of the Comanche Chief Bad Eagle, devlivered the following message to a room full of White racialists:

The white man’s conquests were no different from those of the Comanche; they were just better and on a larger scale. I don’t have any hard feelings about being beaten by real warriors. I don’t want to identify with professional Indian belly-achers. How can you give this land you took from us by force to [non-Whites]? I won’t let you do that. Be as strong as you can be, because whatever it is you have, someone will take from you. That is the law of the jungle and the law of the prairie. If you value what you have, and you value what you are, you must be prepared to fight.

Every single country on the face of the earth was founded upon conquest. Every single race on the face of the earth has conquered another race. Survival of the strong is the most basic law of nature.  The North American continent was made up of countless warring Indian tribes that were already conquering and genociding one another long before the European White man ever showed up.

The Sioux Indians, immortalized as brilliant and peaceful in Coster's film, used to strip naked the bodies of the defeated after a battle and mutilate them, including cutting off their penises, as they believed this meant their soul would never be able to rest.
The Sioux Indians, immortalized as contemplative and peaceful in Coster’s film, would strip naked the bodies of the defeated after a battle and mutilate them, including cutting off their penises, as they believed this meant their souls would never be able to rest.

This list could go on, but I imagine you get the picture by now.

We are not going to survive as a people unless we shake off this Hollywood-induced White guilt complex and stop being afraid of being called a “racist.”

No other race in history has ever suffered as much as the White race did at the hands of the Jews in the 20th century, yet we have been brainwashed into believing that we are the historic victimizer of all other peoples.

Non-White populations are exploding right now, while ours is diminishing at an alarming rate. Whites were 33% of the global population 100 years ago, now we are 7%. Our birthrate has dropped below replacement level and all of our territory is being invaded and taken over by millions upon millions of hostile foreigners.

Sixty-six million White Russians were slaughtered by Jewish Bolsheviks between 1917 and 1991. Between seven and ten million White Ukrainians were starved to death in the Jew-orchestrated terror-famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ in 1932-1933. Eighty million died in WWII to save Jewish power from Hitler and another 10-15 million Whites died in WWI so the Jews could grab Palestine (the Jews of course also managed to make hundreds of millions of dollars off both conflicts).

Countless Whites have been slaughtered by Black savages since the “civil rights” era and tens of thousands of White women are raped by Black men every year.  In 2005, 37,000 White women were raped by Black men in this country, according to official FBI crime statistics.1  That’s one White woman being held down, stripped of her clothes and forced to engage in sexual intercourse with a violent jungle animal every 15 minutes, on average. Those of us who are fighting to bring these facts to life are demonized as the most evil people that have ever walked the earth.

Of course, it is not in our nature as Whites to whine about truths such as these and attempt play the victim card. Unlike Jews and other non-Whites, we accept our past sufferings and move forward like men without asking for, or expecting, sympathy or handouts from anyone.

We want one thing and one thing only and that is to liberate our race from the death-grip of the Jews and secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.

The first step is saying “no” to the Hollywood noise machine.

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1 US Department of Justice, Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005, pg. 55, PDF file.

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“12 Years a Slave” Criticized for Brutal False Portrayal of Kindly Slave Owner https://www.anglinarchive.com/2014/01/27/12-years-a-slave-criticized-for-brutal-false-portrayal-of-kindly-slave-owner/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 Daily Mail
January 27, 2014

Slave owner William Prince Ford taken in the early 1860s. His family say Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of their relative in 12 Years A Slave is exaggerated
Slave owner William Prince Ford taken in the early 1860s. His family say Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of their relative in 12 Years A Slave is exaggerated and bears no resemblance to how their family remember him, or even how he is portrayed in the book.

The respectable southern gentleman with a balding head, straggling white beard and a well-filled but slightly shabby suit hardly looks like the whip-wielding monster of plantation legend. Yet this is William Prince Ford, the Louisiana slave master at the heart of 12 Years A Slave, the blockbuster movie currently packing cinemas in Britain and America.

The film, based on the remarkable autobiography of free black American Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in the Deep South, has been acclaimed as one of the most compelling accounts of the brutal slave era ever made.

The issue remains so politically toxic in the US that it took a British director, Steve McQueen, and a British star,  Chiwetel Ejiofor, to bring the project to the screen. In the wake of great critical acclaim, both have been nominated for Oscars as part of an extraordinary total of nine nominations.

However, the film also has its critics, who say it ignores the kindness that Ford is known to have displayed towards his slaves and claim that the film-makers are promoting a distorted and simplified version of the truth.

Ford is played in the film by a frock-coated Benedict Cumberbatch. The Baptist minister and cotton-grower is portrayed as a pompous hypocrite; a weak-willed man unable to protect Northup and his fellow slaves from sadistic overseers in the cotton fields.

In the movie, Ford’s Christian  sermonising is overlaid with the  agonising screams of a female slave grieving for her stolen children, an effect aimed at underlining the  minister’s double standards.

But Northup had little but praise for the clergyman who bought him for $1,000 at a New Orleans slave market and put him on a horrific path of servitude in which terrible injury and death were never far away.

In his memoir, published in 1853, Northup, who had been a prosperous married farmer and talented violinist in upstate New York before his kidnap, insisted: ‘There never was a more kind, noble, candid Christian man than  William Ford.’

Benedict Cumberbatch as plantation owner William Ford and Chiwetel Ejifor, who plays Soloman in the film
Benedict Cumberbatch as plantation owner William Ford and Chiwetel Ejifor, who plays Soloman in the film.

The faded photograph, the only  known picture of Ford, shows him on  his estate in Cheneyville, a village in dusty central Louisiana, and has been kept by members of his family.

They venerate him as one of the most generous and principled of slave  owners in a terrible period in American history when a series of bloody slave rebellions had thrown the pre-Civil War South into turmoil.

The most serious of these was Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831, when an armed band of slaves went on the rampage in Virginia, killing 65 people.

In the brutal reprisals that followed, 56 slaves were executed by the State of Virginia for taking part in the rebellion and an estimated 200 black slaves who had nothing to do with the conflict were killed by armed militias.

Across the South, laws were passed prohibiting the education of slaves and free blacks, and restricting their rights of assembly and other civil rights.

McQueen’s film spares little in its unflinching account of the events that cast such a long shadow over American society.

But critics of the film believe that his portrayal of Ford is little more than a cartoon characterisation, simplifying the realities of life in the slave-era Deep South.

Many of Ford’s descendants still live in the Cheneyville area and some were tracked down by The Mail on Sunday.

Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. In his autobiography, Northup had little but praise for the clergyman who bought him for $1,000 at a New Orleans slave market
Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. In his autobiography, Northup had little but praise for the clergyman who bought him for $1,000 at a New Orleans slave market.

One was his great-great-grandson, 77-year-old William Marcus Ford,  who described the film as ‘too dark  and exaggerated’.

He added: ‘By all accounts, my great-great-grandfather treated his slaves well and did his best for them.

‘He was born at a particular time in history when slavery was accepted throughout the South.

‘It wasn’t illegal. That doesn’t make it right or moral by today’s standards but back then it wasn’t an ethical issue. Northup saw him as a kindly person. He was a highly moral man.’

The film, says Mr Ford, ignores the fact that ‘slaves were regarded as  valuable pieces of property and that it wouldn’t be in an owner’s interest to treat his slaves badly’.

He said: ‘Good field-hands had worth. They were valued. A skilled craftsman like Northup would have been valued. There might have been a few bad apples, but I don’t think there was widespread brutality.’

While it is true that the white Establishment of the Deep South has a long history of attempting to minimise the region’s brutal history, independent experts concur that William Prince Ford treated his slaves with at least a modicum of respect and kindness.

Charles Neal, an assistant director of the Louisiana History Museum, said he was ‘horrified’ by the unremitting scenes of brutality in the film.

‘It was evil white folks beating on poor black folks and it’s not what  Solomon Northup intended when he wrote his book,’ he said.

‘He thought Ford was a really good master. He was treated right and he was treated like family.’

Indeed, Northup recalls in his book that the minister rescued him from a lynching and instructed him on how, if he led an ‘upright and prayerful life’, he would be rewarded in the next life in heaven. Ford even gave him as a gift a fiddle, which he played at neighbouring plantations, as seen depicted in the film.

But this was a time when the southern states were gripped by mounting fear of their own slave populations, and Louisiana historian Frank Eakin pointed out that Ford may have had other motives for trying to treat his slaves well. ‘Violence had worked in the past as a means of control but now the worry for slave-owners like Ford was that if you were violent to a slave, he might kill you,’ he said.

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12 Years a Slave: An Honest Review https://www.anglinarchive.com/2013/11/17/12-years-a-slave-an-honest-review/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Steve Sailer
Takimag
November 17, 2013

Same old skin game.
Same old skin game.

12 Years a Slave—a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar.

Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes:

12 Years A Slave is a remake. What’s more, the original television film was directed by the celebrated Gordon Parks. Why no one seems to remember this is a mystery to me, yet all too typical of what I’ll call media amnesia. It first aired on PBS in 1984 as Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, reached a wider audience the following year when it was repeated as an installment of American Playhouse, and made its video debut under the title Half Slave, Half Free.

You can watch the 1984 version online for $2.99.

The remake has more whippings, though.

The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves.

Steve McQueen (an art-house filmmaker who is a black Brit of West Indian background) directs 12 Years a Slave in a sort of minor league Passion of the Christ manner. (Incidentally, it’s obnoxious for anybody involved with movies today to call himself “Steve McQueen” instead of, say, “Steven McQueen.” In contrast, there were two 20th-century writers named Thomas Wolfe, but the second had the good manners to call himself “Tom” to minimize confusion.)

Some of the appeal to critics is that Northern whites are shown as saints of racial sensitivity in the film’s preposterous first 20 minutes. 12 Years a Slave opens in 1841 with Solomon Northup (stolidly played by the Anglo-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor) being effusively admired by his white neighbors in Saratoga, New York. Northup is a model of prosperous bourgeois respectability, always doffing his top hat to his white peers while out riding with his wife and children in an elegant carriage. (Watch 0:24 to 0:35 in the trailer.)

How could he afford that?

Well, actually, he didn’t and couldn’t.

A glance at Northup’s ghostwritten 1853 memoir makes clear that in 1841, rather than being a pillar of this Yankee community, he was an unemployed fiddler dragged down by his own “shiftlessness”:

Though always in comfortable circumstances, we had not prospered. The society and associations at that world-renowned watering place (Saratoga, the home of American horseracing), were not calculated to preserve the simple habits of industry and economy to which I had been accustomed, but, on the contrary, to substitute others in their stead, tending to shiftlessness and extravagance.

In McQueen’s often baffling movie, this upper-middle-class family man suddenly decides to run off to join the circus with two fast-talking white men without even leaving a note for his wife. While dining in an elegant Washington, DC restaurant with his new friends, he suddenly takes ill (perhaps from being slipped a Mickey Finn) and wakes up in chains.

Paradoxically, Northup’s life in slavery is better documented than his murky life in freedom. His poor family never reported or even guessed that he’d been kidnapped. They apparently assumed that vanishing was just the kind of thing he’d do.

On the other hand, property records show that Northup spent many years toiling on the ramshackle plantation of the notoriously cruel Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender—as always, a compelling movie star). Epps was a manic master who forced his slaves to cavort until dawn whenever he was in a “dancing mood.” Today, he’d be diagnosed as bipolar.

Northup’s eventual liberation was well-reported in the press and the courts 160 years ago. When word of his kidnapping finally arrived home in 1853, top officials in both New York and Louisiana were dismayed by the trick played upon this freeborn citizen and worked together to quickly have him released.

(The assistance of pro-slavery politicians, such as Pierre Soulé, a US Senator from Louisiana, is a puzzle to the modern mind. But their reasoning was that slavery depended upon a punctilious regard for documented property rights. Thus, they were publicly outraged that a slave sale had been contracted without proper title.)

Northup then had prosecuted the slave dealer who had bought him, but the trial never resulted in a verdict.

Interestingly, the slaver defendant countercharged that Northup had conspired with his white cronies to defraud him of his purchase price by attempting to pull the old Skin Game con on him. One inspiration for the Oscar-winning screenplay for Django Unchained that Quentin Tarantino has lately acknowledged was the 1971 comedy Skin Game, starring James Garner and Louis Gossett, Jr. as traveling bunco artists in 1858. Their most profitable scam is for Garner to repeatedly sell Gossett into slavery and then help him escape.

Northup’s hometown newspaper, the Saratoga Press, surmised that Northup had been an accomplice in a scam gone awry:

…it is more than suspected that Sol Northup was an accomplice in the sale, calculating to slip away and share the spoils, but that the purchaser was too sharp for him, and instead of getting the cash, he got something else.

Indeed, at least one of the con men who sold Northup had previously engaged in the skin game with another black as bait.

But Northup denied at length in his memoir that he would lend himself to such a dangerous swindle.

Still, this theory that Northup was a man of raffish character rather than the tediously upright one depicted in 12 Years a Slave might explain another puzzling aspect of his tale: how little help he got from his fellow slaves.

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