stormsbourne:

revolutionaryduelist:

nuclearmentality replied to your post “You reblogged a post that said “the only harm [non-photographic child…”

of course, it’s important to not discount the impact of propoganda-type works on the course of history

however, more often than not they are more accurately treated as symptoms than as causes

To be clear, yes, that’s definitely true. My shock wasn’t at the idea that BOTN was impactful, it factually was. But trying to pin the stubborn and long-lasting horror of white supremacy, an ideology that’s defined the world for like…centuries, on a single movie? It’s myopic to the point of being dangerously nonsensical.

That was my point here.

a lot of “birth of a nation caused the rebirth of the kkk” discourse is completely decontextualized from all the many, many things going on in the us culturally, such as continued fallout from the civil war and reconstruction, which were both still very culturally fresh in american memory at the time. propaganda is indeed always a danger but a lot of “aha! fiction DOES affect reality!” arguments tend to ignore that the reality was already there – and the fact that the reality was there is what allowed the fiction to exist in the first place. america was already racist. germany had already been slowly immersed in a tide of antisemitism and racism before nazi propaganda became commonplace. jaws was based on actual shark attack scares up and down the coast and did not, on its own, cause a mass slaughter of sharks. 

this is without getting into the fact that tumblr kids tend to consider propaganda and regular mainstream mass-marketed fiction and niche indie-produced fanfiction as being all on the same level of influence over the world, somehow. 

last discourse i’m doing on this honestly, this breaks it down too well not to boost.