One of the most memorable American films I have seen, albeit many years ago, was Mississippi Burning (1988). Its producer was Frederick Zollo, and no, he is no relative of mine, so far as I know, but was married to Barbara Broccoli, famous for some of the Bond films. Mississippi Burning is based loosely on the investigation in 1964 into the murder of three civil rights activists. In the film, inevitably, the Ku Klux Klan are involved, and the atmosphere of persecution of African Americans and civil rights activists is overwhelming. The image of a burning cross is etched in my visual memory.
Significantly, Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech singled out Mississippi, as a state infected with racism: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”
Much progress has been made in the US to combat racism and prejudice, notably the landmark Civil Rights Act, signed into law in 1964 by Lyndon B Johnson. This progress to a more equal society culminated [temporarily, we hope! Ed.] in the election of Barack Obama, the first non-white president of the US. However, that white supremacist undercurrent remained: I remember Donald Trump a few years ago trying to make a pathetic schoolboy joke over the similarity, as he saw it, between the names Obama and Osama (Bin Laden).
Then a few days ago there was the appalling video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys for which he denied all involvement, blaming his staff instead. As is evident to anybody who follows news and current affairs, his bully-boys in ICE are targeting pretty-much anyone with a non-white skin. The attitudes of Musk, of many US billionaires and other supporters of the MAGA movement are clearly those of white supremacists. What has changed? Evidently not a lot in those circles.
This is in a country which was created by taking over most of its territory from the native Americans and treating them abominably. A country which was built on immigration from every continent in the world; of people who left their own countries behind to cross the oceans in order to partake of – and contribute to – the ‘American Dream’. This is defined in Encyclopaedia Britannica as seeking a new life in “a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.”
Among those migrants were the mother (Scottish-born) and the paternal grandfather (German-born) of a certain Donald J Trump. Now he wants to deny others the ‘American Dream’ which has enabled him and his forebears to prosper. Hence, he set up ICE to seek out and purge ‘his country’ of those he deems undesirable, in his white-supremacist megalomania.
So, what about Minnesota Burning? As we’ve seen so clearly, Trump’s ICE have appeared to be out of control, especially in Minnesota, to the extent that two innocent citizens have been shot by them in public with the evidence caught on multiple videos. In relation to King’s dream of an “an oasis of freedom and justice”, has American society really advanced in the last sixty years since the outrage on which Mississippi Burning was based?
Well, there are differences between Minnesota now and Mississippi sixty years ago. Of course, the KKK members were acting against the law, whilst ICE staff have been openly created, empowered and defended by a president and his party. Now, it is not just African Americans and their supporters who are being hounded, but anyone who seems not to be a white American, whether they have the right documentation or not. And yet… like the Ku, Klux, Klan, these violent masked men are using violence and intimidation, terrorising the populace in general and not just their supposed targets: this time not as what the US government has classified a “subversive terrorist organization” (the KKK), but as an organization (ICE) established by the government itself. Depressing… and alarming.
No wonder certain aspects of this current situation remind me of Frederick Zollo’s film. As a republic, is the US living up to the principles of the Roman republic? Is this government on behalf of the people? Or on behalf of Donald Trump? Whatever, the true spirit of the ‘American Dream’ is burning.
