Quote Originally Posted by Batman View Post


The year was 1865. With the close of the Civil War, there began for the South, an era of even greater turmoil. In The Clansman, his controversial 1905 novel, later the basis of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation, Thomas Dixon, describes the social, political, and economic disintegration that plagued the South during Reconstruction, depicting the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the reactions of two families to racial conflict. This study in social history was alternatively praised and damned by contemporary critics. As historian Thomas D. Clark notes in his introduction, the novel "opened wider a vein of racial hatred which was to poison further an age already in social and political upheaval. Dixon had in fact given voice in his novel to one of the most powerful latent forces in the social and political mind of the South." For modern readers, The Clansman probes the roots of the racial violence that still haunts our society.
Finished this today

I was actually surprised, I enjoyed the first 1/2 or 2/3 of the book, it was very much the polictical views of a disgruntled southerner, it was nice to hear their viewpoint and try to see things from their point of view, the only times you really hear it from them it is coming from some fat redneck in a hood or someone opposed to their viewpoint telling us why the Southerners are wrong.

The problem started in the second half of the book when the black characters came into it and were given the freedom of the vote, I understand that there would have been some regional dialect but it was fucking laughable and at times impossible to understand, the descriptions of them completely blasted any possible constructive argument that the writer might have been trying to get across.

Every single black character in the book was either outright gutless and kissed the boots of every white man that they saw or they were out and out monsters, the cowardly blacks and the evil blacks had all been dummed down to the point of retardation as well.

I'll see if I can be arsed to type up some of the dialogue between them just so you can see how amazingly racist and just well...bad it was

I understand that it was a different time and people had a completely different outlook but even back then people must have rolled their eyes when they read it, I note that the book isn't credited with the 'rebirth' of the klan and that it was the film that was based on the book (birth of a nation)