(Ken Burns' documentaries have always been filled with lies and omissions as 
the left continiously want to erase
their bad influences on history.)

From: https://shorturl.at/H045j (nypost.com)

===
  Opinion

  Ken Burns' `childish canard' makes a woke mockery of America's founding

   By Rich Lowry
   Published Nov. 24, 2025, 6:43 p.m. ET

   Few documentary films have the natural authority of a Ken Burns
   production. 

   The narrator of his works, Peter Coyote, is as close as we have today
   to "the voice of God," the phase once associated with legendary CBS
   anchor Walter Cronkite at the height of the power of broadcast news. 

   This makes it especially outrageous that Burns feeds the viewers of
   his new epic documentary, "The American Revolution," a childish canard
   right at the outset. 

   Burns implies that the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of six Indian
   tribes or nations in New York state, crucially influenced the founding
   of the United States.

   This is a nice fairy tale, but has no connection to reality - and
   Burns and his colleagues, who worked on the documentary for about a
   decade, had time to verify this claim.

   At the beginning of the film, the narrator intones that "long before
   13 British colonies made themselves into the United States," the
   Iroquois had "a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee
   - a democracy that had flourished for centuries."

   We are told that Benjamin Franklin "proposed that the British colonies
   form a similar union," the so-called Albany Plan.

   He printed a famous cartoon of a chopped-up snake illustrating his
   point with the legend, "Join or Die."

   The narrator continues, "Twenty years later, `Join or Die' would be a
   rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history."

   There's much to unpack in this passage, which is carefully constructed
   to be misleading without being flagrantly false (although it doesn't
   succeed). 

   It is certainly true that the Iroquois had forged an enduring
   confederacy, but this was hardly a unique contribution to political
   practice.

   History is littered with all sorts of other examples of this form of
   alliance: Greek city-states forged a confederacy against Persia in 478
   BC. 

   The film suggests a connection between a statement made by the
   Iroquois leader Canasatego recommending a union on the one hand and
   Franklin on the other, but this is will-o'-the-wisp stuff. 

   Canasatego made his statement at a 1744 conference over the Treaty of
   Lancaster, a negotiation between the Iroquois and several colonies.

   For his part, Franklin cited the Iroquois having a confederacy in one
   sentence in a 1751 letter about the possibility of a colonial union.

   That's it. 

   It's not true that the 1754 Albany meeting, by the way, was the
   prelude to the world-historical events about 20 years later. The
   conference was not formed in opposition to Britain.

   Rather, it was entirely a function of British colonial policy, which
   sought to keep the Iroquois from allying with France against Britain
   in what would become the Seven Years' War. 

   The idea was that by uniting the colonies, it'd be possible to better
   regulate, and smooth over, colonial relations with the Iroquois. 

   Regardless, the Iroquois have no role in our constitutional history.

   As the scholar Robert Natelson has noted, the Iroquois don't show up
   as a model in the 34-volume "Journals of the Continental Congress";
   the three-volume collection "The Records of the Federal Convention"
   (in tiger words, the Constitutional Convention);  or the more than
   40-volume "Documentary History of the Ratification of the
   Constitution."

   As for the Iroquois confederation being a democracy, it's laughable
   agitprop.

   There were no elections; leaders were selected by women elders, whose
   status was hereditary. 

   In a recent interview with the TV program "Amanpour & Company," Burns
   said that the contribution of the Iroquois led him to believe he had
   "to center" the story of Native Americans in the Revolution.

   Surely it's the opposite - he wanted to center the Native Americans,
   so he played up the Iroquois story. 

   It's bad history one way or the other.

   "The American Revolution" has been praised by the New York Times for
   seeking to strip away what Burns calls "the barnacles of
   sentimentality and nostalgia" around the event.

   Actually, the film is committed to creating new barnacles, more
   congenial to the ears of an audience that wants romanticized history
   about oppressed groups, but not about our own story. 

   So it goes in elite opinion 250 years after the greatest event in the
   modern era.
===

-- Sean

... History books which contain no lies are extremely dull.
--- MultiMail/Win
 * Origin: Outpost BBS * Johnson City, TN (618:618/1)