[Vision2020] How to Handle Political Correctness in the Interest of Real History?

bear at moscow.com bear at moscow.com
Thu May 7 20:31:54 PDT 2009


Visionaries,

I ran across this article about a remake of a WW2 movie and wanted some
input from the great  "unwashed masses" so to speak, of how to handle real
history in the age of political correctness.

Should the poor dogs real name, in the interest of political correctness,
be changed?

I fought this battle before in the Army when I was teaching military
history and wondering what your thoughts are on it.  The incident of
history that  I ran into was that prior to his rise to command all of the
US troops in Europe during WW1, General John Pershing was called "Nigger
Jack"  by his contemporaries to derisively refer to his being in command
of black troops rather than white soldiers.  The popular thought at the
time was that he never commanded real troops, just black ones. It was a
startling discovery at the time I was doing the research, that because of
the army promotion system, Captain Pershing couldn't be promoted to
Colonel by the President of the US, but Teddy Roosevelt, solved the
problem by promoting him to Brigadier General which he was able to do.

NEW DAMBUSTERS MOVIE
"Dog's name in Dambusters remake causes headache for filmmakers
It is not the full-scale replica of a Lancaster bomber nor the special
effects that are causing problems for the makers of a multimillion-pound
remake of the classic British war movie The Dam Busters.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy director Peter Jackson is producing the £21
million movie, to be filmed in Britain and New Zealand, and he has
promised to be true to the original story.
However RAF hero Guy Gibson, head of the mission that destroyed German
dams during the Second World War, had a dog called Nigger and filmmakers
are now wondering whether they dare utter the N-word in 2009.
The canine with the politically incorrect name, who featured in the 1951
book The Dam Busters, was mentioned 12 times in the 1954 film starring Sir
Michael Redgrave."



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