Mukul Kesavan - Imagined worlds: Lessons from "The Plot Against America"
Imagined worlds: Lessons from a disturbing mini-series
The Plot Against America is an unsettling mini-series based on a novel written by the great American writer, Philip Roth. Roth imagines the history of the United States of America taking an alternative turn in 1939. Charles Lindbergh, America’s aviator hero who had retired to Europe after his infant son’s horrific kidnapping and murder in 1932, returns to his country in 1939 and defeats the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to become president on an isolationist platform, promising to keep his country out of a ‘European’ war.
The Plot Against America is an unsettling mini-series based on a novel written by the great American writer, Philip Roth. Roth imagines the history of the United States of America taking an alternative turn in 1939. Charles Lindbergh, America’s aviator hero who had retired to Europe after his infant son’s horrific kidnapping and murder in 1932, returns to his country in 1939 and defeats the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to become president on an isolationist platform, promising to keep his country out of a ‘European’ war.
The story’s subject is
not the Second World War but America’s abrupt descent into anti-Semitism.
Lindbergh was a white-supremacist who thought Hitler was doing god’s work by
keeping Europe safe from the Soviet Union’s ‘Asiatic’ communism. In Roth’s
re-imagining of history, Lindbergh negotiates a non-aggression pact with Nazi
Germany, arguing that the clamour to go to the aid of Britain was sponsored by
Jews via their alleged control over the media.
America’s anti-Semitic
turn is seen through the eyes of a young Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey.
The Levins live in a Jewish neighbourhood where Yiddish is still a fading
lingua franca for an older generation of Jews and a Jewish homeland in
Palestine is still a cause, but Herman, Bess and their sons, Sandy and Philip,
are seamlessly American in their obsession with baseball and the movies. The
wrenching power of the series is the way in which the Levins go from being
patriotic, socially mobile home owners with a car to terrified pariahs haunted
by the spectres of internment camps and lynchings.
Why should a fictional
account of anti-Semitism sponsored by an invented American regime be so
disturbing when we have the real history of the Nazis and their concerted bid
to exterminate the Jews to learn from or to use as a cautionary tale? Nazism’s
association with Kristallnacht, the Holocaust and clips of Hitler’s public
rantings has made it seem exotic and grotesque, something that happened to a
wobbly republic in the aftermath of the Great Depression, not something that
could plausibly happen here. Even non-believers invoke evil to explain the
death camps. The unsettling achievement of The Plot Against America is
to show that institutionalized bigotry is a banal business, that even an
entrenched democracy like the United States is vulnerable, given the right
historical conjuncture, to the rhetorical power of a scapegoating nationalism.... read more:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/imagined-worlds/cid/1771771
