Breaking the Spell: A Film Review of ‘Uncle Tom II’

Image from the poster of the documentary "Uncle Tom II: An American Odyssey."

Commentary

“Uncle Tom II”—the new film by Executive Producer Larry Elder and Director Justin Malone—opens with a shot of Chad Jackson (proprietor of Chad O. Jackson Plumbing) preparing a plumbing site with an excavator. It’s a beautifully photographed scene of an intensely focused young man operating a complex machine in order to build something.

His attention is directed at the act of constructive work, and as Jackson (who happens to be a black man) makes clear, his plumbing enterprise has given him a strong sense of self—as a prosperous business owner and dignified free citizen of the United States. As the film unfolds, the viewer realizes that his life and work are an undeniable refutation of the definition of black Americans as “victims” of “systemic racism.”

The first “Uncle Tom” film, released almost exactly two years ago, was also a refutation of the black victimhood narrative. The original film featured character studies of notable black men and women who began their lives with the belief that they could prosper and were not condemned to victimhood. Their belief guided their actions and their actions yielded material success and a strong sense of self. “Uncle Tom II” picks up where the first film left off by analyzing the historic and intellectual genesis of the “systemic racism” doctrine. In Chad Jackson’s memorably haunting opening words, “My hope is that this [film] will help to break the spell—the spell that so many people are under, that keeps them angry, makes them bitter, and blinds them from the truth.”

As Jackson and director Malone reveal, this “spell” has been cast mostly by means of Marxist ideological indoctrination.

Students of 20th-century history are familiar with how Marxist doctrine has poisoned every society in which it has been propagated, defining men and women not as individuals but as members of groups pitted against each other in a power struggle to the death. Without exception, every self-professed Marxist regime that has ever come to power has suspended basic human rights and committed mass murder. It’s one thing to read this terrible history (as I have); it’s quite another to see film footage of men and women shot at point-blank range on the edge of mass graves as punishment for being identified by a Marxist regime as members of the proscribed class or group. Malone seems to have spent much of the last two years in film archives, and there’s no arguing with the sheer horror of much of what he excavated and presents in his film.

An especially powerful moment features a famous 1983 interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in which he describes the step-by-step process whereby a society is “demoralized” and ultimately overthrown by means of Marxist-Leninist ideological indoctrination. This endeavor is achieved primarily by infiltrating the targeted society’s educational system in order to brainwash its youth, thereby rendering an entire generation unable to draw any sensible conclusions about what is best for its families, communities, and country.

As “Uncle Tom II” unfolds, many viewers may be surprised to see the mounting evidence that Bezmenov’s explication of Marxist-Leninist activism reveals the anatomy of the Black Power movement in the sixties and the Black Lives Matter organization today.

Malone identifies the key orchestrators of these organizations and shows precisely how they have gone about their work of sowing division, anger, despair, and hate. Two of the most notable are white “progressive activists” who shaped the Black Power and Black Lives Matter organizations along Marxist-Leninist lines. Both remind me of Mephistopheles—the “Spirit that Always Negates,” as Goethe memorably introduced the character in “Faust” (one of Marx’s favorite plays). The actions of these men, and many others like them, have indeed cast a spell.

“Uncle Tom II” is an extremely ambitious documentary that attempts to cover an enormous amount of historical and intellectual ground in only two hours. While it will likely generate a great deal of debate (and vitriolic blowback), it has the dramatic and documentary potency “to break the spell”—at least among viewers who approach it with open minds.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.