Imagine being raised from birth as a slave to a reality that never existed.
That’s the idea in Book VII of Plato’s “Republic” (380 BC) in a conversation between Glaucon and his teacher Socrates who compared man’s ignorance to prisoners confined in an underground cave.
“… they have been confined, from their childhood, with their legs and necks so shackled, that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forward, because their chains make it impossible for them to turn their heads …”
The prisoners are forced to watch the shadows on a wall in front of them, created by men they can’t see. The men, like puppeteers, use light from a fire to project images of wooden men and other objects, as the real voices of passersby echo through the cave.
Because they are forced to only look “straight forward,” the prisoners grow up believing that the shadows are real men, and that the echoes are their real voices.
“You are describing a strange scene,” says Glaucon, “and strange prisoners.”
Like the allegory, the film Uncle Tom II: An American Odyssey documents a “strange scene” that’s become shockingly real in America. Nearly all of us – especially blacks – have become like these “strange prisoners,” conditioned for generations to believe in a distorted view of the civil rights movement that was never real.
Racial tension, said director Justin Malone, was “low-hanging fruit” for Marxists in the mold of Lenin who once said that “Communism must be built with non-communist hands,” through trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth.”
The film argues that Marxists – homegrown and foreign – have used the legitimate grievances of the civil rights movement for decades to create a never-ending cycle of racial agitation that was deliberately designed to divide the country, weaken American hegemony, destroy capitalism, and replace God with government.
Puppeteers in government, education, Hollywood, the media, and in the activist world, have kept Americans so spellbound to the glories of the civil rights movement that it’s become impossible for them to “turn their heads.”
Shackled to only one point of view, they grew up believing that shadows projected by outright Marxists were voicing the real plight of black Americans. They weren’t.
With indisputable first-hand accounts, never-seen footage, and simple but spellbinding original music and cinematography, Uncle Tom II shouts truth into “Plato’s cave.”
“My hope is that this [film] will help to break the spell,” said co-writer Chad O. Jackson, “the spell that so many people are under, that keeps them angry, makes them bitter, blinds them from the truth; and realize that they are being deceived. That they’re being lied to – we’ve all been lied to, our entire lives.”
Appropriately, Uncle Tom II opens with Jackson at the driver’s seat of an earth mover, slowly, methodically digging. From then on, the film punctures through the once-impenetrable surface of institutional myths and excavates deep inside the caverns of untouched history to piece together rare archival finds that paint a very different picture of the civil rights movement.
Using rare photos and film footage of classy, upwardly mobile blacks with happy, intact families just a few years out of slavery and up to the ‘50s, the film contrasts that with the violent, fatherless, grievance culture that’s defined the “black community” since the ‘60s.
What happened?
The short answer: Homegrown socialists and Marxists created, then infiltrated black organizations in the early 1900s, and fully entrenched themselves in the push for “social justice” throughout the ‘60s civil rights movement.
The NAACP was not created by blacks, for instance, but by white socialists, among them Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey, a white socialist lawyer who was president for the organization’s first 29 years. The man who became the black face of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois, was not only celebrated in Communist China and Russia, but was an atheist and ardent anti-capitalist.
“I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools,” he once wrote.
Du Bois wrote in the 1940s: “I am not a communist … On the other hand, I … believe that Karl Marx … put his finger squarely upon our difficulties …”
At age 93, after joining the Communist Party in 1961, he was not so ambiguous.
“I believe in Communism,” he wrote. “I mean by Communist, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and world designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of part.”
Uncle Tom II also unearthed recordings and film footage of blacks, as early as the 1950s, who tried to warn America about communist infiltration into the NAACP and the civil rights movement.
“Communists have planted the idea, ‘Don’t do anything for yourself,’” Manning Johnson, a black former Marxist complained in 1958. “Just get out there and fight, and yell and scream, and demand everything!”
Julie Brown, a black woman who infiltrated the Communist Party as an undercover FBI agent, said she saw firsthand a communist blueprint for revolution in America, and if all went according to plan, “Americans will believe that the chaos and violence [of the ‘60s] has something to do with civil rights.”
“Our enemies were quick to find our weakest point for their attack,” she said. “They knew that racial differences could provide them with an excellent wedge to divide our people. … To open all wounds that have long-since healed, and deliberately to create new ones wherever they can.”
After decades of producing the wealthiest group of blacks the world has ever known, a twice-elected black president, and trillions to programs for lagging black communities, blacks, as a group, are worse off, angrier, and demanding more than ever.
As Uncle Tom II shows, the push for civil rights as we’ve known it has never been about solving real problems. It’s about creating endless agitation as a cover to fundamentally transform every institution in America into God-knows-what.
Worse, misguided liberals, leftists, Marxist groups like BLM, and disciples of W.E.B. Du Bois like Ibrahim Kendi, today, are employing some of the most sophisticated tools the world has ever seen to project shadows and echoes about the civil rights movement that were never real.
In Plato’s allegory, one of the “strange prisoners” managed to escape the cave, endure the sun’s blinding splendor, and adjust to reality as it was. His heart melted with compassion for his former friends who, for their entire lives, had been deceived. So he returned to the cave to help break the spell.
After struggling to readjust to the darkness to make his pitch, fearful, his former friends vowed to kill him or anyone who dared to help prisoners escape the cave.
Sound familiar?
Uncle Tom II is that escaped prisoner returning to shine “dazzling splendor” into Plato’s cave. And despite the allegory, this film is so well done that I predict it will make it possible for millions, at last, to “turn their heads.”
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