The John Wayne infamy: Victims of slavery and the holocaust

Mar 09, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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How would the Jews feel about the legacies of Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, Whitney Houston, Kofi Annan and others that made huge contributions to the world, if research unearthed nasty and vile comments they made about the Jewish race, never mind how old the statements were?
As night follows day, Jewish organizations and powerful Jewish voices around the world will attempt to question the legacies of these great people. Their standing will never be the same. I can see radio stations in Israel and countries where Jews own entertainment companies boycotting the work of Lennon, Marley, Houston, etc.
Do you blame them? The answer is no. When you are as talented and knowledgeable as the names listed above, how can you conceive making hate statements, never mind if it was thirty or forty years ago. What about the same accusation against those who occupy prominent places in the world today? The list includes Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paul McCartney, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, etc. Can you imagine what will happen to these personalities if anti-Semitic sentiments were once uttered by them?
The Jewish people suffered terribly in Nazi Germany. You cannot insult the memory of these departed souls by anti-Semitic ramblings. A sacred belief I have is that the two most brutal line faults and fault lines in the entire existence of civilization was first slavery then the holocaust. Slavery was far, far worse than the holocaust.
For any human to justify slavery or to even utter flippant words about slavery is not something that should go unpunished. You cannot escape condemnation and resulting decisive action against you when you insult the Jewish people in American and European societies, likewise the same damnation should greet you when you speak the same insults about slavery.
In 2016, the US had an Afro-American president, Barack Obama. When the daughter of John Wayne, the Hollywood cowboy idol, endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency, it was revealed that in the year, 1971, John Wayne gave a sickening, hate-filled, racist-laced interview to Playboy magazine.
Among the things he echoed was that he was an avowed white supremacist, had no regrets about slavery, White America was right to take the lands from the native Indians and that Africans in the US were still behind whites in civilized values. A Google search will make the item available.
This interview surfaced in 2016 during the election campaign. President Obama chose not to get involved. Wayne’s 1971 diseased semantics were not widely publicized during the election campaign. Last week, the interview was in the news again. Some people are calling for an airport in Los Angeles named after Wayne to be changed. There is also a nine-foot statue of Wayne. He is also the recipient of a presidential medal of freedom and a congressional gold medal.
Why should White America be concerned about Wayne? They were not victims of slavery. Why should white Americans denounce the iconic status Wayne has in Hollywood? Wayne did not issue a hate-filled speech against white Americans. But it is for the countries that experienced slavery to initiate action to remove the legacy of Wayne. This is where the obligation falls on the descendants of American slaves.
There is no airport named after Wayne in any country that endured slavery. There is no statue of Wayne in any non-white country. But there are such things in the US, that was built on slave labour. It is for Black America to do what Jewish America would have done – denounce hate speech against the Jewish race.
Wayne did not lavish his hate for the Black race in the 19th century. Not at the beginning of the 20th century. But in 1971, almost thirty years after the world saw what race poison can lead to – the German massacre of European Jews.
In 1971, the hippie counter culture, the liberating music of John Lennon, Bob Marley, Joan Baez, the anti-racism campaign of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Independence struggle of the colonies, were dominating the world stage. This was not the time or place for a Hollywood star to denigrate the descendants of slavery and the native people of the US.
How could America still retain the glorious image of this sick Hollywood character? One hopes that this resurgence of the Playboy interview galvanizes public opinion around the world against Wayne. His movies should not be played in any cinema where the descendants of American slaves live. No Black American should use that airport that bears his name. Wayne’s legacy should be removed from the world.

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