WHITEWASHING HISTORY: Jonathan Foreman, writing

WHITEWASHING HISTORY: Jonathan Foreman, writing in England’s Daily Telegraph, says that Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York “portrays racist mass murderers as victims“:

Martin Scorsese is rightly the most lauded living American film-maker – a beacon of integrity as well as a brilliant talent. But his bloody, visually gorgeous new epic, Gangs of New York, set in Civil War-era Manhattan, distorts history at least as egregiously as The Patriot, Braveheart or the recent remake of The Four Feathers. In its confused way, it puts even the revisionism of Oliver Stone to shame.

The film works so hard to make mid-19th-century Irish-American street gang members into politically correct modern heroes (and to fit them into Scorsese’s view of American history as one long ethnic rumble) that it radically distorts a great and terrible historical episode.

Read Foreman’s excellent article as to why and how.