"Don't Be a Sucker"

I'm in bit of a contrarian mood today for some reason. So I'm going to grump about a YouTube video that I basically like, one that is identified by its provider as, "Inspirational 1947 film from the War Department [now the Defense Department] that connects the dots between prejudice, fearmongering, and fascism."

It's called "Don't Be a Sucker". (Also a link here.) TheYouTube icon is below the fold, because the YouTube links are kinda ugly.

The film runs 16 minutes or so. It's makes a general point about tolerance being basic to the American way of life, and particularly warned against religious and nativist (anti-immigrant) prejudices. Since it was made by the War Department, presumably it was aimed primarily at young men around 20 who were coming into the Army from a variety of backgrounds and would be expected to get along with one another.

And for that audience, it was probably a good introduction to the fact that they were expected to keep the bigoted crap they may have been used to practicing in civilian life to themselves while they were on duty. At the same time, it provided a bit of recent history on the rise of Naziism and the resulting Second World War which had so recently ended.

So far, so good. But several things in the film grated at me, even considered the small "market segment" at which it was presumably directed.


Grump #1

For one thing, the tone of it is pretty goodie-two-shoes. For some white kid fresh from a isolated Southern town or a "hyphenated-American" who had spent his life in some Northern urban ethnic enclave, it could serve as a slap in the face to say, "Oh, man, I'm going to get in trouble if I go around talking about [religious slur deleted] or [Cheney]ing [racial slur deleted]."



But most anyone else would probably watch it and think, "Oh, yeah, whatever." Or the 1947 equivalent of the "whatever" expression of that type. I thought while watching it, how would an average Southern segregationist have processed this in 1947? Some large proportion of them would have thought something like this:

"Daddy and Uncle Fred already told me that while I was in the service I was going to have use 'Negro' and 'colored' instead of those other words. And that I was going to run into Catholics and even some Jews maybe and I should be nice to them, just be careful about trusting them on anything. And if some of these Yankees ask me how things are in the South with the nigras, uh, coloreds I mean, I'll explain to them that we all get along fine and that it's not really so bad as some of them hear it is on some of those Northern radio stations. Uncle Fred says that the radio stations are all owned by Jews and that they have funny ideas about this race thing. And segregation is really good for the Negro. In fact, the Negroes support it more than us white folks do."

In other words, the film would suffice to jolt someone who was decent-hearted but limited in the type of people with whom he had had contact, but not very effective for someone who grew up emotionally attached to his prejudices and who had developed rationalizations for them.

A large part of the film is a retrospective on the rise of Hitler to power and Nazi policies of repression. That part has its moments, like when the professor is teaching his college students, some of them uniformed Nazis, about how there is no such thing as an "Aryan" race and that people are essentially the same regardless of race, and some thuggish-looking Nazi officials come into the classroom and carry him off. It also makes a good point about how Germans who hoped to gain from the Nazi policies wound up much worse off in the end. And I like the basic set-up, which is to say, don't get suckered by political scamsters.

But what particularly stuck out for me was the picture they gave of the Catholic and Protestant churches. The film gives the impression that the Christian churches were major centers of Widerstand (resistance). In fact, the Catholic bishops generally, and a large part of the Protestant churches, supported the regime to varying degrees and accepted state direction. The Protestant churches who insisted on maintaining their independence formed a loose association known as the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church).

There were certainly individuals who were moved to resistance by their, like the now-famous Sophie Scholl and the "White Rose" group of students with whom she worked, who bravely but naively started an underground campaign against the Nazis in Munich during the war.

Not only does the film leave a false impression of the opposition role the Christian churches played in the Third Reich, it even gives the impression that the Nazi Party had an anti-Catholic emphasis at the time it came to power. Actually, the Nazis did compete (including violently) against the Catholic Center Party. But they also de-emphasized their hostility to the Catholic Church as such as a deliberate electoral strategy. Hitler was a non-practicing Catholic; he was never excommunicated from the Church.

For that matter, the Nazis even downplayed their anti-Jewish them in the key campaigns of 1932-3, although they never abandoned them altogether. Apart from more transient topics, during that time they emphasized hostility to the "reds" (Communists especially but also Social Democrats) who supposedly threatened the Nation with violent revolutionary and subversion, and also the nationalistic grievances around the Versailles Treaty that had ended the First World War.

The film mentions the Nazis' anti-Jewish propaganda, but not the mass murder of Jews that we now know as the Holocaust. Actually, that was not that unusual at the time. Even in what is now Israel, the Holocaust as such was not a major public them at that time. The Jews in Palestine, in fact, were fighting a guerrilla war against the British around the time the film was made.

I suppose the War Department was particularly focused on discouraging the expressing of racial and religious prejudices in the armed services at the time. (President Truman formally racially integrated the armed forces in 1948, though actual full integration took a few years longer.) It's just that to project their targeted message back into the story of how the Nazis operated, they had to make some notable departures from the actual story.

Grump #2

This little film also represents one of many links in a chain extending to today, in which the experience of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich are taken as object-lessons for current problems.

Now, I'm big on the value of studying history. I think there is lots to be learned for current problems by studying history.

But the lessons to be learned are more complicated.than what can be fit into a Sunday School lesson. And easy generalization like, "Nazi Germany shows where prejudice can lead," have their limits. After all, it's never too much trouble for people from one country to find all sorts of regrettable practices in other countries. *Their* prejudices are barbaric; *ours* are sensible and rational.

And the practice of drawing lessons for today from well-known historical events has its definite negative side. And because the Second World War lives in American iconography and popular culture as the Good War, war propagandists now try to make every enemy they want to attack into Hitler, every war a present-day version of the Good War Against Hitler.

The road to Baghdad for the US was paved with bad Second World War analogies. The unchallenged master of hack Second World War analogies is our friend Victor Davis Hanson.

We would have been much better off if the media and the public had spent a little less time with superficial and phony analogies to the Good War of 1939-45, and spent a little more on studying the actual historical precedents to be found in, say, Germany's preventive war against Poland in 1939. Or the framework of the "laws and customs of war" that was set at the Nuremberg Trials.

Grump #3

The other thing that bugs me about this little film is its solution, which is that all Americans have to hang together and not allow anyone to divide us. Which is probably not such a bad message if the purpose is to get new recruits who just entered military service to focus on team spirit.

But democracy is about a lot more than team spirit. Politics of all kinds is to a large extent about mediating differences. This developer wants to put up housing, another developer wants to build a shopping center in the same place. This group of neocons wants to attack Iran, another group wants to attack Syria. And a bizillion other conflicts that fall between High Politics and the tedium of a city planning commission meeting.

Even on the types of prejudices on which the short docudrama focuses have to be distinguished from more substantive concerns. It's irrational and destructive to assume, for instance, "You're Catholic so you must be scum." Or, "you're Methodist so you must take part in infant sacrifices." (Hey, you never know what those Methodists might be up to!)

But are the rest of us supposed to pretend that the Christian Right doesn't exist? If we want our public schools to teach science in science classes, if we want women to have the right of choice on abortion, if we want birth control to remain available, then it's perfectly rational and necessary to distinguish those who support those things and those who bitterly opposed them.

National unity as a symbolic and sentimental matter is great. National unanimity on substantive political issues would only be good if the unanimity is around a worthy cause or policy. If it's a lousy one, like the torture legalization bill Bush just signed into law, "national unity" around that is not a good thing at all.

End of grumping. You may now resume your regularly scheduled 1947 short films.

Tags: nazis, propaganda, racism, WWII

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