You don't have to be oppressed or illiterate to buy the Big Lie

Near the end of the 1942 Oscar-winning Disney animated short "Der Fuehrer's Face" Donald Duck awakens from a Nazi nightmare, relieved to be back in his own bed, then springs to attention in a reflexive "Heil Hitler" salute as he mistakes the cast shadow of a Statue of Liberty souvenir on his windowsill for the shadow of a Gestapo thug.

"In time of war it's typical -- sometimes even useful -- to demonize your enemy," says film critic and historian Leonard Maltin in a mildly pc introduction to "Der Fuehrer's Face," part of the DVD series "Walt Disney Treasures: On The Front Lines":

We still see this today whenever a dictator or despot comes to power anywhere in the world. [Doh.] Caricatures and jokes, not always in the best of taste [Jokes at Adolph's or Saddam's or Osama's expense not always in the best of taste? Huh?], rise to the forefront because it's our way of relieving aggression. [That's debatable. Some would say it's our way of deflating the pretensions of dangerous narcissists.] So it was in World War II. Some people feared Adolph Hitler. Others mocked him. [Others, fantasizing "Peace in our Time," enabled him.] The Disney staff came up with the idea for a cartoon to be titled "Donald Duck in Nutzi Land" [later retitled "Der Fuehrer's Face"], giving the All-American duck a nightmare that he was living in a country run by Nazis. It won the Academy Award as "Best Animated Short Subject" in 1942 [Maltin and Wikipedia say 1943, but the Academy's website says 1942].

Those were the days. For all his moral-equivalency talk of the impulse to "demonize" evil incarnate and his pop-psych-lite analysis of humor as "our way of relieving aggression," critic/historian Maltin gets the big picture exactly right:

It gave audiences a chance to think, as Donald does, about the freedoms they might have taken for granted.

"Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America," quacks Donald ecstatically, embracing Liberty as he realizes she is the true source of the shadow. The closest contemporary animation comes to that kind of fearless good-vs-evil clarity would be South Park.

Speaking of  DVDs and the usefulness of demonizing one's enemies, a revealing collection of animated propaganda "was recently recovered from Russia's television vaults," according to Amazon's product description of "Russia's Animated Propaganda War" [via boingboing], a four-disc boxed set that includes a two-hour documentary and six hours of short films.

Now you can view Soviet animated propaganda on DVD in the comfort of your own home. Click here for the trailer.

"The Russian Revolution of 1917 divided the world into two ideological camps, capitalist and communist," begins the voiceover for the trailer of "Russia's Animated Propaganda War": 

For the next  70 years, the communists would wage a war of words and images against their capitalist enemies. The goal: To capture the hearts and minds of the Soviet masses with disinformation.

From the Amazon review:

[The DVD set] opens a window on a lost art from a lost world. Animation began in Russia under the czars, with the morbid wit of Ladislaw Starewicz's stop-motion creations using the stiff little bodies of insects . . . But after revolution and civil war, film acquired a new importance to the state. With the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, Lenin proclaimed the cinema the most important of all the arts, presumably for its ability to communicate directly with the oppressed and widely illiterate masses.

"In his spare time, [Russian entomologist/puppet-animator Ladislaw Satrewicz] experimented with stop-action films using beetles, which he articulated by wiring the legs to the thorax with sealing wax . . . London newspapers wrote that the insects were alive, trained by an unidentified Russian scientist," according to UbuWeb Film.  "The Cameraman's Revenge" (1912) above tells a story of insect jealousy and infidelity.

But you don't have to be oppressed or illiterate to buy the Big Lie. We were delighted to see reference and a link to one of our own favorite posts on the subject, "Chomsky, Moore, Fisk: Pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant" in the comments of boingboing's post where we first learned of the new DVDs:

"American Imperialists and Fascist Barbarians," and "Capitalist Sharks and Communism's Shining Future" [the subtitles of the two boxes of the boxed set of DVDs]

This reads like the headlines on Indy Media on any given day.

"For the first time in ninety years the West can now see how the Soviets portrayed them."

Oh, please, any kid wearing a Che shirt has been following the Soviet line that has permeated Western popular culture for the better part of the last 80 years or so.

As we said in that post of ours, "Whether it's back in the gulags of the old USSR, in the imamically orchestrated "street" of today's Arab tyrannies or in the politically correct, ivy-covered towers in our own backyard at Harvard, intimidation is the blogtheme that keeps on giving." Just ask Donald Duck.

Comments

[goomp]

Demonizing the perceived enemy is always what everyone does. So called "Liberals" demonize George Bush, Born Again Christians and conservatives. As a conservative I have little trouble demonizing liberals, multiculturists and most Democrat politicians.

[John Ruberry]

Sadly, Hezbollah and that Mickey Mouse knock-off, Furfur, has learned this lesson.

[Tom Bowler]

Lenin proclaimed the cinema the most important of all the arts, presumably for its ability to communicate directly with the oppressed and widely illiterate masses.

Lefty strategy hasn't changed much over the years, has it.