Thursday, October 8, 2009

Solviet Propaganda Cartoon: A Lesson Not Learned

This video was pretty hard to understand, watching it from a Westerners point of view. The cartoon starts out by a brief montage of images that’s supposed to depict WWII taking place; there are images of rockets taking off, the sounds of gunfire and bombs detonating, and the massive pile of Nazi helmets. The captain of the German army comes out and is depicted as a coward by the sheep suit he was wearing and waving a surrender flag. This is when I started to have a hard time understanding the cartoon, the German captain limps into the U.S.’s “hands”. The U.S. proceeds to nurse the Germans back to health, all while letting them continue reading and embracing their Nazi rhetoric. I understand that the U.S. “helped” get Germany back on their feet, but we also blew up half of their country. I’m not excusing the German’s by any means, what they did to Europe set them back hundreds of years in my opinion. But in the cartoon, once we helped them back to their feet, they continued to have Pro Nazi rallies and spitting their hate speech? I know there are still Nazi supporters in Germany, but it wasn’t like they were even remotely close to starting another Nazi movement. They had no infrastructure, no military, and a good portion of their manpower was dead or in jail. I found it quite amusing how they generalized all Germans to be fat, lederhosen wearing, beer drinking slobs. It was also pretty funny how whenever the German’s spoke or wrote anything it was nothing but a barrage of bullet sounds. Finally in the end, after the Germans were
forced to sign the U.S.S.R.-German treaty, the Germans had to mend their coward suits back together. Implying that they could say all they wanted, but in the end there was nothing Germany could do to become a superpower. It is very ironic to see how the Russians feel about how the war was won and who contributed the most. Through that cartoon, it implied that the Russians were the ones that took down the Germans, but last time I checked it was a multi national effort where France, England, The U.S., Russia and many other countries came together to defeat the Axis of Evil.

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