> The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.
- Elmer Davis, director of the US Office of War Information
Fun one to track down. Had to hop through a couple papers and books, but this is what everything winds up referencing:
> It was an organization designed not only to disseminate information and to clarify issues but also to arouse support for particular symbols and ideas. "The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people's minds," said Davis, "is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized."
Koppes, C. and Black, G., 1977. What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942-1945. The Journal of American History, 64(1), p.2, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1888275>
That paper then points to this ultimate source:
> Elmer Davis to Byron Price, Jan. 27, 1943, Box 3, Records of the Office of War Information, RG 208 (Federal Records Center, Suitland, Md.)
Dead end. I emailed the Archives but the entire facility is closed because of the pandemic. I also tried tracking down the paper's authors but both are retired.
C'mon, you didn't break into the Archive and open the box? Typical Internet nonsense.
Seriously: very nice work; thank you. Above and beyond!
> "The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people's minds," said Davis, "is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized."
Now a nearly irrelevant second place to social media.
It's not a silly point to make when you realize that Hollywood is not a government agency. It is a reasonable question to ask how this coordination is possible when there are no legal restraints on failing to coordinate.
Hollywood gets to borrow millions in us army equipment for free if the producer runs the script by them first. Part of the deal is that the us army always have to be the good guys and not have any internal problems related to things like sexism homophobia or anything else
Is the Russian film industry a Russian government agency?
The simplest explanation is that, especially historically, Hollywood has targeted domestic audiences first. What message do you think is/was more likely to play well in the US and broadly in the west?
The theory is probably that the characters must be relatable and therefore American. Films about British actions in the war often have random American characters thrown in too. (I’m not sure that is unrealistic though)
Perhaps another thing is that when the memory of the war was still fresh and people (at least in eg France) generally knew that the USSR had a big impact, McCarthyism was also at its height and there were strong reasons not to show communists in a good light. And then maybe later films mostly copied the trend.
In U-571 History was entirely rewritten as to suggest that it were U.S.A. soldiers, who captured the first German Enigma, whereas in actuality it were English soldiers that did so.
Anyone who watches a Hollywood movie and assumes it accurate is a fool. Movies are made to make money not educate.
It’s like the chase scene at the end of Argo. That never happened. They just got on the plane and left but if the movie was accurate that would be a horribly boring ending so they made up a better on.
Hollywood is highly critical of the USA. Pretty much every sentiment in a post 90's war movie is "The US also did some bad stuff that we should feel ashamed about."
> When have you seen a movie about the USSR winning the WW2?
...almost all of them? the USSR was one of the Allies. who won WW2. so every WW2 movie which doesn't engage in some sort of alt-history has the USSR winning.
The intro sequence for Star Trek: Enterprise[1] was quite interesting to say the least. — It details the history of human exploration culminating in man's achievement of a method of faster than light travel, so it implies, but strangely the first man in space and the first artificial satellite are omitted, and in their stead we may behold a majestic sight of an unknown U.S.A. submarine.
Careful now, lest the audience actually learn that it were the Soviets who launched the first man into space.
Is the claim here that the US has organizations that actively work to prevent a movie showing Russians winning WW2?
It is easier for me to believe that a movie specifically about the Russians winning WW2 simply would not get financed due to low probability of earning a decent ROI due to American/English audiences not wanting to pay to watch it.
I was also taught in US history AP class in high school that a significant, if not necessary, element of winning WW2 was the Russians tying up the Germans on the eastern front, and it was stressed that the Russians suffered the most casualties by far.
>I was also taught in US history AP class in high school that a significant, if not necessary, element of winning WW2 was the Russians tying up the Germans on the eastern front
The Soviets along with some remaining Polish forces also won the battle of Berlin (which caused Hitler to commit suicide), having pushed back the German army all the way back from the gates of Moscow to the gates of Berlin. The Third Reich, left with no "leader" and no capital and no significant territory neither in the east nor in the west really had no option other than total capitulation or total defeat. The capitulation happened a week later.
The Western Front and the Eastern Front in the end had about the same amount of German causalities and captures.
Anyway, the Soviets did a little more than "just" tying up Germans on the Eastern Front.
Are there that many Battle of Berlin movies to begin with? From the Soviet/Russian perspective I could only find The Fall of Berlin (1950), Liberation (1970-1971), and a documentary Shturm Berlina/Штурм Берлина (2015). Battle of Berlin probably isn't very good movie material, unlike Stalingrad or other parts of the Eastern Front, which have a lot more movies.
Furthermore, I've read [2] that historiography on the Eastern Front was quite poor, even from the Soviet perspective, until Stalin's death. From [2], page 12:
> Soviet military works written before 1958 were highly politicized and focused heavily on the positive role of Stalin in every aspect of war. Correspondingly, operational and tactical detail was lacking.
Fun Fact: In Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Humphrey Bogart plays a first officer aboard a Liberty Ship sending supplies to Murmansk. It has some pro-Soviet and even pro-Communist propaganda, with brave Soviet pilots escorting the ship and cheering people shouting "tovarisch!" to the crew.
They are even told "Tovarisch means 'comrade', which is a good thing!" Then all the ship's crew shout "comrade" back to the throngs of happy, well-fed, smiling Soviet citizens in WW2.
Other fun propaganda lines: "I believe in God, President Roosevelt, and the Brooklyn Dodgers!". They even feature radio recordings of Roosevelt set to patriotic music.
Despite being heavy handed and not having the best effects (you can see lines pulling the subs) it's a fun movie for Bogart fans and those interested in propaganda films. On Amazon Prime, tagged with "Cerebral, Joyous, Intense".
The USSR was not part of the Axis. Quite the opposite. (Although they did have a non-aggression pact with Germany before the start of the war, that did not last long.)
Which just goes to show that many Americans aren't really aware of how the Soviets were crucial to winning that war.
It is true to that they joined the Allies, and the Eastern Front was very important to defeat of Nazi Germany, but let’s be honest when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ended: after Stalin and Hitler coordinated a joint invasion of Poland.
To act like the Soviet Union was Ireland or Switzerland at the start of the war, is disingenuous. Stalin and Hitler made a secret plan to carve out an Eastern European sphere of influence, not unlike the Japanese sphere of influence in East Asia.
The irony of course is that Stalin still got his sphere influence, albeit through the Treaty of Yalta.
When have you seen a movie about the USSR winning the WW2? Or about the Guantanamo Bay?