Counter-Currents
Theodor Seuss Geisel during his wartime service in the US Army.
2,055 words
Though it’s been almost a year since our crazed oligarchs decided that Dr. Seuss is racist and several of his books need to disappear, aspects of his cancellation are worth reexamination. Though it pales in comparison to other absurd proclamations from our deranged ruling class — most recently, the Anti-Defamation League schizoiding on the definition of racism, and yet more adults having to apologize for saying bad words –, what makes the Seuss fiasco so hysterical and ironic is that he was one of the Left’s own.
When the idea first appeared out of nowhere, as they always do, Counter-Currents writer Robert Hampton hit the nail on the head when he stated,
[b]ut the Left now turns on one of its most dutiful propagandists for the sake of proper progress. The only ones left to defend Dr. Seuss are the people he spent his whole life mocking and caricaturing. What a turnaround.
I will here examine the depth of Dr. Seuss’ Left-leaning ideological commitments in the form of two very bizarre works: an instructional film titled Your Job in Germany and its subsequent documentary adaptation, Hitler Lives.
I’m not sure if you can pinpoint the specific moment when it officially happened — it’s been on a path of acceleration for some time now — but our ruling class has officially dispensed with subversion. Their intentions are now out in the open; no more smoke and mirrors. Not since the Second World War has this country seen propaganda so overt and charged with threats of retribution if its messages are not adhered to. It is because of this unveiling that historical Left-wing subversion can be so easily researched; they’ve been bragging about it for some time. It is with this idea in mind that I was able to write a piece on Dr. Seuss by mostly relying on every liberal college professor’s most hated research method: Wikipedia.
We all know Dr. Seuss as the quirky children’s writer who used bizarre illustrations and sometimes annoying limericks, but his background is more peculiar than one would think given the hazy memory most people have of reading his books in their youth. The wartime newspeak mentioned above is key, because that’s where Dr. Seuss got his start — or maybe it began even earlier. Born in Massachusetts in 1904, Seuss experienced anti-German prejudice as a boy after the outbreak of the Great War, which was unsurprising given his birth name of Theodor Seuss Geisel and the fact that he grew up in somewhat puritanical, Anglo-Saxon-dominated New England. Rather than bolster any positive sentiments he had about his German identity, however, the unwanted attention must have driven him away from it; Seuss went on to Dartmouth and eventually doctoral studies at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he no doubt learned how to be a good Anglo-American.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s In Defense of Prejudice here
After college, Seuss and his wife moved to New York, where he found employment in the city’s burgeoning advertising industry, amassing a considerable fortune for someone in that line of work. Hobnobbing with New York’s 1930s upper class — you already know the type — brought him into connection with some fairly interesting characters, especially for a glorified copywriter and future children’s author. One such acquaintance was Frank Vanderlip, architect of the Federal Reserve.
As war broke out across the world, Dr. Seuss did his part for globalism by drawing hundreds of political cartoons for a liberal New York newspaper, all covering themes we are abundantly familiar with today: anti-isolationism, deploring racism against blacks and Jews, and generally promoting big government and one-world ideologies. After Washington officially declared war, Seuss went to work in the field of propaganda making films, two of which were instructional movies for Allied occupying forces overseas.
Your Job in Germany opens with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony playing over footage of the Liberty Bell tolling and the words “VICTORY LEADS TO PEACE.” Cymbals suddenly crash and the words “SOMETIMES NOT” follow the silence. The film then presents itself as a guide for American servicemen preparing to serve in occupied Germany. It wastes no time in telling them exactly what to think of their role. Though the film concedes that Hitler is gone, the swastika is finished, and the concentration camps are empty, it warns the soldiers that the summer flowers and idyllic German scenery could make a serviceman forget that he is in “enemy country.” “You are up against something more than tourist scenery, you are up against German history; it isn’t good,” the film audaciously claims.
A brief history of German militarism follows, starting with the unification of the various German states under Bismarck and their supposed immediate bloodlust in the Franco-Prussian war, and again during the world wars. War is presented as something uniquely German, as if the average viewer wouldn’t be able to tally the number of conflicts fought by the Allied nations in that same span of time. In between each German conflict described, the lovely music, landscape, culture, and people of Germany are shown as a way of duping people, specifically Americans, into thinking the German is anything but pure evil.
The occupier is told that unless he follows what the film recommends, “Nazi thinking, Nazi training, and Nazi trickery remain” and will lead to an inevitable “fourth war.” Every job a person could do is listed as a breeding ground for potential Nazi sympathizers, and German youth are said to be “the most dangerous” in bringing about another conflict because they were “brought up on straight propaganda” — not unlike the film itself. The narrator then dictates that there be “no fraternization with the German people” while showing footage of little girls with their hair in braids and women purchasing vegetables at markets. “The German people are not our friends,” it boldly states.
The film ends with a reminder that Germany is no longer allowed a seat at the table of respectable nations and that the soldier on guard in the occupied land is there to keep it that way. Sadly, almost 80 years later, this notion appears to have been expanded to the entirety of Western civilization.
A screening was held for American generals prior to the film’s distribution to units in training. General Patton apparently walked out in the middle of it, declaring that it was bullshit. The film was nevertheless still utilized. What makes it so interesting is not that some of the top brass disliked it, however, but rather how it compares to another film penned by Dr. Seuss focusing on the occupation of Japan: Our Job in Japan. Their disparity begins even in the opening titles; it is the job of the individual soldier (your) to be isolated out of fear of the German people and to do what he can to stop them, whereas the collective effort (our) in Japan was reaffirmed, according to Seuss, taking a different approach.
In Our Job in Japan, MacArthur’s USS Missouri speech opens the film, starting with his mentioning of a “better world” to come out of the conflict. Though the opening credits use the same foreboding font as its European Theater counterpart, the narrator references solving the problem of “what to do with 70 million Japanese people” as some sort of Christian mission as opposed to implementing an eternal cultural punishment. Japanese society’s devout following of its warmongering leaders is mentioned, but never as a catalyst to an inevitable future war. In fact, their lengthy history of aggression in China and elsewhere throughout Asia is all but glossed over. “Our problem is in the brain of the Japanese head,” says the narrator; and instead of the entire Japanese people being regarded as evil and untrustworthy, as their Axis counterparts were said to be, their brains had merely been “tricked” by a small coterie of warlords.
Halfway through, Shintoism is referenced and the film suddenly becomes more of a documentary, highlighting the exotic peculiarities of a foreign people in song and dance in lieu of actually instructing an occupying soldier on how to do his job. It wasn’t the Japanese people, but merely their “brains” that were duped by a ruling class’ restructuring of the Shinto religion.
Dismantling Japan’s war machine is said to be the easy part; altering their ideas is the real challenge. The film explicitly states that this is not the job of the US Army, however: “They can only do that for themselves . . . Our job is to see that they do it.” Instead of being encouraged to avoid the local populace as they were in Germany, footage of American soldiers accepting flowers from Japanese girls, sharing comic books with Japanese boys, and fraternization in general is shown. “Regardless of race, or creed, or color,” Americans agree on offering a fair break for everybody, the film stresses . . . except for Germany, obviously. So sympathetic was Our Job in Japan toward the Japanese that General MacArthur apparently went to certain lengths to suppress its distribution.
Barely six months after the war in Europe had ended, Jewish Hollywood director Don Siegel and writer Saul Elkins retooled Seuss’ Your Job in Germany to make Hitler Lives, a documentary that won an Oscar in 1946. The film is only about seven minutes longer than Seuss’ original, but the blatant, anti-German/fascist propaganda must have been too enticing for LA’s Jewish colony. The main difference in Hollywood’s version is that it intensifies the portrayal of the war’s chaos and destruction against the docile, innocent people of Europe and the free world. More concentration camp footage is added, girls being raped is alluded to, and the leveling of churches is shown. Inspiring disgust is the film’s desired goal, an example being:
And with typical German efficiency, the ashes of the burnt bodies were mixed with manure to enrich the soil, and raised a crop of cabbages grown with human fertilizers, that once was someone’s husband, wife, and child.
The films ends with a warning that Hitler and his Nazi ideology live on — in America, of all places, the primary force that turned the Third Reich into ashes. “Race hatred and violence” are said to be indicators of American fascism, and 1940s “Karens” are depicted arguing about God-knows-what. The film closes with footage of leaders of the “free world,” including Stalin, working together for a better future, all the while still condemning racism. Hitler Lives might very well have been the first piece of post-war propaganda devised by our current neoliberal ruling order. For those that know this, it’s almost too cringeworthy to watch. Yet, it is only in today’s mindset that such a piece of ethnomasochistic trash could be critiqued for being too soft. The film’s Wikipedia page states,
However, there is no mention of Jews as victims of persecution. The crematoriums of a concentration camp are shown, only using “victims” to describe those murdered.
Though Seuss had nothing to do with Hitler Lives, he laid its groundwork. He was already busy turning his war propaganda themes into children’s books by that time. Though he stated that children’s literature should have no lessons attached to it, he contradicts this notion by admitting that there’s an inherent moral in any story and that he’s “subversive as hell.”[1] His stories focus on all the same tropes that were highlighted in his war propaganda: anti-racism, the woes of (Right-wing) authoritarianism, and anti-isolationism. Since his heyday, many of his works have been adapted into television programs and films. As stated in Your Job in Germany, the German child was to be feared as the incubator of a new war. Thus, what better way to avoid anything remotely conservative, Right-wing, or fascist — all being the same in the eyes of men like Seuss — in America than to start by indoctrinating American youth?
Thus we can now understand the full irony of the fact that the very people and ideologies Seuss spent his entire life extolling eventually came to cancel him. No matter how anti-racist, globalist, and Left-leaning he was, he happened to inadvertently draw certain demographics in a way that made them appear as less than God-like — so those books have to go. Sadly, Seuss must have forgotten that he was white, and that’s all it takes to be deemed unworthy today.
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Note
[1] Jonathan Cott, “The Good Dr. Seuss” in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1984).
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16 comments
Trivia: Seuss’s family pronounced their name as Soyss, according to John Strausbaugh’s recent book Victory City, about NYC in WW2. That book is well-written and worth reading, but the philosemitism is extreme. It seems that not one page in the book is without reference to “soandso, a Jewish immigrant from [].” I mean, yes, New York is very Jewish, but there were others who were there in the mid 20th century. Jeez…
Mid-wits love to ask anyone with a New York accent, “are you Jewish?”
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll check it out!
“as their Axis counterparts were said to be”
The author must have either meant “partners” or he’s unaware of what the Axis was. iirc, Japan was actually one of the two founding members, with Italy joining at a later date.
“partners,” a better word choice!
It’s the other way around. “Axis” originally referred to the so-called Rome-Berlin axis. Japan later signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in 1940.
Are there any specific kids books he wrote that are particularly subversive that come to mind? I’d be curious to reread those. And General Patton’s refusal to hate the German people is what likely got him killed.
I read Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Patton and in it, he alludes that certain Jewish interests had decided that he had the potential to fight against the system, and knew he most likely would.
Patton was also quoted as saying, “we fought the wrong enemy”, in confidence to a loyal aide. He also knew who was in charge of the American war machine, he just miscalculated his chances of being a specific target.
The Patton and Forrestal death conspiracies fascinate me. Patton, obviously being the loudmouth of the two, let enough comments slip to know where his mind was by the end of the war; Forrestal, on the other hand, is much more mysterious. I have a rare copy of The Death of James Forrestal by Cornell Simpson, who continuously references the “international Communist conspiracy” as his killers. Forrestal’s opinions on the rapidly changing geo-politics of the era are a great indicator of what groups would probably want him dead.
As General Patton was quoted as saying: “we fought the wrong enemy”, the same was with General Douglas McArthur. After he was sacked by Truman despite his wonderful battlefield prowess brought by his bold and lightening feat of Inchon landing that turned the table at the enemies in the early phrase of Korean War, during a testimony he gave to the US Congress, he stated with frankness and certitude that “Japan fought a war of self-defense”, and “Japan was cornered and prodded (by us) into a war it couldn’t win. its mind was like that of a child while US was like an adult” (my paraphrase), to the surprise and disbelief of many.
This was in spite of the fact that Japan was his avowed arch-adversary and he was one of the main US generals who led US to the final victory in the Pacific War over Japan and that he was the head of the GHQ, the military occupation government of US in the wake of Japan’s defeat. I believe like General Patton, McArthur also spoke his mind because he perceived, albeit belatedly, that the real and much greater threat to US and the Western world was the Red Soviets and China, not the reluctantly warring Japan who was dragged and goaded into conflict with US by the secretly maneuvering and duplicitous FDR and his communist spy friends and associates in disguise, when America finally had to come to face the cruel and glaring realities of losing China to communists and fighting the commie forces in the Korean War.
The massive reversal in the Chinese civil war from nationalist dominated territory to a complete red victory will never cease to amaze me. You seem to be more schooled on it than I am; I’ve heard the communist forces largely sat out direct engagements with the Japanese, with nationalist forces taking the brunt of it. I wonder how much truth there is to that.
“I’ve heard the communist forces largely sat out direct engagements with the Japanese, with nationalist forces taking the brunt of it. I wonder how much truth there is to that.”
It is 90% true according to historical facts, except the communist forces led by Mao fought two, and only two, frontal battles with the Japanese military. One was at the beginning phases of the Sino-Japanese War which was an ambush of the Japanese armies; the other was led by one of Mao’s capable general Peng Dehuai, aiming at the Japanese post and railway transportation, which was later criticized by Mao, for fear of unduly disclosing the strength of the communist forces to the Japanese. The rest of the communist forces against Japanese armies were all skirmishes with very limited scales. And the Japanese soldiers being killed by the Chinese communist forces were also very limited in number, a small faction of the numbers of the Japanese KIA at the hand of the the nationalist (KMT) army.
In case Mr. Bavaria and other readers are interested in more doses of the complex and exciting contemporary history of East Asia centered on US, Japan, and China including that of WWII, you may just search essays written by “Comtaose” and will get a feast of rarely known and intriguing historical facts. Here are just a few examples I’d like to highlight here in this context.
Let me start with late 1920s, when the nationalist forces dispatched its expedition army to beat down the warlord of central and northern China in an attempt to unite China under the nationalist flag. However, it must be noted that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) founded by Dr. Sun Yat-sen (who was already dead then) had already been heavily infiltrated and influenced by the commies, largely due to the weaknesses and naivety of Sun himself. The marching expeditionary forces, incited and agitated by the lurking commie elements, deliberately provoked and attacked foreign consulates of the Western countries and Japan including both diplomatic personnel and civilians alike, in Wuhan, Jinan, Nanking etc. The aim was to put the nationalist government, then headed by Chiang Kai-shek as Sun’s legitimate successor, in a tough and awkward spot and to drive a wedge between his regime and the Western powers so that the commies would reap the benefits. In a worse case, the British consular in Wuhan was dragged to the square of the city and openly executed with a broadsword by the Chinese soldiers and his wife was gang-raped to near death. British ships sailing on Yangtze River were also snatched, searched, and robbed by brute force against international laws. The British, French and Japanese diplomats and civilians bore the brunt of the massacres and robberies from the marauding expeditionary armies. In retaliation, the British and French gunboats shelled some cities along the Yangtze River such as Wanzhou and caused some Chinese civilian deaths. Major Western countries then issued a united and strongly worded ultimatum to the Chinese nationalist government backed by threats of war, which was later mediated and diffused by Japan which adopted a policy of appeasement toward the Chinese nationalist regime under the Shidehara cabinet of that time. It must be noted that the soft and conciliatory stance of Japan toward China in late 1920s later backfired for Japan as the Soviet and the red forces it supported in China perceived the signal and came to regard Japan as the “soft link” in the chain of the “imperialist powers” and thus started a new campaign that focused on stoking up anti-Japanese sentiment in Chinese masses and sowing discord and alienating Japan from Britain and America.
In early 1930s, Japan seized Manchuria by force and started to build and modernize it as a reliable strategic buttress and buffer against Soviet Union to prepare for predictable future wars between itself and the Soviets. Freed from the grips of the backward and barbarian warlords of northeast China, Manchuria under the Japanese rule became clean and orderly and prosperous. Until Japan’s defeat and surrender in 1945, the GDP of Manchuria had surpassed that of the Japanese homeland and accounted for 80% of the total GDP of East Asia. Shinkyo (now Changchun), the capital of Manchukuo became a very modern city with infrastructures and city greenery coverage rivaling if not exceeding those of Washington D.C. In mid 1930s, Japan joint Germany and Italy to form the “Anti-Communist Axis”. In December 1936, the commie forces led by Mao and his right-hand man Zhou Enlai plotted the “Incident of Xi’an” and successfully coerced Chiang into fighting the Japanese and legalizing the commie camp under the banner of “the united front of resisting the Japanese aggression”.
In July 1937, the commie intelligence cleverly exploited and capitalized an isolated and already solved skirmish between the Japanese guards legally stationing in the outskirts of Peking and the local Chinese nationalist garrisons to expand and escalate it to a full-scale war between China and Japan in a further attempt to weaken the nationalist government so as to seize the power in China in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese war. In August of the same year, Chiang, now exasperated by Japan’s early victories and under the pressure from its commie ally, staged a false-flag operation in Shanghai to incriminate, provoke and entrap Japan, followed by a full-throttled offense against the disadvantaged local Japanese marines. The Japanese marines stood the ground and fought with mettle and tenacity and turned the situation around with consecutive reinforcements sent from Japan, thus setting in motion an eight-year war between the two nations. Later, under the support of Japan, a split faction within the nationalist regime, headed by Wang Jingwei, and holding high the banner of fighting off the communism, reconciling China and Japan, and reestablishing a legitimate nationalist China, was founded who became a third force in China until the war’s end.
Basically that’s is a quick recapitulation of the major events of China from 1920s to 1940s till the end of the war. From this historical course, one with a discerning eye can well see that Japan was by no means the only evil or guilty part. The Chinese side, including both the communist and the nationalist camps, had its problems and fallacies. It was a like mirror reflecting China’s long and winded history that is full of excessive trickeries, iniquities, chicaneries, and duplicities.
For more in-depth and insightful understanding of the Chinese national traits and the long veiled truths behind the curtains of the Chinese-Japanese War, two books are highly recommended to those with a deep interest in the concerned topics.
1. Ways that are Dark: The Truth about China, a great book by a greatly knowledgeable, perceptual, and farsighted man, Mr. Ralph M. Townsend, who had been a long time US diplomat in China. It has also been translated into Japanese with a new Preface penned by Willis Carto. The book is still available at Amazon.com, but sold at a steep price. Those with an interest might search online to find a copy from a different source and at a more affordable price.
2. The Inside Story of China’s War Propaganda and the Truth of the Japanese-Chinese War, a highly rare and valuable book by Frederic Vincent William, who was an American citizen and adventurer in 1930s’ China. This book is now hard to find for sale online. Those with an interest and patience could try searching online carefully to see if a digital copy could be located.
Fascinating. This is really in depth and sorry it took a while to reply….
“In early 1930s, Japan seized Manchuria by force and started to build and modernize it as a reliable strategic buttress and buffer against Soviet Union to prepare for predictable future wars between itself and the Soviets”
Amazing to think what this would look like after the Russo-Japanese War: Japan and Soviets going toe-to-toe on the Manchurian frontier in WW2.
And thanks for the rec on Ways that are Dark, hopefully I can get to it one day!
Well, unfortunately, Dr. Seuss was not the only American German to become an ardent Germanophobe. Eisenhower is a much more striking example. And some other examples can be found in the book “Deutsche helfen Amerika bauen – und Amerikas Dank?”, by Heinrich Piebrock.
Sadly true. I guess that’s what two world wars of virulent anti-German propaganda will do.
It just goes to show how death camps like the rhinemeadow could exist after the war ended. There was such hatred of the germans that continued after the war was officially over. I think this policy contnued for several years 1945-48. Only when the russians wanted to take over did we americans decide that the germans weren’t that bad after all.
A very interesting and thought-provoking article by Mr. Bavaria. I also read Mr. Hampton’s essay on the same figure i.e. Dr. Seuss. Both articles were well written and highly revealing. From my perspective as an East Asian national socialist and supporter of White Nationalism, I’d like to humbly offer my two cents of opinion and impressions after reading these two great pieces:
1. Dr. Seuss is a obviously an American of German ancestry who is self-hating and self-abnegating when it comes to Germany, German history, German culture, and German people, in the same line with Dwight Eisenhower. That’s utterly despicable and disgusting.
2. I was particularly impressed by sentences in this essay such as “For those that know this, it’s almost too cringeworthy to watch. Yet, it is only in today’s mindset that such a piece of ethnomasochistic trash could be critiqued for being too soft. ”; and “Thus we can now understand the full irony of the fact that the very people and ideologies Seuss spent his entire life extolling eventually came to cancel him. ”; and “ Sadly, Seuss must have forgotten that he was white, and that’s all it takes to be deemed unworthy today.” These three sentences are pure gold, highlighting the hard and deep irony embedded in the modern day cancellation of Seuss and his books, and being infinitely thought-provoking and soul-searching. This guy was like a serpent who ate his own tail, or, a smaller poisonous snake being devoured by a larger and more poisonous snake (the dominant ideologies in the current West). He must be rolling in his grave? What would he feel about being denied and discredited by a society he had so faithfully served and helped build? Why and how the hell the West centered on Anglo-America, having committed the worst fratricide in modern world history against its brotherly German people, have declined and decayed to such a civilizational and moral nadir?
Emotionally, I have no problem to call it “karma”; but rationally, it’s the unshakable duty and obligation of all White nations, beginning with the Anglo-American nations, to make a deep self-reflection and act in unity and solidarity to salvage the entire Western world and White race.
3. I personally have no problem at all at the allegedly lenient treating of Japan and the Japanese in the propaganda film Our Job in Japan. Make no mistake, it’s already bad and unjust enough to Japan, with many deliberate or ignorance-incurred historical misconceptions and distortions, which is glaringly apparent to any discerning eye who knows historical truths behind events such as Sino-Japanese War, the Pearl Harbor etc. We only felt unfair and fumed over it because in comparison with the propagandists’ treatment of Japan, the treatment of Germany is way more unjust and harsh, mainly due to Jews’ virulent and implacable hatred and enmity for the National Socialist Germany, hence the wantonly and rabidly hateful and vengeful contents in Your Job in Germany and Hitler Lives. In a word, it is not they treated Japan too well or clemently, it is they treated Germany with too much willful hate and diabolism.
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