Dr. Seuss, Wartime Propaganda, & Cancel Culture

Posted By Anthony Bavaria On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]

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 [2]writer Robert Hampton hit the nail on the head when he stated [2],

[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.

[3]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s In Defense of Prejudice here [4]

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.

Your Job in Germany, 1945Your Job in Germany, 1945

 

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.

Our Job In Japan (1945)Our Job In Japan (1945)

 

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 [5] 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] [6] 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] [8] Jonathan Cott, “The Good Dr. Seuss” in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1984).