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A Picture is Worth...

Submitted by Ken Watts on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 18:16

SOME PROPAGANDA EMAILS ARE dishonest, some are frightening (there's one like that to come), but some are so ironic as to be comic—or would be, if you didn't know that they actually worked on some people.

Today's is one of those. It's short, and has a picture, so I'll begin by letting it speak for itself:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

From the Chicago Tribune April 21, 1934.....

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!

The cartoon features various political figures of the day, throwing money out of cart labeled "Depleting the resources of the soundest government in the world" and "Young Pinkies from Columbia and Harvard".

Stalin stands, approving, in the background, and I'm guessing that the figure in the lower left corner, writing a "Plan of Action for the U.S." is Trotsky.

His "Plan of Action" reads:

SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!
Under the guise of
recovery - Bust the
government - blame
the capitalists for
the failure -
junk the constitution
and declare
a
dictatorship.

So the message of the cartoon would seem to be that:

  1. Roosevelt's Government is spending the country into bankruptcy,
  2. That the explanation for this is that they well-educated, and worse,
  3. That they are socialists and
  4. That they are associated with foreigners and unAmerican ideas, and
  5. That the capitalists in the country are not really to blame for the mess.

The intended message of the e-mail as a whole would seem to be that:

  1. The cartoon was right on all five points,
  2. The situation today is pretty much the same, and that
  3. We should learn from the past, and not repeat our mistakes.

That last point is deliciously ironic, because the entire email is an exercise in not learning from the past, and in repeating mistakes.

In point of fact, no one busted the government, the capitalists were in large part to blame for the great depression, the constitution was not junked, and no one declared a dictatorship.

Another picture might help at this juncture:


This is an economic chart of the period we're talking about. If you find 1934 at the bottom, and line it up with the graph you can see exactly where the nation was, in the recovery process, at the time this cartoon was published.

You might also want to note:

  1. where the turn-around occurred,
  2. the fact that Hoover was a Republican, and
  3. the fact that Roosevelt was a Democrat.

So it turns out that there was a new Democratic president at the time, and that the country was in the beginning of a recovery after a devastating depression under the former Republican president.

In spite of this, those who didn't like the Democrats were running around screaming about elite, over-educated socialists with foreign connections who were spending too much.

And they're still doing the same thing today.

Will they ever learn?