{"id":763,"date":"2005-04-06T15:35:46","date_gmt":"2005-04-06T15:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:06","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:06","slug":"propaganda_redu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=763","title":{"rendered":"Propaganda Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

No time to blog later today, but check out Kenneth Turan’s review of Marshall Plan propaganda films in the L.A. Times – “How the U.S. waged peace after WWII<\/a>.” It’s behind the subscription wall, so I’ll quote a bit:<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, a country won a great war but found itself uncertain about how to proceed in the aftermath of victory. How best to ensure that the enemy got on its feet economically? And, more important, how to encourage a revival of democracy in countries that had been under totalitarian rule for many years? How indeed.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though the parallels to America’s challenge in postwar Iraq are unmistakable and intriguing, the cataclysm that previously put America into that kind of a quandary was the Second World War. How we responded to those dilemmas is the subject of a fascinating and surprisingly relevant four-part series of rarely seen films \u2014 at one time actually illegal in this country \u2014 beginning tonight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Its title says it nicely: “Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan, 1948-1953.”<\/p>\n

\n…<\/p>\n

\nA key element of that recovery plan was the production of films candidly intended to influence public opinion and, as the title proclaims, sell democracy. A Marshall Plan Motion Picture Section was set up, headquartered in Paris but working out of 18 countries. Stuart Schulberg, the son of pioneering studio executive B.P. and the brother of writer Budd, was one of the heads of the section, and it is his daughter, Sandra Schulberg, who has spearheaded the creation of the current 25-film series.<\/p>\n

\nThe motion picture section made some 250 films, all shorts and most in the 20-minute range. In an era when audiences demanded shorts, the films played widely in theaters and had an extensive nontheatrical life in 13 languages as well: The Athens administrator of the Marshall Plan even hired boats to bring copies to the Greek islands. As a result, the prints of these films were pretty beaten up, which is where the Academy Film Archive stepped in to preserve a good percentage of the ones being screened.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See my post on propaganda<\/a>, below.<\/p>\n

Of all the reasons to see this landmark series, its relevance to what has been happening in Iraq is the most absorbing, and not only because the administration has yet to come up with a comparable way to win the peace in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\nTo see these films, to hear their talk about “the victory over the power of darkness,” is to experience a postwar world where a positive attitude and hard work was all that was needed to succeed. It’s also to understand why the simple, powerful rhetoric of World War II and the Marshall Plan has had such a seductive lure for today’s policy-makers. We did it then, the powers in Washington are no doubt thinking, we can do it now.<\/p>\n

\nHow much of a parallel exists between postwar Europe and postwar Iraq, however, is a question history has yet to definitively answer.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, in all the four layers of editing at the L.A. Times, no one has apparently heard of the Morgenthau Plan<\/a>. Perhaps if they read blogs??<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No time to blog later today, but check out Kenneth Turan’s review of Marshall Plan propaganda films in the L.A. Times – “How the U.S. waged peace after WWII.” It’s behind the subscription wall, so I’ll quote a bit: Once upon a time, a country won a great war but found itself uncertain about how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}