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 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.
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 — at one time actually illegal in this country — 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.”
…
A 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.
The 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.
See my post on propaganda, below.
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.
To 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.
How much of a parallel exists between postwar Europe and postwar Iraq, however, is a question history has yet to definitively answer.
Sadly, in all the four layers of editing at the L.A. Times, no one has apparently heard of the Morgenthau Plan. Perhaps if they read blogs??
Along these same lines, here is something from Life Magazine, 1946:
The 7 JAN 1946 “Cover”:http://home.san.rr.com/vagabondia/images/tmp/lifecover.jpg of LIfe Magazine
The “Article”:http://home.san.rr.com/vagabondia/images/tmp/life_article.htm associated with that cover.
Joe, just a quick note off-topic. Scott Ferguson of punditdrome.com has posted a “comment”:http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/forums/index.php?showtopic=604&view=findpost&p=2999 at the MT-Blacklist forums as he was unable to comment on your site.. it appears you have either blocked his particular IP octet intentionally and he just isn’t getting the message, or you have inadvertantly IP blocked the entire IP range for comcast.net. Either way he seems to think it’s the fault of MT-Blacklist (which has nothing to do with IP blocking) and the alternate he suggests is that perhaps you should remove commenting altogether so as not to piss him off.. you may wish to respond to him and set the record straight.
cheers.
demonsurfer.
This is a war of ideology, religion, and culture
Marc,
Well said – Excellent!
We are definitely short on message. After all this is a war of ideology, religion, and culture.
We have no time to waste. There are windows of opportunity now open to strategically exploit weaknesses in the flawed ideology of our enemy. Islamofascism is a evil relic of the 12th Century that has no place in our time.
These windows will close shortly. We must exploit these weaknesses to deliver a crushing and fatal blow to our enemy.
The solution is simple. We have the means to do this without resorting to frontal attacks.
First, we as a great Nation must realize we are at war (WWIV) with a very cunning, barbaric, and dangerous enemy. Second, we must unite both left and right as a people to crush and wipe this enemy from the face of the earth just as our parents did in WWII.
We must stay focused, our heads in the game, and our eyes on ball. This is not time to play defensively. We must go for the ball. We must not listen to the whiners on the sidelines. The strategic consequences of the Mad Mullahs of Iran going nuclear are unimaginable.
This is further developed in an earlier post on assisting the Iranian people to effect a regime change. Jim Hake of the Spirit of America has already intuitively figured this out and has a project started for the Lebanese people:
Lebanese independence project
To support Dr. Zin at Regime Change Iran see:
IRAN – WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY FOR REGIME CHANGE
and
Operation Blinding Light
I must have missed your Morganthau Plan post earlier, or I would have taken issue with it. Read “The Conquerors.”
Bottom line is that Morganthau was unqualified and something of an idiot, and the level of discussion about his plan was shockingly terrible. Come to think of it, the parallels are uncanny.
I know of Beschloss’ book, and it’s on the list. But what I’ve read of it doesn’t dramatically change the picture I’ve had of a postwar US tacking and jibing as we tried to figure out what would work.
I’m obviously interested in what you’d “take issue” with…
A.L.
The Morgenthau Plan itself shows less “tacking and jibbing” I think, than it shows FDR’s ‘tell everyone what they want to hear’ management style and poor leadership. The Morgenthau Plan didn’t get far but it got as far as it did because FDR didn’t establish any clear policy on postwar Germany. And in the absence of a clear policy, Morgenthau was allowed to think he had the President’s ear on the subject for too long. Leaks of the plan became effective German propaganda grist.
_How best to ensure that the enemy got on its feet economically?_
impossible as long as they produce oil. Also the prescription the US want to use is totally wrong for the situation on the ground. Iraq is a very rich country. (1 billion barrels py x $20 / 25 million =) They earn like $800 per person a year from oil alone. This makes cheap labour impossible as a way to develop and employ the country. High technology way of employing the county is also not open (needs to much time) so the only way left is using barriers and subsidies, they are costly and inefficient but Iraq has money enough for it to work. The only problem with it is that it runs counter to the ideology of open boarders and privatised industry the US goverments adheres to (for other countries only obvious)
_ And, more important, how to encourage a revival of democracy in countries that had been under totalitarian rule for many years?_
Most of those countries are under dictorial rule and not totalitarian rule. That makes a big difference.
_Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan,_
I really doubt that the Marshall plan films sold democracy. They sold capitalisme, possible of the social democratic kind. It would have been a failure if the people decide for a democratic communisme which was unlike but possible. That is also the problem with this suggestion. It is unlikely that a democratic Middle East will do what the US wants to see happening and this is different from the situation after WWII in which the West Europeans wanted largely the same as the Americans.
bq. This makes cheap labour impossible as a way to develop and employ the country.
Do you understand how freedom works ?
Yes you can have capitalism without freedom, the Capitalist Roader ChiComs, Hilters National Socialism, Mousulini’s Facism, Tony Blares “Tjird Way”
But you cant have freedom without capitalism, free men will trade, they will open shops and they will make things and sell things.
A market is not the creation of govt nor the product of central planners, all they do is create distortions, malinvestment, and dysfunction.
With freedom, the market will take care of itself, all Iraq needs to do is provide a limited govt function of protecting liberty and providing security, but otherwise get out of the way of a free people, who can, and will, do the rest on their own.
the USA’s early ability to supply all its own oil certainly didnt seem to hamper our growth.
the USA is a superpower because we are free, everywhere you look, among democratic states, the less free the people are the less power they have.
Europe has socialised away their ability to defend themselves.
The only altertive is a fear society dictatorship centered around support of a military, but the heart of their solgers is weak when they dont believe in what they are defending.
If the people of Iraq had more benevolent rulers or self rule, of the type they would have felt worth defending, the invasion of Iraq might have been utterly unthinkable.
The meme I get from Iraqi bloggers is patrotic, they are happy to have us there, but they will want us out as soon as they feel that can be safe on their own.
Give them Liberty and freedom of action, allow them to create their own market, limit the govt authority to infastructure security and forein policy,, all those things the US govt should be limited to, and the people of Iraq will be able to do just fine. all to the dismay of the left of course, whos dream is all about living at the point of a govt thugs gun imposing his “social justice” on you.
Roger Simons “article”:http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/04/peretz_speaks.php
and kevins “commentary”:http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/04/peretz_speaks.php#c44608
Says all you need to know about the carping left these days.
They dont understand markets, and they hate markets and think they are evil, and their every solution involves the range from govt control to govt takeover, very small wonder why they cant or refuse to understand that fixing the freedom thing is the beginning of all the other things fixing themselves.
Ron #3
Austin Bay presents a letter on the same, taken with the Perez article and commentary by Simon, you get the impression that in a general sense, we arent doing half bad considering the equally important caution that we still have a lot of hard road ahead
“To Wit:”:http://austinbay.net/blog/index.php?p=214
bq. Victory in this ideological struggle that has galvanized America since 9/11 will occur when terror is no longer an attractive option for Muslim youth, and when moderate Muslim voices dominate the debate about the future of Islamic societies in a globalized, modern world. Military action is a necessary, but insufficient component of the formula for victory.
Right on target, as for the left helping, the BusHitler moonbats would be happy to see 50 millin people go up in flames for a political point.
From here, I still see them still chanting “Tear it down, Tear it all down!”
They are too busy attacking their own source of confort to worry about the plight of those that are actually oppressed.
In the future, if Iraq makes it to to Freedom and a free market economy and all that, they will be denouncing the whole thing as just another capitalist center of “oppression”.
Not the real oppression that created those mass graves of kids, but of the kind exmapled by working for a paycheck.
Its refreshing however, to see stuff like the article Simon is taking note of, if more can see the light on this issue, if we can put off arguing where to hang new stoplights for later. Perhaps there is some hope.
Just a minute observation, that the Marshall plan was developed for a technologically deficient world, when the press that we are used to in the present was not enabled by instant communication or much presence. Post WWII continent was also devastated.
Distributing propaganda was, we can be sure, not seen as lies and deceit by the US buoyed up by success in the war – but as a way to spread an optimistic view of our world that was definitely influenced by the euphoria of winning a war.
There’s actually a component of this effort that seems to be omitted here, but it was very important.
Yes, there was a covert CIA effort to strengthen anti-communist socialists in Europe, but i’m not talking about that. There was also a major program of linkage between American organizations like unions et. al. with their European counterparts as those organizations were reassembled.
These non-governmental affiliations provided a very important entree for these messages that flew below the propaganda radar, and also made a big difference by setting up friendly structures in those countries, not just friendly messages.
Long-term, the global war on terror will be about friendly structures as well as messages and that will mean eroding, supplanting, and/or changing many of today’s freedom-hostile players in the International system. Vid. Belmont Club’s “Mordor”:http://www.demosophia.com/2004/03/wretchard_on_mo.html
AL wrote:
“I know of Beschloss’ book, and it’s on the list. But what I’ve read of it doesn’t dramatically change the picture I’ve had of a postwar US tacking and jibing as we tried to figure out what would work.
I’m obviously interested in what you’d “take issue” with…”
———
That’s true in general. But what happened wasn’t actually Morgenthau’s plan, which was much more draconian than what you were describing and involved the physical destruction of German industry and resources in the Ruhr Valley and the Rhineland. So you’re conflating the situation that Eisenhower was confronted with (widespread starvation & destruction as a result of the war) with a plan that had already been spiked, mainly by Churchill (who was already thinking about the Soviets and how to thwart their designs on Wester Europe).
You’re right, though, that the Morgenthau plan was super dumb, but at the end of the day that was already known. FDR flipped and flopped around because he couldn’t tell his longtime friend to chill. Hull, Stimson, the Pentagon, and later Stettinus all worked against Morgenthau, in addition to Churchill on his end. Some stuff made it into JCS 1067–the Pentagon’s guidance–but not everything. You’re right though, that it wasn’t fully repudiated until the Marshall plan came online in 1947.
There was also the strange case of Morgenthau’s underlying, Dexter White, who was later found to be a Soviet agent.
But the Morgenthau plan has been used by anti-Semites and neo-Nazis to bolster their claim that the Jooooos and their Commie allies are out to get them, so be careful of that.
Actually, though, the the months after the war (as I understand it, no cites on hand), they did start implementing the Morgenthau plan by dismantlying some of the surviving industrial plants in preparation for shipping them abroad.
I’ll be interested in researching it more, but my impression is that the policies varied between pastoralization and “what now?” for the first years after the war.
A.L.
“Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan, 1948-1953.”
As this obliquely refers to, the Marshall Plan didn’t start until 1948. Most of us know that World War II ended in 1945. That’s a three year gap between the end of the War and when the Marshall Plan was started.
While it’s certainly acceptable to make criticisms of the Administration for not planning ahead exactly how to help Iraq more (though, as Mr. Chrenkoff points out, we are doing alot, and I also doubt how much we could have planned without accurate information about what Iraq was like), but it’s really ridiculous to point to World War II as a wonderful example of planning ahead for reconstruction. That just didn’t happen; it was 2.5 years after the end of the war before the Marshall Plan was really formulated.
John #14
And further, dont forget the free marketers that placed germany again in command of Europe in short order.
German Economic “Miracle”:http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GermanEconomicMiracle.html
bq. What looked like a miracle to many observers was really not a miracle. It was expected by Ludwig Erhard and by others of the Freiburg school who understood the damage that can be done by inflation coupled with price controls and high tax rates, and the large productivity gains that can be unleashed by ending inflation, removing controls, and cutting high marginal tax rates.
And the german economic engine lifted the rest of western europe out of dispair far faster and more effectively than the marshal plan did.
Beware the rewriting of history by the socialists.
_What looked like a miracle to many observers was really not a miracle. It was expected by Ludwig Erhard and by others of the Freiburg school who understood the damage that can be done by inflation coupled with price controls and high tax rates, and the large productivity gains that can be unleashed by ending inflation, removing controls, and cutting high marginal tax rates._
ideologic answer.
It is easy to grow an economy when you are in a situation where you still have the people and organisations but not the buildings and machines. Just get the machines back and everything will start rolling again. Also a lot of controls were not because people wanted those controls but because they were needed. You don’t ration food because you want to but because you have a food shortage.
ideologic answer ?
No, factual answer.
Your aversion to history and its clear lesson is what is ideological.
The historical record shows the boom happened when the controls was removed, that the controls themselves, was the problem.
bq. Erhard had a fun summer. From June through August of 1948, wrote Fred Klopstock, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “directive followed directive removing price, allocation, and rationing regulations.” Vegetables, fruit, eggs, and almost all manufactured goods were freed of controls. Ceiling prices on many other goods were raised substantially, and many remaining controls were no longer enforced. Erhard’s motto could have been “Don’t just sit there; undo something.”
bq. It is easy to grow an economy when you are in a situation where you still have the people and organisations but not the buildings and machines.
Btw, Germany was still making new airplanes untill the small shops distributed thruout the countryside was overun, german pilots set fire to brand new fighters the day before surrender.
Ever wonder why german tanks was assembled out of riveted armor panels instaed of large cast parts like everybody elses ?
Large cast parts require a large foundry, the smaller prefab panels and joining fixures that made up a german tank was made in 1000’s of small shops that never got bombed, and we was never able to destroy the German machine tools.
Look at the pics of the german “tank factory” and its little more than a high bay crane over a strip of cement to help assembly. the parts was all made elsewhere, all over germany.
The only weak central targets we was effective at was the fuel refineries and railyards.
The german farms produced a good crop the very year after the war.
bq. Each day, and particularly on weekends, vast hordes of people trekked out to the country to barter food from the farmers. In dilapidated railway carriages from which everything pilferable had long disappeared, on the roofs and on the running boards, hungry people traveled sometimes hundreds of miles at snail’s pace to where they hoped to find something to eat. They took their wares—personal effects, old clothes, sticks of furniture, whatever bombed-out remnants they had—and came back with grain or potatoes for a week or two.
But the economic system was broken, untill Ludwig Erhard took charge.
The unleashed german economic engine lifted all of Europe out of dispair.
You should read the articles written in the early 50s where over all of Europe there is plenty of snipping that the Germans rebounded to rull over us after all.
The recent German decline began when the left came into power and began to destroy everything, as they always do.
_Do you understand how freedom works ?_
Raymond, do you know how economies works?
I suspect that you are a hardcore libertarian. A theory that works about as well as communisme. Both work fantastic in theory but not in practise as they assume that people wont cheat.
The situation in 45 was much more uncertain than it was in 48. In 45 the money wasn’t stable, you didn’t know if your factory was moved to the US or the food would be confiscated. This all leads to hoarding. In 48 all those worries were over and that lead to investements in production when you stop price controle
_The recent German decline began when the left came into power and began to destroy everything, as they always do._
You mean Kohl, the lefty?
>> The situation in 45 was much more uncertain than it was in 48. In 45 the money wasn’t stable,
Ludwig Erhard fixed that.
bq. Taking the country by surprise, Erhard went on the air on a Sunday night in June 1948. First, he announced that each German would be given forty Deutschmarks (replacing the old Reichsmarks). This would be followed by a second installment of twenty Deutschmarks. Credits and debts would be converted into the new currency at the rate of ten to one, and people would have to prove how they came by sums that exceeded 5,000 Reichsmarks.
Overnight, he erased inflation !
bq. The basic idea was to substitute a much smaller number of deutsche marks (DM), the new legal currency, for reichs marks. The money supply would, therefore, contract substantially so that even at the controlled prices, now stated in deutsche marks, there would be fewer shortages. The currency reform was highly complex, with many people taking a substantial reduction in their net wealth. The net result was about a 93 percent contraction in the money supply.
Printing money dont create wealth, fiat currency has no value. the creation of wealth is totaly based opon the production of crops and finished goods that create the backing of the currency.
Its one of the many central realities the left must deny or their utopian dream falls apart.
“from”:http://www.theadvocates.org/freeman/8812pete.html
bq. The Marshall Plan certainly helped, but its influence was not great enough to cause the German “miracle.” As historian LaVerne Ripley points out, “vastly larger sums have been donated to other countries without preventing their economic disaster.”4
Yes !
>> “You mean Kohl, the lefty?”
Since the 1960s, Germany has turned away from Erhard’s free market policies. Many German young people missed the significance of Erhard’s reforms, while as U.S. News & World Report recently observed, “Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been a timid free-marketer.
Yes, plenty lefty enough to start the decline.
Have you taken notice of those on the right haranging bush over many of his leftist taints ? the spending on the drug bill etc …
Except for taxes and defense, he is almost a RINO, Republican In Name Only, the same disease that afflicted Kohl.
bq. “5 After achieving wealth and leisure time by pursuing free market policies, a new generation of social engineers has devised schemes to divide the wealth, disregarding how that wealth was created. Intellectuals provided moral support for the move toward socialism, even though the very leisure they used to undermine capitalism was itself the result of capitalism. The process is still going on.
bq. The move toward socialism has manifested itself in higher taxes (West Germany has the highest corporate taxes of any Big Five economic power), unreasonable demands from labor unions, a 37.5-hour work week, and over-regulation. The result is that West Germany is, as one commentator put it, “Rusting on the Rhine.”6
People never seem to learn, so man is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. suffer the same leftist re warmed re labeled but just as dysfunctional as they always were, leftist schemes.
Rinse recycle repeat.
_and people would have to prove how they came by sums that exceeded 5,000 Reichsmarks._
He confiscated large sums of money (illgotten gain probably but still) no wonder that there was less money in circulation and hence less inflation. But this couldn’t be done in 45 as the situation was still to fluid
_The net result was about a 93 percent contraction in the money supply._
He stole 93 percent of all the money (more when you include the fact that 10 mark was a lot of money (something like $200 in todays money). It also leads to the result that the situation in 45 was way to unstable for many investments
_other countries without preventing their economic disaster._
Outside the UK those other countries are?
_The result is that West Germany is, as one commentator put it, “Rusting on the Rhine._
If that is rusting than give me rust. West German is going reasonable economicly , especially when you have the sweatshops of Eastern Europe on your doorstep. There is a big problem in East Germany but that is because their industry was a rust belt after reunion and it always takes 25 years or so before there is industrial life again (same effect is visable in Southern Wales)
bq. He confiscated large sums of money
He confiscated nothing, it was an exchange of paper, the paper itself, totaly without value, has it had NO backing, no economy to give it value.
Fiat paper otherwise is worth its weight in bulk for toilet tissue manufacturing.
bq. West German is going reasonable economicly
And down in flames you go in discredit.
they alre living by eating their seed corn. everything that the decade of real economic freedom after the war had built, is turing to ashes in a socialist economic death spiral.
a cycle of tax and decline, tax and decline, more taxes more decline, rinse recycle repeat.
Their 12% unemployment is only the beginning.
Socialism dont work .. its a simple proven fact. proven over and over and over and over again.
They would need to the aggegate total taxes on a familly below 30% but not only have they destroyed any hope for a better life, but they are destroying the familly itself.
Unless another ant-socialist like Ludwig Erhard comes along, they are doomed, and i cant see a man like that having any chance with the leftist media propaganda matrix they exist in.
bq. There is a big problem in East Germany but that is because their industry was a rust belt after reunion and it always takes 25 years or so before there is industrial life again
A Communist-Socialist torn country is much like a war torn country.
Soft socialism is just communism in slow motion, the end result is the same.
Ludwig Erhard turned around a devestated war torn country almost overnight.
The stupid soft lefties have had a longer time to turn around East germany, but the West Germans had already adopted too much of what ruined the east and was in the slower motion process of doing the same to themselves.
They have long forgotten the lessons Ludwig Erhard had taught them, and their leftist propaganda bubble media is no better at pointing out the true causes of their problems than Pravda and Brema. in fact they are cheerleaders for the very causes of their doom. Like Pravda and Brema was.
The sad thing about socialist failures is they are like the drug addict, very little hope of them seeing the need to turn around untill they burn thru everything they built during their sober life. and like the drug addict, wont look honestly at their problem untill they hit bottom.
Not all drug addicts survive the bottom, quite a few civilizations have suffered the same fate.
_And down in flames you go in discredit._
Did i sad something you don’t want to hear? The occupation of East Germany is more expensive for West Germany than the Iraq occupation and they have still an unemployment rate lower than 10% (and a lot of that 10% works on the side or gets enough sothat they don’t want to work)
No, you said somethimg at odds with reality.
Heir Shroder is losing elections due to these problems, and bad as it is in east Germany, its not near the project of turning around postward Germany to become the econmic engine of Europe, something they could do just as quickly as the last time, if they followed the perscription that worked the last time.
The perscription that works every time.
As opposed to leftism socialism, that fails, every time.
Its not complicated.
The policies of Herr Schroder can hardly be called left and i’m not so sure he will lose the next election. Not that it makes any difference for what the next German goverment will do with respect to internal economic policy as that will be more of the same.
But what is your prescription to the economic problems of Germany?