Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The problem is that people are still falling for exactly the same sort of comic-book evil even though it's every bit as obvious. e.g. Haitian's eating dogs, illegal immigrants scamming medical services, stealing high-paying jobs, etc..

A high percentage of people completely lack what Carl Sagan would call a "Baloney detection kit", and the current purveyors of baloney like it that way. That's why they're anti-science and anti-education.

I suspect we're seeing WWII anti-Nazi propaganda being promoted all over social media in an attempt to shock people into a moment of introspection. Someone watching this propaganda piece today doesn't even have to make substitutions. The man on a street-corner ranting about immigrants could be a talking head on certain current "news" programs. However, the shock relies on the viewer's perception of Nazi's as irredeemably evil.

Humans forget, and that happens pretty reliably when something passes out of living memory. There are precious few people left with first-hand memories of Nazi evil or who can remember fighting Hitler. For most living people, Nazi's are just comic-book and Hollywood villains. Comparing oneself to the people in this propaganda reel today undoubtedly has less impact than it did fifty years ago, and that impact will continue to fade. Society in certain countries is now clearly at the stage where painful lessons need to be relearned.



> same sort of comic-book evil even though it's every bit as obvious.

The same as the video? Where is this happening and how is it so obvious?


The parent post literally had examples, did you just skip that paragraph?


Do the examples given at the end of that paragraph not qualify, in your view?


I noticed you didn't include any bipartisan examples. I'll help with that,for example believing Joe Biden was sharp as a tack is more damaging than any examples listed, and is probably the primary factor in Trump's reelection.


They only included actual examples of the phenomenon they were talking about. And "bipartisan" does not mean what you seem to think it means.


> I suspect we're seeing WWII anti-Nazi propaganda being promoted all over social media in an attempt to shock people into a moment of introspection. Someone watching this propaganda piece today doesn't even have to make substitutions. The man on a street-corner ranting about immigrants could be a talking head on certain current "news" programs. However, the shock relies on the viewer's perception of Nazi's as irredeemably evil.

Anti-Nazi propaganda from WWII has been a staple of American and broader Anglosphere culture for the entirety of my life; and so has the counter-phenomenon of people deliberately using Nazi symbols to be shocking or provocative.

Anyway, at the time this film was produced by the US government, legal immigration from foreign countries to the US had been heavily curtailed for a generation by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924, and immigration would not be liberalized until another generation later in the 1960s.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: