War & Society
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For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎
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See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎
📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.
Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.
Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.
📽️ If you want to watch a thriller set in 1939 before Germany’s invasion of Poland, “Man Hunt,” dir. Fritz Lang (20th Century Fox, 1941), holds up. Only the ending was unsatisfactory, if appropriate to a time when embattled Britain needed Americans to understand what was going on.
🇺🇦 Excellent development: “Ukraine Is Jamming Russian Glide Bombs All Along The Front Line, Erasing One Of Russia’s Main Battlefield Advantages” by David Axe, Forbes, February 26, 2025. www.forbes.com…. “It now takes up to 16 glide bombs to hit one target.”
📽️ Watched “‘Pimpernel’ Smith,” dir. Leslie Howard (British National Films, 1941), which imagines The Scarlet Pimpernel set in Germany in 1939.
A message to Putin from my car’s rear end. The same goes for his White House asset. #RussiaIsATerroristState #SupportUkraine #SupportHumanRights
Do I dare check the election news from Germany? Lots of opportunities to chip away at support for Ukraine on the left and the right.😬🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState
“Make Ukraine Guilty Again” – short cartoon by Freeonis, youtu.be…. Turn on closed captions for English subtitles.🇺🇦
“First day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine captured in images,” AP News, February 22, 2025, apnews.com….🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState
'The Iron Curtain' (1948 Spy Film)
📽️ Tonight I watched “The Iron Curtain,” dir. William A. Wellman (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948). The film was based on Igor Gouzenko’s memoir of his time working as a military cypher expert in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” Hearst’s International–Cosmopolitan (February–May 1947).
Related News from 1948
The excerpt below from a news item in a trade journal uses the term “appeasement” to describe attempts to block the film’s release. And it recalls accusations “of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films” before the U.S. entry into World War Two. Disinformation campaigns by hostile governments are nothing new, it seems.
MPAA Pins Red Label on “Curtain” Protest
Reaffirming his continued resistance to any attempts to dictate what appears or does not appear on the screen, Eric A. Johnston, MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] president, has rejected the protest of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship against release of 20th-Fox’s forthcoming “The Iron Curtain.” At the same time Johnston questioned the motives of the National Council and coneluded that “the purpose of your organization is to create in this country an atmosphere of appeasement and acceptance of Russia’s policy of aggression and expansion."…
Johnston pointed out … that the issue of free speech in relation to the screen was challenged seven years ago before a Senate committee, when the producers were accused of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films. “Producers then insisted upon and maintained their constitutional right to make films on any subject, free from dictation,” Johnston reminded. “Their position was vindicated. They stand on that right today, and I back them up."…
Source: The Film Daily February 3, 1948, p. 5.
Anyone in the current U.S. administration who thinks Ukraine will accede to their weird demands has not been paying attention.🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState #ПутінІдиНаХуй
Operator Starsky takes time out to fact-check the recent stupefying utterances on Ukraine by the U.S. president because friends don’t let friends drown in bullshit. youtu.be… 🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState
'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)
"The Contraband"
"The Recruit"
"The Veteran"
The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1
The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2
From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.
The U.S.–Russia talks in Saudi Arabia have proven once again that Ukraine is ground zero for the war against democracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn’t give a rat’s ass about democracy—or ethnic cleansing or genocide. We’ve done evil before, but never so openly, stridently, or proudly.
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
– Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” (1940)*
* Quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2002), 21.
Anders Puck Nielsen looks at the current U.S. administration’s (non)understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War and offers reasons for why we needn’t panic. Ukraine has more agency than the U.S. administration assumes. https://youtu.be… 🇺🇦
📽️ Watched “The Deadly Affair,” dir. Sidney Lumet (UK, 1967), a spy thriller based on John le Carré’s 1961 debut novel, Call for the Dead. Quincy Jones did the musical soundtrack. Good stuff.
📽️ Watched an antifascist drama set in the time before the United States was at war with Germany, “Watch on the Rhine,” dir. Herman Shumlin (USA, 1943). Despite the title, it takes place around the U.S. capitol, except for an initial border crossing from Mexico and a train to Washington.
📽️ Rewatching “Mrs. Miniver,” dir. William Wyler (UK, 1942) for the first time in maybe 20 years. In its day it was an effective propaganda film in the early months of the U.S. entry into the war. Now, for me, it’s an escape from a world in which the Nazis are in Washington, DC, itself.
Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944
Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.
Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.
Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.
Books Are Weapons – World War Two poster by NYC WPA War Services promoting knowledge about Black history and culture, the war's colonial entanglements in Africa, and the role of Black Americans in national defense. The books referenced were housed in the New York Public Library's renowned Schomburg Collection.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5211531.
Xi Jinping must be feeling really good. Putin’s worn down his army in a bid to end Ukrainian state- and nationhood. Felonious Husk is gutting the U.S. federal government from within, snuffing out crucial expertise. And Hegseth is leading the Pentagon—enough said.
Ethnic cleansing as daring do—if Orange Donald’s own country doesn’t move to try him and his collaborators in the end, other countries will.