War & Society
King Donald as nation builder in the Middle East. It’ll be a snap with the U.S. armed forces at his command. He just needs a few more weeks to undermine everything that once made America a great power.
Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis, not bondage!
World War Two poster – The word "bonds" can work three ways here: the bonds or chains pictured here as broken, the bonds that unite us, and U.S. war bonds. The second of these offers the most powerful contrast to "bondage."
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_065.
Group portrait of a Tuskegee Airmen squadron, U.S. Army Air Corps, ca. 1939–45. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1823641.
“Air Force says recruits will again learn about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express-News, January 26, 2025.
The head of the service’s San Antonio-based training command said a video about the famed Black aviators would remain in the Air Force basic training curriculum. The course had been shut down in response to President Trump’s DEI ban.
Apparently overly zealous interpretations of executive orders can be turned back in some cases. It’s a small win for military training and tradition building, but it also suggests that military professionals can get through, at least on something like this. Trump’s pardon of war criminals in his first term tell a different story, however.
Finished reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020). Highly recommended. Good antidote to feelings of confusion and helplessness in these troubled times.📚
“Heeding Trump, Air Force won’t teach recruits about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express News, January 24, 2025, expressnews.com….
A video describing the exploits of the groundbreaking African American airmen, who flew combat sorties during World War II, has been removed from the instructional curriculum for new recruits at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, the hub of Air Force basic training.
“‘Make a Molotov Cocktail’: How Europeans Are Recruited through Telegram to Commit Sabotage, Arson, and Murder,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, September 26, 2024, www.occrp.org….
📺 Smart analysis by Anders Puck Nielsen on the dangers of unrealistic expectations for forthcoming talks to end the Russo-Ukrainian War: youtu.be (10 min).
Poster: Cartoon of the German and Italian dictators trying to cobble together what was left of their obscene project in 1945.
Source: Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015646607.
I watched the Ukrainian movie “Sniper: The White Raven,” dir. Maryan Bushan (Ukraine, 2022), which was filmed before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The protagonist comes to this work after Putin’s little green men invade his country and murder his family. The film offers a moving counterpoint to the dark comedy, “Donbass,” dir. Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine, 2018). The latter presents glimpses of life in territory controlled by Russia, mixing local politics, disinformation, and violence in ways that blur the boundary between reality and alternative factuality. 🇺🇦
Women installing assemblies and fixtures in the tail fuselage of a B-17F bomber (Flying Fortress) under construction at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer for the U.S. Office of War Information.
Source: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878924/.
🇺🇦 Excellent satirical primer on the Russo-Ukrainian War: a half hour of military and foreign policy animations by @Freeonis in 2024 (in Ukrainian with English subtitles), youtu.be…
Poster from the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936–39. The main text reads, “We charge the rebels as assassins! Innocent children and women die. Free men, repudiate all those who support fascism in the rearguard.” The text, bottom right, with the arrow pointing at the mother and child reads, “Here are the victims.” Note, too, the black and red triangle of the Anarchists in the lower right-hand corner.
Source of image and main text translation: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5188576r. This page also offers historical context and analysis.
“Russia is executing more and more Ukrainian prisoners of war” (December 21, 2024), www.bbc.com…
I enjoyed rewatching “The More the Merrier,” dir. George Stevens (Columbia Pictures 1944). Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn star in this delightful comedy. Part of its charm for me is the setting itself, wartime Washington, DC. We do not see the halls of power but instead the streets, a hotel and restaurant, office buildings, a small apartment, and the shared roof of a row of houses filled with apartment dwellers.
We sometimes describe aggressors as “brainwashed” by propaganda that dehumanizes their victims, so much so they are “hypnotized” into committing atrocities. But what if the “dehumanising” propaganda rather legitimizes cruelty, makes it ordinary, and the aggressor sees the victims' humanity all too clearly?
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.
Did the [Ukrainians'] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.
I watched “Passage to Marseille,” dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros., 1944), this evening.
I forgot about the shocking scene in which Humphrey Bogart’s character machine-guns the surviving crew of the German plane he’d just downed at sea. The audience in 1944 was meant to sympathize with this act. After all, that crew had just tried to bomb the small civilian freighter. I don’t know if such a scene would have worked in a Hollywood film much earlier, but it did in 1944. Was this fictional atrocity an indication of American popular culture’s brutalization in World War II?
Movie poster image source: “Warner Bros. Pressbook” (1944), Internet Archive.
U.S. Government Caricature of Nazi Propaganda
This 1942 poster was designed to counter the effects of Nazi propaganda in the United States. It is fascinating in its own right, but parts of the text reveal startling similarities to Russian disinformation in our own time.
Accessibility: Description and full transcription of poster.
Adieu Assad
Oh dictator, take note –
when you order your image hung all over,
you offer an attractive target
for the hatred of everyone you wrong,
you offer a practical object
for the people to trample, shred, and burn.
Started reading Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024).
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
🇵🇸🇮🇱 Here’s a gruesome report of the dire conditions in northern Gaza at +972 Magazine, “an independent, online, nonprofit” publication “run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.”