War & Society
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“Judgement” by John MacWhirter, signed print from an engraving, ca. 1935–43, for the Works Progress Administration. Via the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179597. Click image to enlarge. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Micah 3. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Isaiah 10. ↩︎
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The Library of Congress has photos produced by the Farm Security Administration of flood refugees in 1937. Many of them are African American. ↩︎
Sometimes you got to Ukrainesplain shit to people.
– Roy Wood Jr., “Have I Got News for You,” season 2, episode 3, youtu.be….
Playing Putin’s lapdog isn’t a good look for Trump. His ass is too big for the terrorist. But he is just as uselessly loud as the most annoying small dog. Oh, what a fierce creature would the orange one be, if his master were to remove his leash. Yip! Yip! Yip! #MoscovianCandidate
“U.S. military removes words ‘history,’ ‘respect,’ ‘dignity’ from digital presence as part of DEI review” by Gabriella Alcorta-Solorio, Texas Public Radio, February 28, 2025, www.tpr.org…. #NotTheOnion #MoscovianCandidate #FuckTrump
This Italian fascist poster prefigures the disgusting rhetoric of Putin and Trump: “On them rests the blame!” by Gino Boccasile, ca. 1942–45.
Via David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bp0064p.
“Stamp ‘em out! Buy U.S. stamps and bonds.” Poster by Thomas A. Byrne. WPA War Services of La., circa 1941–43.
Via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518290/.
The Kyiv Independent’s Anna Belokur packs a lot into one of the best comments I’ve seen about the Trump-Vance debacle during Zelensky’s visit this past Friday (Feb. 28). See the first eight minutes of “Ukraine this Week,” youtu.be…. 🇺🇦🇺🇸
🇺🇦 Friends of Ukraine might learn something from how the Second World War was portrayed in American movie theaters before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain and its friends did important publicity work to open Americans' eyes and to counter the poison of the fascist German American Bund.
Zelensky is 1,000 times more a man, leader, and patriot than Trump and Putin will ever be. #FuckTrump #ПутінІдиНахуй #ScrewOligarchy #СлаваУкраїні 🇺🇦✊🗽
📽️ “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.
'Judgement' by John MacWhirter for the WPA, ca. 1935–43
In the powerful image above,1 a biblical passage on the pulpit reads:
They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil can come upon us. Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field2 … Woe unto them who decree unrighteous decrees … who turn aside the needy from justice, and rob the poor of my people of their rights.3
Below are church pews full of worshipers. Straight ahead are two church windows and above them a cross in front of a bigger window that is cracking. The walls of the church and a beam are coming down, helped along by falling bombs. Surrounding the cross that the bombs are falling toward are four quadrants that show challenges and injustices of the late 1930s and early 1940s. (If they match up with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I am unsure how.)
Clockwise from top-left: There is a factory producing something; out front stands a boy whose emaciated ribs and distended stomach are painfully visible. Next, there are buildings almost completely submerged by flood waters; flooded telephone poles are leaning precariously.4 After that is a Black man hanging by his neck from a tree; the seated onlookers are wearing civilian clothes, not Klan robes. Finally, there are sharecroppers bent over, working a field, presumably for less than their bare subsistence requires.
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.