Trying to explain irony to SJWs is an utter waste of time. Their sophistication of humor rarely exceeds laughing uproariously over some poor bastard of a rightist they’ve beaten half to death with the bronze arm they extracted from a destroyed statue of P.G.T. Beauregard. Thus, in their zeal to foment their very own Cultural Revolution, attempting to erase every last vestige of the pre-1865 republic and denying the very existence of any ancestor they ever had, they unsurprisingly are impervious to the fact that their left-wing great-grandparents were embarking on the exact same mission. True, the old folks went about it in a somewhat more subdued fashion – subscribing to mainstream liberal periodicals like The Atlantic, singing some of Woody Guthrie’s less bloodthirsty ballads at union registration rallies, splitting their vote between Henry Wallace and Norman Thomas in a progressive war similar to that of the Clinton/Sanders imbroglio of a later era, and so forth. It wasn’t called the ‘silent’ generation for nothing.

In the wake of Charlottesville these blue-haired barracudas have emerged seemingly triumphant, with the entire apparatus of government, media, and church solidly in their corner and encouraging them on to ever greater conquests, not dissimilar to the ravages of the Red Army after the successful covering up of the Katyn Forest massacre. As doctrinal re-education is a necessary tool in ensuring that any populace the Reds overrun remain servile, the alt-left has rapidly donned a historian’s uniform. To that end, they have unearthed a precious artifact from their forebears’ time: a 1947 short film produced by the U.S. Army condemning “fascism” in general and racism in particular. Ironic point #2: is this the exact same army these exact same loudmouths have long condemned for its own supposedly inherently institutional racism, that august group’s no-holds-barred foray into complete acceptance of multidextrous identitarianism to the contrary? No matter. Our enemies took a shine to this early cinematic example of virtue-signalling, and it has gone viral, just like Ebola or ransomware.

This Battleship Potemkin-on-a-twentieth-of-the-budget is called Don’t Be a Sucker. From the title alone, it is apparent that this movie will be catering to the lowest common societal denominator – Jake LaMotta– and David Greenglass-style slobs, recently mustered out of the military and sitting around in their Brooklyn tenements in their wife-beater undershirts, guzzling cheap beer and earnestly wondering if Da Bums are going to win duh pennant dis year widdat new wonder kid Jackie Robinson dey’s got. The title could just as easily have been Don’t Be a Palooka or Don’t Be a Mook, but such lingo probably wouldn’t have played too well out in the sticks. And this brings us to Ironic Point #3: how much chutzpah does it take for the army to admonish anyone not to be a ‘sucker’, when they themselves sucked hundreds of thousands of boys into the international Bolshevik meat-grinding crusade with ebullient promises of ‘travel to far off exotic lands’ while ‘performing your country’s highest calling’ and ‘learning a valuable trade’ in the process?

Well, enough of that. Let’s take a gander at this public domain pap and see what all the fuss is about. For your edification, here is the film in full. I would strongly advise watching the entire thing before continuing on to the review:

Our saga begins with a justification of the film’s title – a brief montage showing a couple of poor schlubs getting played for saps, with one getting fleeced in a poker game and one being enticed into a mugging by a scheming blonde dame. (To give you an idea of this short’s production values, the ‘wild’ roadhouse Schlub #2 picks up the dame in is represented by one girl in the background jitterbugging for all she’s worth. Look, this isn’t a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, all right?) Another schlub mesmerized by a rigged shell game is then depicted to further drive home the point: our Marxist guardians really are proletarian, and they really have their finger on the pulse of Joe Doakes’s daily grind of exploitation. They forgot to add a scene where the costermonger keeps his thumb on the scale while he weighs out Mrs. Goldfein’s order of gefilte fish, but doubtless that was due to time considerations. You get the idea.

Our hard-bitten narrator – whose tough guy vernacular is supposed to remind us of Gunny ordering youse guys to get digging that foxhole on the double, see? – then introduces us to our protagonist, Mike. (I think that’s his name – the audio on the print I viewed contains an unwieldy number of hiccups, so sneeze and you miss it.) Just a typical guy with the breaks going all his way and blessed beyond measure to be living in the biggest country in the world….the United States of America! I’m not kidding about that ‘biggest’, either, as the narrator extols the Big farms and Big factories and Big cities and Big masses of people for whom race is merely a social construct that go into making a grandiloquent republic. Not coincidentally, at the time of this movie’s filming Stalin was busy constructing his own Big dams and Big mines and Big common unmarked graves, but such is beyond the purview of our presentation, and best left to be lauded by the A-list Hollywood morality plays from the same period. A ‘big’ people, we are assured, is also a racial and religious oleo and is, in some fashion or another, automatically ‘free’. Stock footage of a black kid playing stickball and a synagogue is then displayed before us, so who are we to argue?

I should point out at this stage that the film up to now has been intently focused upon that which man can construct – a vibrant monolithic industrial democracy in the case of the swells vs. a sneaky low-down con game in the case of the cads. It’s blatantly obvious where they wish to go with this – the whole concept of racial differentiation, too, is something that can only be craftily assembled by an insidious fifth column and can in no fashion be innate and inherent (and thus ordained of God) to any living soul. Thus the movie is advocating social determinism, whereby a man’s relationships with others entirely determine his morality and character, and is entirely in accordance with the more familiar economic variant of determinism that constitutes one of the chief tenets of Marxism. No wonder Antifa is treating our photoplay as their very own Gone With the Wind.

At any rate, we see Mike walking down what appears to be a New York City street. His attention is distracted by an agitator on a soapbox. We know this guy is a bad joke because of his loud paisley tie, trousers pulled up to his ribcage, and his uncanny anachronistic resemblance to George Wallace. He describes himself as a ‘pure-blooded American’ and thumps his heart while bellowing ‘I see Negroes holding jobs belonging to me, and YOU!!!’ The camera cuts away to the sole black actor hired for this movie, dolefully shaking his head without changing his confused expression. Putting in your time to get Whitey’s Screen Actors Guild card is a tough gig, all right. Oddly enough, while the speaker mentions Negroes, Catholics, and ‘foreigners’ by name, he seems oddly reticent on the subject of Jewry. This is typical of that more demure era, in which calling out the (((stranger))) that has dwelt among us the longest, even from a picture’s supposed ‘heavy’, was looked upon as bad form and not at all cricket. See the hysterical 1930s anti-Klan polemic Nation Aflame for another example of this phenomenon.

Mike begins to fall under the sway of this third-rate Theodore Bilbo but, fortuitously, an elderly gent with a funny accent just happens to be standing beside him at this ‘yuge’ rally (we see maybe nine or ten extras in cutaway shots, tops). He sadly asks if Mike believes all this insane firebrand talk – which so far has sounded pretty vague and muted to me – and Mike loquaciously responds in the affirmative, laughably affecting a Humphrey Bogart imitation so we’ll be reminded of his ultimate heroism. Just as Mike is all set to run down to his local America First office and proffer his name to the subscription list, though, the orator makes a big boo-boo – he avows that the Freemasons will have no place in the new scheme of things, and (golly!) Mike is a Mason!! The spell has been broken, and not a minute too soon – the running time of this thing is seventeen minutes, and we’re already three and a half minutes in. Our focus now shifts to the scholarly-looking Voice of Roosevelt (who is, given the trope mentioned above, never explicitly identified as Jewish, but is an obvious representation of that illustrious tribe) who will spend most of the remaining time pompously expounding on the dangers of racial and cultural homogeneity. In so doing, I am very much reminded of a Korean pastor in a PCA pulpit lecturing me on my ‘ratent lacism and bigotly’.

The rally breaks up, with many of the spectators making dismissive ‘Ah, whaddaya know!’ gestures, which you think would rather undermine the Jew’s angst. But no. He has a captive audience now, and he’s going to kvetch to it for everything it’s worth! (Speaking of suckers…is this really all you had to do for the rest of your afternoon, Mike?) He begins with the confession of his foundational creed – ‘in this country, we have no ‘other people’! We are American people!’ This guy must be a constitutional law professor over at Columbia who specializes in the Fourteenth Amendment. To Mike’s understandable perplexity over his own origins, Prof admits he was born in Hungary, and furthermore was present in Berlin as Hitler made plans to consolidate his power. His streak of left-revisionism begins to manifest itself as he says the Nazis were not strong enough to overwhelm ‘a unified country’, necessitating their fragmentation of German society to reach their goal. Huh? What ‘unified Germany’ is this, Prof – the Weimar republic, riven with street battles that makes today’s antifa/alt-right melees look like a square dance? Which took place over the ferocious resistance being waged against a top-down imposition of Bolshevism from, ahem, ‘foreigners’ resident in Berlin? Is that nascent Teutonic Communard what you meant by unification? Or perhaps you were waxing nostalgic over your native Hungary and the mellifluous national harmony wrought by your cuddly uncle Bela Kun some twenty-five years previous?

Prof returns to the already-stale assertions about prejudices being artificially created in a mean lab somewhere. Just curious: does that also extend to Judaic prejudices regarding the superfluity of gentiles in general and Christians in particular? And does that not negate the curse wrought upon Jewry by its own hand in gleefully accepting the blood of Christ upon themselves and their children in return for His Passion? Prof dodges this tricky conundrum by metaphorically announcing ‘Hey! This would be a good time for a flashback, wouldn’t it???’

And sure enough, we’re back on the streets of 1930s Berlin. Except….these streets bear an uncanny resemblance to those we just saw in 1940s New York. Hey, could it be that this is a subtle contextualization in set-dressing to reinforce the movie’s theme of the universal brotherhood of man? Or could this just be another indication that the shooting schedule for this thing was likely an extended lunch hour? I think you know what I think. Anyway, five diverse types are listening to another orator – a Catholic, a Jew, a small business owner, a farmer, and an unemployed blue-collar worker. (This sounds like the most awkward ‘group of guys walk into a bar’ joke ever.) This orator’s spiel is almost exactly like the previous one, except delivered in a phony accent and with the occasional drawn out ‘glo-o-oorious!’ thrown in to remind us that this is the decadent Old World. He is also allowed to call out the Jew by name this time, so as to mirror the previous speaker’s calling out of the Negro in similar fashion. The Jew responds with a sulky look, as though he realizes if he had acquired a copyright on this speech, he could have amassed a fortune. The orator next pledges the destruction of Catholicism, and the Catholic responds by anxiously rubbing a wafer on a necklace incongruously hanging across his open v-neck shirt. Good thing this movie shuns all stereotyping, wot? Next up are the Masons, and small business guy gawks at the opulent square and compass ring on his finger. This while he’s standing directly in front of the orator, yet. I dunno, shouldn’t a member of the Craft be more….crafty? Farmer and Blue Collar Guy step back from him in exaggerated mistrust, just as they did with the Jew and Catholic – a clumsily point made is still a point made. Of course, Blue Collar Guy, being cisethnically German and (I’m assuming) at least nominally Protestant, swallows the bait like a brook trout, leading to some more tut-tutting from the Prof about what a tragic fool he is and so forth. The moral to be gleaned is clear: only such vestiges of the native yeomanry are stupid enough to presume that they still have rights of inheritance within their ancestral borders! The Morgenthau Plan was still very much a part of U.S. foreign policy at the time of this film’s release. The Army’s due diligence in heeding its civilian commanders-in-chief is to be commended.

Hans, our blue-collar worker, is accepted into the Nazi ranks and is given a uniform to parade around in. Prof laments that he has been irretrievably lost to the dark forces of fragmentation. Perhaps this is meant to be underscored by the gratuitous footage of Hans proudly preening his newfound rank in front of his very Aryan family. This is not the path forward to gray amalgamation that is our last great hope! But in the meantime, there’s much evil work to be done – smashing trade unions, prohibiting the Social Democrat and Communist parties, and beating and killing Jews. (Yes, strong-arm tactics are listed as part of the Nazis’ premier strategic aims. Obviously, this short wasn’t meant to be viewed by general officers. Here, too, the Prof reiterates the tired old dishonest myth of a timid German Jewry utterly defenceless in the face of Nazi brawn – which, by a strange cohencidence, also happens to be the subtitle of a recent book lauding the Semitic smackdown of Hitler. ) Prof drives home the overriding point for the 474th time – the wickedness of ‘one party, one nation, one religion’. Hey, notice how he listed ‘party’ first? Pretty slick, insinuating as it does that a desire for a racial group to be in control of its own territory with no heathen influence can only be wrought through totalitarian means and is thus to be shunned by every decent believer in liberal democracy. Prof could teach Goebbels and Ehrenburg a thing or two, himself.

He gets considerably less slick during the movie’s next section, though, as he sings a dirge over the Nazis’ annihilation of truth. And what, pray tell, is ‘truth’? Let’s just say Pilate had a better grasp on that concept than Prof does. Truth, you see, is to be found in generic literature – ergo, 20 million books had to be burned. The harbingers of truth are to be found in the ranks of ‘teachers, writers, and scientists’ – ergo, these preterists all had to be displaced and/or jailed. The purveyors of truth were to be found in secular education, so attendance at German colleges plunged 53% in five years. (How Hitler was directly responsible for this is left to our imaginations. But hey, ominous stats.) And, of course, the Urim and Thummim of secular truth, British radio and American newspapers, had to be prohibited altogether.

American Vision will be delighted to hear that the Prof concedes that Germany’s churches were one of the last vestiges of truth. Oh, who am I kidding – they were delighted with this vid a long time before a church was first mentioned! Anyway, in the spirit of ecumenism we are assured that both the Catholic and Lutheran churches were strongly committed to speaking truth. In the latter’s case, doubtless it was the truth heralded by such pillars of orthodoxy as Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr. Oddly enough, returning to the earlier unspoken rule regarding invisible Jews, we are not presented with a rabbi’s version of that same universalist truth. I should also point out here that the movie at no point ever specifically mentions Jews being placed in concentration camps – that fate is reserved exclusively for the pastor of the aforementioned Lutheran church and a generic Catholic priest earlier on. This tends to suggest that: a.) the target audience for this bit of brainwashing was urban Italians in Philadelphia and rural Germans in Wisconsin, and b.) the Holocaust industry had not yet gotten a foothold in the West’s psyche, further documented by Eisenhower’s failure to mention fantastic extermination centers in his Crusade in Europe, published the year after this movie’s release.

Next we come to the movie’s highlight – a relatively lengthy dramatization of precisely how education acted as a purveyor of near-truth set in a classroom. Connoisseurs of cheese will find plenty to savor in this scene, let me tell you. The setting: a rather starkly furnished classroom, complete with an obvious blown-up photograph of a piece of neo-Gothic architecture in the window to remind us we’re in Hamburg or somewhere. A professor with more than a passing resemblance to Albert Einstein (doubtless by design) is giving a lecture on ethnology. (Despite that ‘53% drop in college attendance in five years’ factoid from before, students mob the seats.) He begins his lecture with the immortal words (in a Katzenjammer Kids accent, naturally) ‘Vhat iss ein Aryan? I doan know mysselff!’ Some scholar! Never bothered to crack the Encyclopedia Britannica during your doubtless extensive reading jags, Poindexter? Oh, perhaps he was merely being facetious, as he then proceeds to describe the prototypical Aryan as ‘tall, slender, blue-eyed, and blonde’, while drawing attention to pictures on the wall of the short Goebbels, the fat Goering, the black-eyed Hess, and the brunette Hitler. All of this is delivered with much mugging towards the camera so that we perceive what a devastating riposte this is. Then he cuts to the chase: a bold assertion that there is no Aryan race (dead wrong), and furthermore, that there is no master race. Left unsaid is the logical end to this train of thought: there is no race, period, and the entire concept is one gigantic phantasm concocted by big bullies who want to lord it over suckers. Hilariously, in the midst of this spiel the camera cuts to three decidedly middle-aged looking ‘students’ dressed in full Nazi regalia glowering unsubtly at the professor from the very front row of the classroom! You would think this would cause our fearless academic to be a little more circumspect in his lecture to begin with, but I guess not. He drones on about the same wide range of potentialities to be found within all racial groups – from idiots to geniuses, from criminals to philanthropists. Wait – criminal and philanthropist are antonyms? That’ll sure come as a relief to the directors of the Clinton Foundation. After a few more choice lines (‘Ve musst not chudge a man by der kolor uv hiss skin, or der length uv hiss nose!’) a couple of noticeably non-stereotypically-looking Aryan gendarmes barge into the classroom and, as our plucky Mr. Chips bravely soldiers on in his discourse, proceed to slap him silly, and haul him off. End scene. That was the greatest thing ever. I’m certain that SJWs believe that these kind of antics are regular features at Trump University.

Enough with those shenanigans, though – time to return to our headliner Prof again, so that he can continue his mourning over the hatred found in men’s hearts. If I haven’t made it clear by now, this guy obviously doesn’t get invited to many parties. He shakes his well-manicured finger of our original bunch of German patsies, confident that if they’d only joined forces and rushed that obnoxious soapbox orator, World War II could have been prevented. ‘When that first minority lost out, everybody lost out’, he intones, and the footage of the four backing away from the Jew is repeated. I think there might be an insidious moral to be gleaned here. What fruit was reaped from their misguided trust? Well, Karl, our farmer, was forced to stay on his land permanently growing what the government told him to grow, Heinrich, our Masonic business owner, saw his hardware store closed, and Hans got a job in a munitions factory that involved long hours and low pay, and that he was forced to keep by executive diktat. Now all you have to do is magnify these indignities a hundredfold, and you have conditions that were also prevalent in the Soviet Union twenty years before the events depicted herein. It should come as no surprise that at no point does the movie ever address the Marxist menace satiated with blood and looking to expand westward that largely served as the basis for the popularity of Nazism within Germany. They weren’t called ‘reactionary’ politics for nothing. No, if only Hindenburg had been proactive and banned soapboxes so orators couldn’t acquire them, all this unpleasantness could have been avoided.

OK, enough prologue. Time to get the war under way! Prof jeers over Hitler’s ‘carefully prepared sneak attack’ against Poland, not bothering to explain why this moral turpitude is less reprehensible than the United States’s false flag sinking of the Lusitania in the previous war, or Britain’s preemptive strike against the French fleet in northern Africa and her planned preemptive invasion of Norway and Sweden, both in 1940. In a telling moment, Prof jeers at the failure of the ‘pure Aryan armies’ to overwhelm the ‘mongrel armies that they despised’ – implying that those mongrels squashed the Aryans like bugs, with no effort and nary a dint to be seen in their formations. Such revisionism might bolster the Prof’s sociological theories, but it comes across as especially laughable considering this movie was originally produced in 1943, when the Nazi juggernaut was still far from defeated, despite the recent setback in El Alamein and the far more serious one at Stalingrad – neither encounter having left the British and Russians with the creases still sharp in their trousers. Then, of course, comes the crowning achievement (in a segment added later for the film’s 1947 release): D-Day, with Americans of ‘every color and religion’ storming up Normandy and into the suburbs of Berlin itself, lickety-split! Of course, this happy rainbow coalition left behind in its wake a wasteland of rapine, enough to rival even the notorious ravages of the Red Army (which was also of a distinctly multicultural makeup), but hey…eggs and omelettes, and whatnot. We then get an inappropriately gleeful ‘where are they now’ epilogue of our Aryan crew from the German street demonstration, like a morbid version of the ending of Animal House, and reminding me that I could get a more accurate history lesson watching that movie, instead. Bottom line: they were all killed in various battles, and good riddance. I wonder if the screening rooms at bases all around the country erupted in whoops at this point when this was shown right before the Hope/Crosby feature film? Bear in mind as well, that at the time of this film’s release the forced relocation of displaced Germans was well under way in Eastern Europe, creating a trail of agony and death…at this selfsame American army’s hands. Gall, thy name is Don’t Be a Sucker.

And with that, our little morality play is just about at a merciful end. We cut back to Prof reminding Mike about all the minority groups he belongs to – Mason, farmer (what’s he doing in New York, then???), Methodist, etc. He emphatically declares that ‘we must guard everyone’s liberty’ – hold up there, Egghead: what liberty are you talking about? The liberty to believe whatever aphorisms the Rooseveltian Voice of Conscientious Reason is telling us, or to risk ostracization, unemployment, prison, even death? Because those are the straits your vaunted ‘liberty’ has led us to today. Boy, if you only had a crystal ball. And that puts a whole sinister spin on the jingoistic term ‘freedom ain’t free’, as well. He says it is impossible to merely tolerate minorities in America, because America is minorities. Wanna know something? This hearkens back to the various trade- and ethnicity-based soviets that came together in one great revolutionary mass to found that bastion of enlightened freedom known as Petrograd. Both the American and Soviet mosaics, of course, also can be spun to represent grotesque blasphemies of the many-membered body of Christ, with diverse components subordinated to a greater Whole, and the occultists in both societies were diligent in keeping this delusion operational. How’s that for a new take on the dynamics of the Cold War? Mike, already lost to the esotericism of Masonry, is completely sold. He tears up the pamphlet he picked up at his own rally and tosses the refuse on the sidewalk. Boy, he really is a regular guy, isn’t he? Prof says that his vision of a suckerless Columbian idyll is something worth being ‘selfish’ over – a parting shot of Marxist materialism. And a belated ‘The End’ title card, followed by the charming postscript, ‘This film will not be shown to the general public without permission of the War Department’. Yeah, you don’t want to show your hand when you’re doing all you can to inculcate your captive audience with the necessity of getting rid of that archaic Posse Comitatus, should the general populace resist your blitzkrieg egalitarian directives.

Well, what more is there to say? Other than Joe McCarthy has been thoroughly vindicated in his extending the search for Communists into the ranks of the Army? Or that the notion that the military is a fundamentally conservative institution is rot? Or that some enterprising hipster SJW obviously stumbled across this masterpiece on his recommended list after scouring YouTube for anti-racist public service announcements from the 1970s and decided to drop it in his Twitter feed, where it took off like kudzu run wild? Why snowflakes think a hastily conceived and shot-on-a-shoestring bit of leftist federal propaganda is some kind of a home run for their position, I couldn’t venture to say. Are they prepared to grant us the same leeway and not screech and throw bodily fluids if we were to widely spread the notorious 1960s anti-integration documentary Anarchy USA? Somehow I seriously doubt that.

But then, what do I know? I’m just a sucker, after all.