this is not a journal title

I don't get what's interesting about the first one. After close scrutiny I think it looks like an anus with something going into it, but that's probably me being perverted.

The second one is pretty offensive. It sort of looks like the guy in center is giving like some sort of white power salute (which is reinforced by the fact that the comic is called "American Power"), and is surrounded by evil threatening or dying Arabs. Egh.

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Apparently some people are not seeing the Captain America cover where he's hitting Hitler. Do a hard refresh.

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ah, okay. Yeah, they do look the same image. Except that it's somehow less offensive because it's not using ethnic signals to identify the enemy and instead uses uniforms.

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And a moustache.

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Egh, propagandistic comics are propagandistic comics all over. I think the one in the second image is supposed to be punching out Osama bin Ladin.

Captain America is one of my favorite superheroes, but I'm not a fan of how he (or other superheroes) were used as propaganda during WW2. The infamous Superman "You can slap a Jap!" cover comes to mind.

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The infamous Superman "You can slap a Jap!" cover comes to mind.

Yeah, that's also pretty fucked up.

I guess the point is that when they punch out Hitler, it's at least not racist.

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It's not prima facie racist from the cover, but having seen a few of the Cap comics from WW2, I'm remembering a good bit of anti-German racism in there as well.

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I'm not sure that it's possible to be "racist" against Germans. Prejudiced, sure, but I don't think that anyone thought of Germans as a race at that point. For instance, Americans didn't, say, round up all Americans of German descent and put them in camps because they 'couldn't tell the difference' between loyal German-Americans and newly-landed German spies, since they all looked the same.

I do remember someone arguing that at some pointin US history, various kinds of Europeans, like Italians and Irish and Germans, weren't thought of as actually "white" in some sense. But I think by that point Germans were.

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I'm not so sure. I know that there was definitely stuff about the inhabitants of various nations having certain psychological characteristics. I know that there were definitely racial epithets used against the Germans ("Huns," and "Boche,") and so forth. I am too sleepy to muster furhter evidence at the moment. :)

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Oh, there was, but it tended to be about how German culture was too authoritarian, not that German genes were intrinsically barbaric. Importantly, there was so much migration all over Europe and to America that there were ethnically German, but not culturally German people all over the place were pretty accepted and not considered evil. Like Herbert Hoover. The main people arguing that Germans were a race, it seems, were the Germans themselves at the time.

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... for clarification, I am not disputing that people had stereotypes about Germans and called them rude names. That's really historically clear. But racism is a particular phenomenon that I don't think was operative against Germans here, and there are valid reasons to consider racism to be on a level worse than regular xenophobia/cultural bias against a nation we're at war with.

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Two thoughts.

1) My father (Jewish) is "racist" (or at least biased) against Germans. He calls it "racial guilt" - he feels that they are all still guilty of what they perpetrated in the Holocaust, and he feels that the culture of the country today is still the same as it was during WW2. He of course has no evidence for this. I wouldn't be surprised if he interacts differently with Aryan-looking people, though I haven't observed it personally, making the "race" part more noticeable. I do not think he assigns any racial guilt to white Americans for enslaving blacks.

2) various kinds of Europeans, like Italians and Irish and Germans, weren't thought of as actually "white" in some sense

I've heard that too. What are Jews considered? And Arabic/Middle Eastern (whatever's the appropriate PC word) peoples?

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1) I still don't think that your father could actually be called racist in the proper sense unless he's biased against Germans who, say, were living in America already in 1930. Or even people whose parents moved to America afterward, and who were raised American and are culturally American. Otherwise I would call it a bias against the people living in the country of Germany, or maybe are culturally German.

Then again there was also a certain kind of anti-German racism in Europe that was different. After WWII, Czechoslovakia expelled most ethnic Germans from the country (as did a number of other countries), and in the wake of the war there was widespread violence against Czechs who had German or Austrian surnames. This, as far as I can tell, never quite existed in the same way in America. We honestly can't even tell the difference, visually, between Germans and non-Germans, nor are we even that good at telling German surnames from Dutch. We probably had prejudice against German speakers, though. People with "Aryan" features are just as likely, or more, to be Norse or Swedish or Swiss (and there are plenty of dark-haired Germans). I guess it's almost as hard for me to conceive of American racism against Germans as it is for me to conceive of American racism against Nigerians - we wouldn't know the difference between a Nigerian and any other North African.

2) I think the same source claimed Jews weren't "white" until a while into the 20th Century, but are now (except, of course, for sephardic Jews, who look African or Arabic). Arabs used to be considered "caucasian" but clearly are not currently considered "white." They seem to have turned into a racial category in people's minds.

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seekingferret.livejournal.com

I don't think it's particularly useful to distinguish between racism and other forms of bigotry. When you qualify by saying that bias against Germans in Germany isn't racist, you make it sound like it's not as bad as racism because it's only xenophobic.

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I do think that racism is in fact worse. For one thing, Germans do in fact share a culture, and for another, we were in fact at war with Germany, so it's a little bit hard for there not to be some anti-German sentiment. I don't think that the kind of anti-German xenophobia common in the US during WWII was as essentializing, for example. They focused on German culture rather than Germans' natures. And to be fair, it's not bigoted to say that German culture was really fucked up during the Third Reich.

Second, look at the effects: during WWII, America rounded up and imprisoned every ethnically Japanese person (and, I think, many other Asians) in America, including citizens whose families had been living in the US for generations. They didn't round up and imprison Herbert Hoover, or any other ethnic Germans in the US. The prejudice against Japanese was completely different because it had to do with race: people were more likely to think that Japanese were somehow fundamentally, naturally different, and more likely to claim that they just "couldn't tell" the difference among Japanese people in some fundamental way (I mean, just think how silly it is to imprison Japanese people who were born here because, among other things, people couldn't tell the difference between them and newly-landed spies).

It's also different because the xenophobia against Germans was completely tied to the war: people were actually quite pro-German until WWI, and in the inter-war period they were also relatively pro-German; people in the US were praising Hitler's leadership almost right until we declared war on Germany. We elected an ethnically German president in 1928. Nobody made a big deal out of the fact that he was German. It basically didn't matter in any way. After WWII, American hostility to Germans lingered for maybe a few decades and has since almost completely evaporated except for a few tasteless jokes. In terms of the scale of social oppression that American anti-German sentiment caused, it's just nowhere near the kinds of pervasive, centuries-long discrimination based on physical features that I'd refer to as "racism."

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Yes, that's one of the things I get when I read these two covers. The first is attacking the individual (Hitler), while the second is being racist.

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To me the second one is more offensive for two reasons.

1) I don't read it as bin Ladin, I read it as Arabs. Therefore it is condemning a class of people not based upon their beliefs regarding the US, but upon their religion (and religion and politics are not a one-to-one relationship). The first is about the individual Hitler, not a group of people, and if it was a group it'd be Nazis, which *is* a political belief.

2) The second one reads as hateful, the first reads as mocking. This may be primarily b/c of the color choice, and in the first one they had a restricted palette of colors that were acceptable, so that's part of why I posted this w/o commentary at first, to see if others agreed with this assessment. I read the first one as mocking and as taking power away from Hitler by making him an absurdity, while the second is all about hate and fear.

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Looking at the image, I though it was supposed to be Bin Ladin, partially because you juxtaposed it with a shot of Cap beating up Hitler (and partially because the beard looks like Bin Laden's beard).

I think part of the tone difference is the freedom comics have at the moment. The WW2 comics were under the oversight of the CCA (and primarily directed at kids), I don't think they were allowed to show deaths (other than that of the main villain sometimes). Now, comics are treated as any other form of work, and thus there's a bit more realism, a good bit more violence.

I don't know. To me, both look like propaganda pieces, and so I feel the same about both.

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jrtom.livejournal.com

I don't read it as bin Ladin, I read it as Arabs. Therefore it is condemning a class of people not based upon their beliefs regarding the US, but upon their religion

*cough* Um, either you mean "ethnicity" instead of "religion" or you mean "Muslims" instead of "Arabs". Which?

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Ugh, you're right. I read it as Middle Eastern people (ethnicity), and I understand that not all such people are Muslims. However as an emotional piece it makes me totally forget that intellectually and smush them all together so that when I read it I get race and religion mixed up. Bleh. That's why I hate these sorts of things.

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heh, now that I look at it again, it's closer to a Black Power salute (fist) than a White Power salute (a la Nazi salute), it's just that this guy is white so I defaulted to thinking "white power." Still, it looks pretty creepy in some way.

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It seems strange to me to make him so dark and ominous looking. He looks ~~just as~~ more evil to me than the man he's punching. Even the fact that his face is covered makes it less wholesome looking than it could be, than Captain America's half-mask.

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