A Nation of Suckers: How a 1947 Film Exposes the Truth about Trumpism

by Nomad

Released in 1947, this 23-minute film, "Don't be a Sucker" was produced by United States Department of War. Its aim was to educate the American public about the dangers of fascism, racism empowered by prejudice and discrimination.

The Guys Who Stay Up Nights

In a real awakening of right-wing extremism, the message of this film has found a new audience. I found it interesting (and timely) how rabble-rousers were portrayed as swindling con artists, rather than just power-hungry politicians. "There are all kinds of games and all kinds of suckers." 

Extolling the beauty of American diversity, the narrator points out that America is composed of..

..all kinds of people, people from different countries with different religions, different colored skins, free people. They can live together and work together and build America together because they're free, free to vote to say what they please go to their own churches, to pick their own jobs.

But, the film reminds us, "there are guys who stay up nights figuring out how to take that away from [us]."

With the nation now subjugated by a con-artist turned president, this warning could have been more prescient. As the Washington Post noted:

Trump’s whole business career was littered with broken promises — in other words, swindles. Trump paid $25 million to settle civil suits by students at Trump University who claimed that he had not delivered on his promises to teach them the secrets of his money-making success. Actually, he did: The lesson came in the way they were fleeced.

All this was just a trial run for his presidency.

A Precious Thing

In the film, an actor playing Hungarian immigrant explains to an American how once upon a time he too underrated the hate-filled demagogues and swindlers.

“But I was a fool then. I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics. But unfortunately, it was not so. You see, they knew that they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country. So they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.”

As the Hungarian observes, respect for minorities is a "precious thing" because..

 ..you have the right to be what you are and say what you think, because here we have personal freedom, we have liberty. And these are not just fancy words. This is a practical and priceless way of living but we must work at it. We must guard everyone's liberty or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom ..by prejudice, we are threatening our own freedom.  

This is not simply an idea. This is good hard common-sense. You see here in America, it's not a question whether we tolerate minorities. America is minorities and that means you and me.
So let's not be suckers. We must not allow the freedom or dignity of any men to be threatened by any act or word.

I suppose it is easy to dismiss this as a bit of corny propaganda. Yet, at one time, these were the ideals that once unified our nation.
It's true that, as a nation, we often fell short of those ideals but these were principles upon which our grandparents were willing to stand up and fight for. And when called upon, many Americans were willing to die for these ideals.
We all should remember that sacrifice on the 74th anniversary of the Normandy invasion which was the first step in bringing down the brutal Nazi regime.

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The weekend after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in which in one person was killed and 19 injured, links to this film were retweeted over 130,000 times.

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