Posts Tagged ‘communism’
A little humor… that’s what’zup today.
Thought you had finally got a handle on grammar? The Onion suggests you might be out of luck:
Some might have called him a neocon but now Jon Stewart’s suggesting neocommie?? Glenn Beck gets targeted again by “The Daily Show”:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Rage Within the Machine – Progressivism | ||||
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You’ve seen the figure skating, the bobsledding, the skiing… But have you seen the fondue pong?? (And watch Colbert tell the Russians to “tear down this wall!”)
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Olympic International Houses | ||||
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By the standard of contemporary films like Avatar, some old fashioned Hollywood flicks can look completely laughable.
The only thing weirder and goofier than old Hollywood movies are old US GOVERNMENT movies.
Some of these movies may have been well-intentioned at the time but now some smack of awkward propaganda.
The film above is one of the most famous government-issued pieces of all time. “Duck and Cover” teaches children how to stay safe, even with the looming threat of a nuclear bomb. The concept seems a bit silly to us now, but was taken seriously to the point of duck-and-cover methods being practiced in schools.
Cartoons are supposed to be fun and lighthearted, but this animation depicts a disheveled Donald Duck learning the importance of his income taxes.
The Cold War Era of American history included a lot of anti-Communist sentiment. Lucky for us, the US government created this video so that we could learn how to easily identify a communist and get rid of the internal threat.
Veering a bit from the wartime track, the video above is an educational video by the US government on the effects of LSD, a popular drug in the 1960s. Wow, drug education has surely changed in the past fifty years!
These old government films and propaganda pieces may seem corny, but don’t think that similar tactics aren’t being tried today!
Have you seen anything on television or on the news that you think is propaganda? Do you find it to be an effective tool for the government to use to change attitudes? Leave us a comment and get the discussion started!
9
Film Festival: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by LittleBones 
Film Festival
This week USDemocrazy is going hysterical historical. Our weekly film festival is featuring an important and quite recent historical event.
November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a structure that separated East and West Germany and characterized the Iron Curtain for decades until 1989.
We found four interesting videos about the event starting with the video above. It is an ABC News report of the fall that gives a brief overview of the context of the situation.
Okay… Hands up anybody who remembers the Cold War? And communism? And the Cuban Missile Crisis? And that movie Thirteen Days?
Well, we here at USDemocrazy have recently learned from top intelligence reports (OK, a news article in the Washington Post) that President Obama wants us to forget all that stuff.
You see, President Obama has decided to nudge open ever-so-slightly the door of friendship to Cuba.
He is giving the green light for Americans with family members in Cuba to go and visit the beseiged island nation whenever they want. More importantly, he wants them to spend however much money they want.
Spend money? What’s the big deal about that you may ask…? We at USDemocrazy consider ourselves experts at spending money. This new spending spree is different. Let us tell you why. (We always do!)
Back during the Cold War, the U.S. had some serious issues with the spread of communism around the world. The U.S. felt seriously threatened when Cuba, a nation at America’s doorstep, turned to communism under Fidel Castro.
To isolate this perceived red menace, the US employed economic embargoes on Cuba. Fifty years later, those embargoes (and communism) still stand.
To make a long story short (you can read it all on Wikipedia anyway…), among those embargoes were restrictions to keep American people and money out of Fidel Castro’s commie grip. Some of these historic embargoes are now history.
President Obama has decided to start a new era on Cuban-American relations. You can read all about the newly-lifted restrictions here, as well as what this move means for Cuban-American relations.
So, maybe you can’t cross into Cuba to buy a bunch of cigars just yet… but it is encouraging to see some of these old embargoes going up in smoke.
