Remnant of "Red Scare" repealed.

[Edward]

In the case of the German Army in WWII, it is true they followed orders as issued by their leaders, as did everyone else's. But the war crimes trials were about specific acts that were contrary to international law, not simply for waging war.

They were, but ultimately the concept was the same: does one bear moral culpability for carrying out the orders of a higher rank? Nurembourg enshrined in international law that "only obeying orders" is not an acceptable defence.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, there are those who believe that the constitution gives us the authority to overthrow the government by violent revolution. I don't subscribe to that interpretation but it makes you wonder how much devotion there really is to the idea of a democracy and an elected government. Of course, it was written when some states had a majority slave population, too. "Truth, justice and the American Way of Life." That's a quote from a TV show about a fictional superhero who gave himself police powers.

 

[Edward]

Well, there are those who believe that the constitution gives us the authority to overthrow the government by violent revolution. I don't subscribe to that interpretation but it makes you wonder how much devotion there really is to the idea of a democracy and an elected government. Of course, it was written when some states had a majority slave population, too. "Truth, justice and the American Way of Life." That's a quote from a TV show about a fictional superhero who gave himself police powers.

That theme was beautifully explored in WAtchmen, of course - and later the Nolan Batman] films: "superhero" vigilantes vs the rule of law. All sorts of interesting underlying jurisprudential debates in popular culture, if you look for it!

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's no such thing as a legal revolution. The founding fathers, under British law, were traitors and criminals.

 

[BlueTrain]

The thing about superhero vigilantes (never heard them called that before) is that they're all fictional. I don't know if that's good or bad. In fact, the word "vigilante" has bad connotations in that it is usually thought of as men "taking the law into their own hands." In other words, a bunch of men (always only men) rewrite the law to suit themselves. But with only one exception that I can think of, it's usually just a bunch of men getting together and writing the law in the first place. That's where the law comes from. The only differences are how many men are involved and ultimately how many get a say in the matter. More often than not, very few.

A curious fact about the American Revolution was that essentially the same people who were running the country after the war were largely the same people who were running it before the war, with some regional variations, of course. One might even say that we had a form of oligarchy in some colonies and it isn't a lot different today, insofar as we pay any attention to government. It is also curious how one can be a patriot and not a loyalist.

An oligarchy is supposed to be a government by the few or by the rich. I think there should be a term for a government by those who can call their opponent the worst names or yell the loudest. How about "onoma-klisisarchy?" Or "Dynatifonarchy?"

 

[LizzieMaine]

As for superhero vigilantes, at least Batman had official status in Gotham City -- DC's internal censorship code, adopted in 1941, frowned on vigilantism, and after that date all of its heroes became very much establishment figures. Superman went from two-fisted left-wing radical to a compliant tool of Authority. And Batman went so far as to carry a diamond-studded police badge presented to him by Commissioner Gordon. I wonder if he's on the pension plan?

 

[BlueTrain]

Good comments. I liked Wonder Woman the best even if the artwork was marginal.

 

[Fading Fast]

As for superhero vigilantes, at least Batman had official status in Gotham City -- DC's internal censorship code, adopted in 1941, frowned on vigilantism, and after that date all of its heroes became very much establishment figures. Superman went from two-fisted left-wing radical to a compliant tool of Authority. And Batman went so far as to carry a diamond-studded police badge presented to him by Commissioner Gordon. I wonder if he's on the pension plan?

Have you seen the three Chris Nolan "Batman" movies? The series, the second one in particular, explored the themes of vigilantism and police obeisance to the letter of the law (Gordon plays fast and lose there) better than any movie (a superhero one or not) that I've ever scene. In addition, he explores the lines and meaning of terrorism in a thoughtful and challenging way. Some of the speeches in those movies are intense philosophy arguments that feel organic to the movie because Nolan did the hard work of making them relevant to the context of the story's arc and consistent with the characters' pasts and outlooks.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Good comments. I liked Wonder Woman the best even if the artwork was marginal.

And of course, Wonder Woman was, in her secret identity, an actual uniformed member of the Armed Forces. In fact, the entire Justice Society of America enlisted en masse -- even the Spectre, who was legally dead. You can't get much more constituted authority than that.

I did see the first of the Nolan Batman pictures, and thought it was an excellent piece of work, but haven't seen the other two. I think it's fascinating how the superhero myth changes to reflect its times. "Retroactive Continuity" now claims the Justice Society went out of business in 1951 because they refused to unmask before the HUAC. But in fact, the superhero comics of that time, the few that survived, made no effort whatsoever to criticize what was going on in the country. That was left to such radical pinko comics as the EC books -- and we all know what happened to them.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, no, we don't all know what happened to them. As for any political subtlety, I assure you that it would have gone way over the heads of ten year-old boys. I can't speak for the adults who were reading comic books but chances are, they would have missed it, too.

There was another comic book series, Blackhawk, which featured a small group of men dressed in uniforms that reminded me of SS uniforms, what with the blue-black color and black riding boots. They were super heroes without any super powers. I imagine they represented the establishment, although the image was skewed. They could just as easily have represented the establishment in Germany without any change in costume. All they'd have to do would be to change the hawk to a Germanic-looking eagle.

It's interesting that most of those superheroes appeared within a relatively short time frame. It was a good period for comics, if nothing else.

 

[Edward]

There's no such thing as a legal revolution. The founding fathers, under British law, were traitors and criminals.

Of course. Neither "terrorist" nor "freedom fighter" is a noun; both are mere subjective value judgements. Ditto "patriot", "traitor", "loyalist", et al.

I did see the first of the Nolan Batman pictures, and thought it was an excellent piece of work, but haven't seen the other two. I think it's fascinating how the superhero myth changes to reflect its times.

Same as most any myth, of course. I'm always hoping somebody with more time than me will write a sociological treatise on what we can tell about the times in which a version of the King Arthur - or, for that matter, Robin Hood - myth is told, simply from the way in which the story is explored. Of course, the classic example of a more historical story being told to comment on contemporary happenings was Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, no, we don't all know what happened to them. As for any political subtlety, I assure you that it would have gone way over the heads of ten year-old boys. I can't speak for the adults who were reading comic books but chances are, they would have missed it, too.

The EC comics line was put out of business by political inquisitors, supposedly on the basis of their "violence," but also because of their very unfashionable political views. The head of the Comics Code Authority, appointed in the wake of the "comic book panic" of the early 1950s was an extreme right-wing reactionary, who ensured that nothing that might lead the little kiddies to question what they were being told by the media would appear in comics. EC, under pressure, collapsed into a single publication: Mad, which escaped Code censure by changing itself from a 10 cent funny book to a 25 cent black and white magazine supposedly marketed to adults.

There was a lot of political content in the EC horror, science-fiction, and fantasy books, but it was concealed under the trappings of the genre. One of the most famous incidents was a an allegorical story about American racism set on another planet, which concluded with the startling revelation that the explorer telling the story was a black man. The Comics Code had just taken effect, and EC was forbidden to show the character as a black man, because, of course, "everybody knew" that civil rights agitation was Communist-inspired. But the publisher and the editor finally said -- and this is a direct quote -- "F*** you" to the Code administrator and the story went out as drawn.

That was the final panel of the final issue of the last comic book that EC would ever publish.

 

[BlueTrain]

"Everybody knew!" Good excuse for pretty much everything.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The reasoning was that because the CPUSA was the loudest voice raised in favor of absolute civil rights in the 1930s, the whole idea of civil rights had to be Communist. The Powers That Were could not tolerate the conclusion that this was one situation where the CPUSA was absolutely in the right and pretty much all the rest of the country was in the wrong. Dozens of show-business people listed in "Red Channels" were there solely because of their activism on behalf of civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s. That alone made them "Communist dupes."

 

[Fading Fast]

The EC comics line was put out of business by political inquisitors, supposedly on the basis of their "violence," but also because of their very unfashionable political views. The head of the Comics Code Authority, appointed in the wake of the "comic book panic" of the early 1950s was an extreme right-wing reactionary, who ensured that nothing that might lead the little kiddies to question what they were being told by the media would appear in comics. EC, under pressure, collapsed into a single publication: Mad, which escaped Code censure by changing itself from a 10 cent funny book to a 25 cent black and white magazine supposedly marketed to adults.

There was a lot of political content in the EC horror, science-fiction, and fantasy books, but it was concealed under the trappings of the genre. One of the most famous incidents was a an allegorical story about American racism set on another planet, which concluded with the startling revelation that the explorer telling the story was a black man. The Comics Code had just taken effect, and EC was forbidden to show the character as a black man, because, of course, "everybody knew" that civil rights agitation was Communist-inspired. But the publisher and the editor finally said -- and this is a direct quote -- "F*** you" to the Code administrator and the story went out as drawn.

That was the final panel of the final issue of the last comic book that EC would ever publish.

An intentional or unintentional echo of that twist showed up later in "Star Trek's" "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" or, as most people (myself included) know it, the one with the half black - half white faced people.

 

[BlueTrain]

Some of this makes me wonder about things.

The 1950s were supposedly a sort of golden age. Or is that Golden Age." Anyway, we like to think of it as a wonderful and stable period in American history, forgetting for the moment the wars and threats of wars, the epidemics, the problems with integration and so on. Maybe it wasn't really any different from any other decade, although some might agree that it was a little better than the 1930s. And everyone knows the 1890s were easily the best decade ever. But I still wonder.

I was watching parts (my attention span being short winded) a movie the other day, "The night the earth exploded." There were a lot of movies in the 1950s, none of which were particularly high budget. They might be called drive-in movies or B-movies these days. But they all seemed to have a theme of world destruction. There was "The day the sky exploded," "The day the earth caught fire," "It came from beneath the sea," and so on. Did movie makers (they may have all came from the same studio for all I know) just pick a genre and run it into the ground? Or was there some socio-political background that made things like this popular (I assume) for moviegoers.

A teenager going to the movie would never notice any subtle reference to current events, aside from the fact that stock footage of actual natural disasters might be included in the movie. But in one science fiction movie, the name of which I don't recall, teenagers helped to fight the alien invaders. I imagine that went over big with teenagers, boys at least.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Most of the people who consider the 1950s a "golden age" were children then. The "golden age" of everything is eight.

You'll find a lot of subtext in 1950s giant-monster movies revolving around the utter terror over possible nuclear annihilation. That's what "the monster" is in just about all those pictures no matter if it's giant ants, giant lizards, or giant carrots.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was eight years old in 1954. I don't remember it being all that golden at the time. Maybe we didn't have enough gold.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"The Golden Age is never The Present Age." Nostalgic idealization only comes after one has had a chance to grow old enough to say "Damn kids today!" without seeming ridiculous. Without too much effort you can find absolutely sincere nostalgic rants by thirty and forty year olds about how great it was to grow up in the Eighties and Nineties and what whiny little pansies these kids of the 2010s are. And yes, in the mid-1930s there was a wave of nostalgia from the middle aged about how great the Gay Nineties were. Ah, Grover Cleveland, where are you now that we need you?

 

[BlueTrain]

In the same way, someone pointed out that many television shows set in the definite past (as opposed to the vague past, the way TV and movie westerns usually were), they are typically set twenty to thirty years earlier than when they were being produced. It's hardly a hard and fast rule or anything like that, especially when a show is on for ten years but it does seem that way sometimes.