In politics, some of the most devastating attacks can be done with humour or, as in the example to follow, ridicule.
Head to youtube.com and you can find plenty of excerpts from Triumph des willen [Triumph of the will], Leni Reifenstahl's 1935 propaganda masterpiece. Wagnerian music, goose-steppers galore and some camerawork that creates a truly breathtaking view of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.
Breathtaking that is, if you don't have any idea what Hitler and his lackeys' were up to at the time and planning to do later.
But the over-the-top posturing of the Nazis easily lent itself to a simple human emotion that pulls the whole thing into perspective: humour.
During the Second World War, British and American propaganda teams tended to rely more on humour to poke at Hitler for popular consumption. Cartoons were especially popular and both Warner Brothers and Disney in the United States produced training films and propaganda films as animated shorts.
One of the numerous examples of their comedy art is in this Universal newsreel from the early 1940s. It takes clips of Hitler and of German soldiers marching and edits them together Doin' the Lambeth Walk, a tune from a popular pre-war West end musical. The result is hilarious over 60 years later. Lambeth Walk was also a London street particularly hard-hit by Nazis aircraft druing the Blitz.
The two minute clip was effective at the time.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is said to have stormed from the screening room cursing and knocking over furniture when he was shown this.
Of course, sometimes, ridicule isn't part of an orchestrated political attack. Sometimes some over-the-top posturing leads to ridicule that just happens naturally.
Right, Danny?
