The white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Va. have given new life to a very old video: an anti-Nazi film released by the U.S. War Department just after the Second World War.
The video, titled “Don’t Be a Sucker,” was produced in 1947. But something about its anti-fascist message evidently spoke to people watching the rallies and violence in Virginia this weekend.
On Saturday, hundreds of members of the neo-Confederate League of the South, neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement and white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party showed up to protest, along with several high-profile white nationalist figures.
The rally turned violent and one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a driver rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Many people online were alarmed by the sight of people carrying Nazi flags and their white supremacist messages. And that’s when this video was re-discovered and went viral.
A B.C. man’s tweet, including a short clip from the video, was shared over 137,000 times.
The 17-minute film discusses Nazi messages and their populist appeal and describes how Americans must be vigilant against such hateful speech.
The film, which can be viewed in its entirety at the Internet Archive, opens with a scene of a man falling for a gambling scheme, equating this with people who fall for Nazi-style rhetoric.
In a particularly poignant scene, a character named Mike attends a rally at which a fiery speaker rails against immigrants and black people who take jobs meant for “real Americans.” Mike believes in what the speaker is saying, until he names Freemasons as an enemy group – as Mike is a Freemason himself.
Mike also meets a Hungarian immigrant who tells him that he’s heard this kind of speech before.
“In this country, we have no ‘other people,’” says the immigrant. “We are American people, all of us.” He then tells the tale of what he saw happen in Germany, which became a “nation of suckers” under the Nazi Party. Only the leaders ultimately benefited from the changed German society, he said.