Don't Be a Sucker (22:48)
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This is a U.S. War Department educational short film, originally released in 1943; a slightly shorter version was released again in 1947. It went viral in August 2017, in response to the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (I bookmarked an article about it around that time, but didn't get around to actually watching it until September 2018, because I am such a terrible procrastinator. Or a really good procrastinator, depending on how you look at it.)

Anyway... the film begins with a couple of relatively mundane examples of people being "suckers," before moving on to the actual point of the film: being suckered in by divisive rhetoric. There's a guy on a street corner giving a hate speech, trying to agitate listeners against other races, foreigners, other religions (or religious denominations). One man in the crowd is listening to the speech, and doesn't seem to have a problem with it until the speaker mentions freemasons, which this one listener happens to be. That surprises him, and troubles him. He then goes and sits on a park bench with another man who had heard the speech, a Hungarian-born man who is now an American citizen. He tells the first man about having heard similar speeches in the past, when he was a professor in Berlin. He gives examples of how Nazis turned different groups against each other in Germany, to help their own rise to power. So, we shouldn't allow such a thing to happen in America. There should be no "other people" among Americans, but rather we should all just be Americans, and remain united, regardless of race or creed, etc.

Well, I thought it was a pretty decent film, particularly for its time. Not exactly perfect... I mean, one of the last things the Hungarian-American man says is that we should be "selfish" about it, and I think that fairly well sums up my one real problem with the film. I like the idea presented of America being entirely made up of various "minorities" (including many that we might not usually think of as such), and that we should not let that separate us, but rather defend everyone's right to belong to whatever particular minorities they do, and be proud of it. But what I don't like is that the reason given for doing so is because if we don't all stand up for every minority, we could each eventually find our own minority being the one under attack. I'd prefer it if everyone wanted to defend everyone else's right to be themselves out of a sense of altruism, rather than selfishness. Then again... it occurred to me that that's actually what Martin Niemoller's famous poem, First they came..., ultimately boils down to. And I've never had a problem using that as an inspirational message of unity. So, I guess... whatever works to unite people is better than allowing ourselves to be divided by hate, even if that unity is at least partially motivated by self-interest.