There’s a massive archive of old educational movies over at R.I.P. Films. Some of them, like “A Date With Your Family” will be familiar to fans of MST3K, and of course there are the cold war and atomic age classics “Atomic Alert!” and “Duck and Cover.” There are also some much more disturbing films, especially among the WWII era U.S. propaganda films.
Most of them are fairly innocuous documentary style pieces. Movies about how personal hygene, good posture and recycling can help the Allied Forces win WWII. But there are a bunch of movies depicting the WWII attitudes about Japan that are flat-out racist. They’re pretty disgusting even when viewed in their historical context. What’s even more disgusting is that, even today, there are people who try to defend the US Government’s interrment of Japanese Americans.
The trouble is that the person making the defense isn’t just your average redneck. He’s a Congressman, and he was making the defense in the context of possible interrment of Muslim-Americans. To top it all off, Howard Coble (R-NC) is the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.