OCCUPATION AND THE MARSHALL PLAN
InstaPundit's debating with himself and others, and mostly as an exercise in understanding the current Iraq situation, how Americans and especially the press viewed the European occupation after World War II. If you read the contemporary press accounts, it all sounds familiar--botched anti-Nazification, starving and restive masses (replace starving with lack of utilities for Iraq if you want to), hand-wringing about WHAT WENT WRONG, etc. But Instadude writes in one post that the Marshall Plan came along later, and that by implication prior to its onset we had a hard time grappling with the occupation's full scope.
Not true, or at least not necessarily. The idea that we would first win the war and then rebuild Europe was around as early as 1942. Reader Occam sent me a couple of mp3's from Fibber McGee, and writes:
In case you're wondering how much positive attention a Howard Dean would have received from the mass media in 1942..........These are typical of most network
shows during the war, but Fibber did a better job of
incorporating the required propaganda into the plot line.The first cut, Nursing, is a brief speech by the character
of Mayor LaTrivia, showing that the idea of the Marshall
Plan was already well-known, and part of our internal
propaganda, at that early date.The second, Chucklehead, is a song warning
listeners not to behave like Howard Dean.
Here are the files:
Listen for yourself--we were more serious back then, both about the war and about how to deal with its aftermath. Now, everything is just another political football.