Valueable Kopeck (Soviet Anti-Western Racist Propaganda cartoon 1949) TRANSLATED

I have translated this so you can have more fun watching it.

I found this cartoon in public domain recently. Its clearly a propaganda cartoon against American financial system, but also shows racist animation.

The story is the little Kopeck (russian cent) gets lost. Goes to the money museum. At 12am money comes to life. All the money that looks like it comes from 3rd world countries is peaceful and they all dance together. Later the attention moves to the basement, where American and other "Western" money hang out with alcohol and cigars. The announcer says "here is western GDR western germany guests" and you see soldiers dance. All the soldiers clearly look like NAZI infantrymen.

Then they have a boxing contest the chamption is a brass colored ONE CENT, who is clearly made to look like an African American. He is rude and pompous and smokes cigars. Tiny kopeck cries. Then the soviet radio says "all citizens! bring your money for re-printing" the money goes in, and comes out heavier and more valuable.

The cartoon has been cut to be under 10minutes according to youtube rules. But you will see all the propaganda parts.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• soviet propaganda
• propaganda cartoon
• soviet russian propaganda
• anti-american
• anti-western
• racist propaganda
• anti black propaganda USSR
• soviet union racist
• negro racism
• socialist propaganda
• GDR
• west germany
• kopeck
• rubles

[alfonsotest]

why this is racist? You sick white guilts

[StopFear]

@alfonsotest

I uploaded this and described why in my opinion it is racist. Yes I am white, but I do not think I am guilty at all. I had nothing to do with making of this cartoon, plus some racism in the cartoon was directed at white Germans.

[TheHeidelbergKid]

@StopFear I watched the video from my laptop and the only annotations were Russian-English translations, and literally no commentary. Also, forgive me if I'm a little naïve, but what is big lips supposed to mean? I've seen people of all different backgrounds, yet none seemed to have strangely large lips. I've also seen Chinese cartoons with similarly shaped eyes, and I've never seen or heard of a racist who sees their own "race" as the INFERIOR one.

[StopFear]

@TheHeidelbergKid

Annotations are translations, and description is in description field of the video. Maybe you have to expand it. In America the image of a black person with exaggerated big red lips is an example of how they were portrayed in a racist way. If you check youtube for cartoon called (scrub me mama , or lazytown) you'll see. This soviet cartoon does the same. If this cartoon were actually made by blacks, Chinese, or Japanese, then maybe we'd talk about it differently.

[TheHeidelbergKid]

I can get the anti-Western part, but why's this racist? For one thing, I think the kopeck cried because she wasn't heavy enough, not because of anything Cent or Pence said or did. Also, it's worth noting that some of the "third-world" coins which danced with Kopeck were African-looking.

[StopFear]

@TheHeidelbergKid

I have written in description and in annotations (they should appear when you watch on computer) which explain why this cartoon appears racist to me. In fact I do mention those African coins. The coin that represent CENT is an image of a boxer black guy, other coins have big lips, or asian coins look like cartoony slant eyed asians.

[Lazurath101]

@Vuvenz I don't know about you, but I've never heard anyone call old American cartoons "patriotic"... in fact they get just as much shit for being racist

[StopFear]

@Vuvenz

Nobody criticizes the racist American cartoons of the pre and during ww2 period more than the Americans themselves, so your comments is totally invalid.

[Labargoth]

@StopFear It isn't against the west of Germany it's against the USA which used West Germany as a puppet state...

[oa7200]

@TheHeidelbergKid Chorus here, yet in the real world people do the absurd things, like create races around national or regional identities, funny ain't it. (I mean funny interesting, not funny, ha-ha.) Oh, and this video is an example of one of those things. As you point out the British "races" are especially ornate and detailed to us Yanks and we should count ourselves as having used our time properly, because we've never really spent time on it, until now. My bad.

[TheHeidelbergKid]

@TheHeidelbergKid One more point I would like to make is another big problem. I highly doubt that when Germany split into West and East Germany, the "German" race suddenly no longer existed and was replaced with "West German" and "East German" races. That's kind of, i.e. very, absurd. Tying race to nationality leads to problems like these.

[TheHeidelbergKid]

@oa7200 You make a good point, but there are problems. First, Great Britain refers to a combination of England and Scotland, so "English" and "Scottish" are both "British". Also, America still doesn't fall under this criteria, as the native societies have been replaced with a very diverse mix, with many races by European standards. (continued in a reply to this)

[oa7200]

@TheHeidelbergKid This video is certainly racist, just not by American standards. Race, since it does not truly exist, is a societal construct. European society, unlike US society, does view German, British, Scottish, Italian, Russian, and Greek as races. Just read their coverage of the Euro crisis. This cartoon was made by Europeans, not Americans, so their, not our, societal view must be used when watching the cartoon.

[TheHeidelbergKid]

@oa7200 Sorry, I misunderstood you earlier. But when we look at this, we see at America, Britain, and West Germany are depicted as "evil", but all sorts of ethnicities, including some stereotypical minorities, are seen as "good". Since the latter sounds like racial TOLERANCE, and "Western", "American", "British", and "West German" aren't typically seen as "races", so although this is Anti-Western, it [the film] is not racist.

[oa7200]

@TheHeidelbergKid You ignore that disproving the existence of race does not disprove racism. One is a physical condition (we agree doesn't exist), the other a state of mind (which does.) The contention of yours that I argue with is that something is not racist because race doesn't exist. Go and watch the last 5 min of Birth of a Nation. The awful feeling in your stomach, that is the proper, visceral reaction to the craziness that is racism. And you hate it, because it is real.

[TheHeidelbergKid]

@oa7200 Skin colors fall along a vast continuum, meaning there are no clear-cut boundaries. The word "race" is so poorly defined it has practically no meaning. And if you can prove something contradictory, then it doesn't exist. For instance, a non-physical substance does not exist, as "substance" implies physicality, so it reads "non-physical physical thing (read "anything which exists even hypothetically)", an obvious contradiction.