Thread by @torstenkathke

"Let’s totally equate the movement she actually started with the Nazi propaganda minister using images of idealized Aryan offspring."

There’s no denying the Nazis used blonde children – and yes, girls in braids – for their propaganda.

Then again, so did the USIA after World War II in their efforts to “re-educate” former Nazis.

See, e.g. p.77 here:
books.google.de/books?id=UcDWB…

This is, however, part of much larger discourses surrounding childhood, whiteness, and gender. The Nazis certainly availed themseves of these, and built on them.

You’ll encounter the cute white children everywhere in 20th century imagery: propaganda, advertising, movies.

That’s because whiteness was portrayed as the norm.

farm2.static.flickr.com/1039/136542583…

Here’s a white blonde family working on the homefront:

And here’s a mother protecting her blonde kid from ghostly Nazi and Japanese hands:

Here’s the Hollywood movie "The Parent Trap" from 1961.

You get the point: there’s something about blonde white girls that causes them to show up again and again.

And that something *is* linked to the Nazis as well.

It’s race, and racism. The idea that blonde and white and female equals pure.

This is a thing that does in fact link Nazi propaganda and Thunberg, if not in the way D’Souza implies.

But let’s address the obvious differences:

Thunberg is a young woman leading a movement. This in itself is unthinkable in Hitler’s Nazi ideology, where women are not supposed to have power.

They are revered and needed as, and reduced to be one thing only: mothers. The state was men, the household for women.

(As always things in reality were often a bit different from the official ideology, but propaganda spread mostly that official ideology. Some good starting points for more:
jstor.org/stable/3173289 and
jstor.org/stable/4397988)

And of course, that she is not just a figurehead, but an actual leader with opinions, sets her apart starkly from the interchangeable images of blonde girls shown in Nazi propaganda.

There is also no "progressive left" that is peeking into Goebbels’s playbook.

What there is is a long history of images of blonde girls and women with a host of associations that are readily tapped into by the media.

That someone looking like Greta Thunberg could start this movement and get attention was not a given.

But we can certainly look back in history to try and understand how it could happen.

That history is much longer and broader than just Nazi propaganda posters.

Quick coda (it was late last night, so I couldn't work everything in):

@BobrowStrain wrote "White Bread," a book that includes more on post-WWII ads featuring children (as in the image above): npr.org/sections/thesa…

"The Parent Trap" was based on a novel by German author Erich Kästner, who certainly had no love for Nazis: spiegel.de/international/…

(If your read German, his war diary is insightful: deutschlandfunkkultur.de/erich-kaestner…).

So much for now.