Aux Barricades!

Moscow's "cold war" against the Marshall Plan was hottest on the cartoon front. Favorite subjects were an apelike George Marshall and the "bootlicking" Western press. Goebbels & Co. had scarcely fared worse at the clever hands of Soviet cartoonists.

This campaign of vilification was of course not "warmongering," in Moscow's eyes. Only "capitalist imperialist gangsters" could be warmongers, and they, it seemed, stretched their claws everywhere. Russia's Andrei Zhdanov had called for ideological as well as political resistance to the U.S. Last week the French Communist paper L'Humanite took it from there. Introducing a special anti-American cultural section to run Wednesdays and Fridays, L'Humanite cried: "America degrades the spirit." It got down to cases:

"Do not buy the tripe published by American editors.

"Do not buy American magazines.

"Boycott the morons of the American screen.

"Distribute sane literature. In the land of Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Moliere, Anatole France, Rimbaud, Eluard and Louis Aragon, there can be no support for a propaganda tending to lower the spiritual values."

Somewhat breathless after a half-page assault on U.S. civilization in general ("racism, gangsterism, alcoholism . . . prostitution disguised as law"), L'Humanite begged readers to send in suggestions for future treatment.

"The Superman of Nietzsche." But L'Humanite could not wait for the following Wednesday. Twenty-four hours later the women's page screamed: "Mothers, beware of American illustrated papers . . . these drawings, these comics." Hearst comics were the worst, but all were bad:

". . . Here is Tarzan, king of muscle, Mandrake, king of magic, and, stronger than all, Superman (the Superman of Nietzsche recently adopted by the Americans), whose power has no limits and who well symbolizes the overweening vanity of atomic capitalism."

L'Humanite's solution: "A law for the material and moral protection of our child's press." To twist home the point, the editors ran a two-column cut of a handsome, curly-haired boy doing his homework under lamplight. No comics were in sight, but the caption read: "Is this studious little boy to be the prey of Yankee journalism, the murderer of youthful minds?"

"Felix le Chat." Just how insidiously ubiquitous U.S. comics could be was something even the editors of L'Humanite had apparently not realized by last week. In its customary position in the same issue was the latest installment of the adventures of "Felix le Chat," drawn by U.S. Artist Otto Messner, supplied with French-text balloons, and syndicated by Hearst's King Features.

No Nietzschean supercat, Felix might be tolerated for a while. He was being baffled as usual by Suzy the Mouse.

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