In a lot of ways, the speech is a time capsule. It must have seemed obvious: we'd whipped the intolerant regimes, so things had to get better. Just as before the war it was obvious that munitions magnates fomented wars for profit, rather than political reasons -- Hitler torpedoed that one, but now, of course, we'd figured it out, if only too late. And then the Soviets set up their puppet states in Eastern Europe, and blockaded Berlin, and people of goodwill the world over wondered what we did wrong. But that cheerfulness, that we-can-lick-anything optimism, says volumes about the postwar period. And it says a lot about Superman to me.
Superman's Christmas message, 1945
In a lot of ways, the speech is a time capsule. It must have seemed obvious: we'd whipped the intolerant regimes, so things had to get better. Just as before the war it was obvious that munitions magnates fomented wars for profit, rather than political reasons -- Hitler torpedoed that one, but now, of course, we'd figured it out, if only too late. And then the Soviets set up their puppet states in Eastern Europe, and blockaded Berlin, and people of goodwill the world over wondered what we did wrong. But that cheerfulness, that we-can-lick-anything optimism, says volumes about the postwar period. And it says a lot about Superman to me.
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