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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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The Bill Whitcroft character is the weakest of window dressing to the moral themes the show is muddling through. He barely exist.

He's there to hold out the hope of some sort of positive ending that, given the conditions, simply should not be possible, which is why he's so weak as a character. Yes, a deus ex machina, but the fact that the writers felt the need to have that (rather than let the black communists win, or just devolving into chaos) is significant. The idea of Smith playing the long game isn't weak like that, they hint at it throughout at least the later seasons.

That the black communists in the show think the Americans and the Nazis were pretty much the same is what you'd expect from such a group (compare Muhammad Ali's "No Viet Cong ever called me [the N-word]") but it doesn't mean the show was actually endorsing that view. Kido essentially makes the same claim to Frank Frink at Manzanar; are we supposed to believe him too? No, the show clearly prefers the old America over Nazi or Japanese rule, even if it refuses to idealize it.