Octopus & Propaganda

TaningiaDanae said:
I've heard the metaphor also used to describe political movements and business monopolies.
very true, I've seen it happen also, clem has seen it too often I suppose, he brought up this article about some of it, they're is alway's two debating sides to everything, I concur that those who don't personally know ceph's should keep their atistic point of view's to themselves, other's might disagree of course, It does bother me to see octo's portrayed as something evil or harmful, this, which is entirely false.I've been handling octo's for about 10+ year's, I don't understand how those who have never tryed to learn about ceph's infer that they are evil or whatever, clem what's your thought's on this?
see ya guy's, peace! :smile:
 
o.vulgaris said:
.... I concur that those who don't personally know ceph's should keep their atistic point of view's to themselves, other's might disagree of course, It does bother me to see octo's portrayed as something evil or harmful, this, which is entirely false.I've been handling octo's for about 10+ year's, I don't understand how those who have never tryed to learn about ceph's infer that they are evil or whatever, clem what's your thought's on this?
see ya guy's, peace! :smile:

Hi again o.v. A couple of thoughts re this:

  • - Unfortunately, the Octopus is not the only critter to be tarred with the brush of negative metaphor. Look how common it is (in English, at least) to refer to a person one doesn't like as a "weasel", "snake", "rat", "worm", etc. None of these animals are evil in themselves, though we perceive some of their characteristics as unpleasant from a human point of view.

    - Not everyone who enjoys scary images of Cephs necessarily hates them! The most close-to-home example here is the number of Cephalofans (myself included) who are also Lovecraftians. While HPL himself had a phobic aversion to all sea creatures, one of the qualities that hooks readers on his stories is the vividly terrifying portrayal of supernatural Cephs, in particular the tentacled god-monster Cthulhu :cthulhu: . Look at many of the less-technical TONMO threads, and you will find references to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos all over the place. In the world of Cephalofandom, Cthulhu and Oswald are equally welcome. :smile:

Blessings,
The Tanster
 
Thanks Tentacular! :smile: And BTW, where did you get that great avatar? I never heard of "Squid Girl" comics until I saw one being offered on eBay about a year ago, and I never saw another one since. I assume there were only a couple of issues released? Good stuff!

Dux vobiscum,
Tani
 
And BTW, where did you get that great avatar?
:oops: I blush to admit that I got it doin the old google image search. Does that make me very, very bad? When I first found Tonmo I thought to myself... I need something tres funky for this... so I spent an hour or so of valuable office time :twisted: searching through images till I found this one. I have not read the comics, but obviously I'd love to.
Oh and of course I look EXACTLY like that, right down to the bikini, thigh high boots and whip. :jester: Lucky I wont be making Tonmocon or my shallow facade would be shattered.
Rachel
 
O. & Taningia,

Well, I've stumbled onto another piece of this puzzle. Turns out, the process of sustaining the octopus' vile reputation was helped along by Adolf Hitler himself, in the pages of Mein Kampf: "If our people and our state become the victims of bloodthirsty and money-thirsty Jewish tyrants, the whole world will be enmeshed in the tentacles of this octopus." I'd been aware of Nazi propaganda illustrations depicting "International Jewry" as an octopus, but I was surprised to find that the association had been made by Hitler himself, in his ideology's founding document. Surprised, and struck by the suggestive proximity of the word "bloodthirsty" to his cephalopod metaphor.

Vampirism and cephalopods have a peculiar relationship in the popular imagination. In "The Toilers of the Sea," Victor Hugo endowed his "devilfish" (an octopus that attacks the hero Gillatt in a watery grotto) with vampiric attributes, explaining that octopus ingest prey by first liquefying them. Illustrations accompanying Hugo's text commonly show the devilfish's arms leaving bloody welts where the suckers had fastened onto Gillatt. It's not hard to imagine an ignorant man assuming that the suckers on a cephalopod's arm might be feeding structures of some sort, akin to the mouth-parts of leeches and lampreys. Even those schooled in biology and zoology might make the momentary visual association between the superficially related structures of an octopus sucker and a leech's mouth. Carl Chun owns the dubious distinction of having established a formal connection between cephalopods and vampires: in 1903, he first described Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the "Vampire-squid from Hell."

If Hitler read Hugo's novel, he might have appreciated the metaphoical possibilities of the vampiric devilfish. Where Gillatt stood for the particular working-class associated with the sea, and the devilfish for the system that exploited them, Hitler might have imagined the hard-working German volk parasitized by conspiratorial Jews. For Hitler, a man obsessed with the pseudo-science of racialism and eugenics, the notion of a parasitic appendage would have carried a potent psychic charge. Multiplied eight-fold, it provided him with a potent image. That it was abysmally wrong made it no less effective: the visual association made between sucker and mouth, between octopus and vampire, occurred faster than judgment and did not need to be rationally sustained. It was one of numerous bestial metaphors in the anti-semitic bag of tricks, and Hitler had an audience willing to suspend its critical faculties.

Below is the frontspiece to an 1883 edition of "The Toilers of the Sea."

418.jpg


Mon dieu.

:goofysca:

Clem
 
....and more Gallic octo-phobia, here used to make Free-Masonry seem yet more threatening:

1697896120579.png


:goofysca:
 
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TaningiaDanae said:
Hi again o.v. A couple of thoughts re this:

  • - Unfortunately, the Octopus is not the only critter to be tarred with the brush of negative metaphor. Look how common it is (in English, at least) to refer to a person one doesn't like as a "weasel", "snake", "rat", "worm", etc. None of these animals are evil in themselves, though we perceive some of their characteristics as unpleasant from a human point of view.

    - Not everyone who enjoys scary images of Cephs necessarily hates them! The most close-to-home example here is the number of Cephalofans (myself included) who are also Lovecraftians. While HPL himself had a phobic aversion to all sea creatures, one of the qualities that hooks readers on his stories is the vividly terrifying portrayal of supernatural Cephs, in particular the tentacled god-monster Cthulhu :cthulhu: . Look at many of the less-technical TONMO threads, and you will find references to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos all over the place. In the world of Cephalofandom, Cthulhu and Oswald are equally welcome. :smile:

Blessings,
The Tanster

hello again :smile: , I know exactly what your leading to, It's not like if Im targeting those who made these pic's because I understand why they did it, as a youngster (still am, hehe) I though the same way too, I thought octo's were evil too, no way in hell were they docile right, hehe, it wasn't until I was in 8th grade that I learned to fully appreciate ceph's, If someone were to say a octo were a monster around me, you would surely recieve a socking from me lol (j/k but you get the point), you should know how many heated discussion's I had with people who had seen those prehistoric B&W movies with a huge squid attacking the fisherman, in the end they learned nothing just that I was some crazy fanatic of octo's trying to tell my side of the story lol, to sum it up I've had my fair share of monster ceph's argument's lol, I know were you're coming from, I totally understand what you're saying lol, no point in saying otherwise, will do some research on Cthulhu as I don't much about this, it's not my field of study or interest I suppose.
 
clem, adolp hitler's book eh, I suppose they're might be something about ceph's being those monster's everyone grew up to know, hehe, But isn't it a book mainly about german triump and german nationalism, where do killer octo's come in? :P
see ya later clem, peace. :smile:
 
O.V, the use of the imagery of the octopus by the Nazi state was inevitably racist and negative in tone. Unfortunately, Hitler alluded to the octopus more than once in Mein Kampf. In addition to the quote Clem has posted above in chapter 3 lies the following quotation in reference to his perceived view of European Jews:

"While one of these scum is attacking his beloved fellow men in the most contemptible fashion, the octopus covers himself with a veritable cloud of respectability and unctuous phrases, prates about ' journalistic duty ' and suchlike lies, and even goes so far as to shoot off his mouth at committee meetings and congresses- that is, occasions where these pests are present in large numbers -about a very special variety of 'honor,' to wit, the journalistic variety, which the assembled rabble gravely and mutually confirm."

There are a number of images that were produced under the auspices of Josef Goebbels' propaganda machine that depict international Jewry as some form of bloodthirsty octopus. Taste dictates not posting them here, no matter how relevent. Indeed, one issue of Julius Streicher's ranting Der Sturmer magazine depicted an octopus bearing a Star of David being stabbed with spears labelled 'truth' and 'enlightenment'.

On a (slightly) lighter note, here is another good example of the symbolism of the octopus this time taken from Life magazine from January 1953. The octopus/fire pump represents the cold war fears of arms and munitions being transported across Europe into Eastern Germany and thus feeding the then perceived Communist menace.

(BTW, Clem - fantastic research on this thread. Where do you find these images? It's all fascinating.)
 
o.vulgaris said:
...will do some research on Cthulhu as I don't much about this, it's not my field of study or interest I suppose.
O.,

Cthulhu is a recurring character in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. There are some at TONMO who actively worship Cthulhu and take pride in being his minions. Steer clear of them.

Phil said:
Where do you find these images?
Phil,

Google image search responds well to inputting words for cephalopods in various languages. "Pieuvre" (octopus) yielded the anti-masonic poster, while "pieuvre, Hugo" led me to a trove of illustrations associated with "Les Trevailleurs de la Mer." Still, there's a lot of brute-force slogging involved...and I still can't find that great WWII poster depicting an Imperial Japanese octopus reaching for Australia.

Thanks for that Antwerp octopus. I'd posted a link to a larger version at the top of the thread, but I'll take its re-appearance as an opportunity to ask a question: why Antwerp? Was it considered a "weak sister" by more ardent anti-communists?

Clem
 
Clem said:
Cthulhu is a recurring character in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. There are some at TONMO who actively worship Cthulhu and take pride in being his minions. Steer clear of them.
will do clem, don't want to get in anyone's bad side, anyway's I got you to back me up right. 8)
 
This is becoming one of my favorite threads, and by now, with all his research Clem could probably teach the subject as a college course (sponsored jointly by the departments of Journalism and Marine Biology).

More random thoughts:

  • - O., I think Clem's pulling a few of your legs. Most of us who pose as Cthulhu-worshipers on this message board are doing just that: posing, similarly to Trekkers who speak Klingon, or STAR WARS enthusiasts who go around saying "May the Force be with you." We're Lovecraft enthusiasts, and we're weird, but not that weird! There are, of course, exceptions. I used to belong to a Lovecraftian amateur press association called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and I wondered why some people would edge away from me when I said that. Turns out there was another group called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, comprised of bona fide Cthulhu-worshipers who took the entire Mythos seriously! What makes this even funnier, is that Lovecraft himself was an atheistic materialist, who didn't believe in the supernatural, or in anything unprovable by observation or research. So go to your local library, take out a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and prepare for some very classy chills (I recommend starting with THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, THE CALL OF CTHULHU, or a non-Mythos story entitled THE OUTSIDER).

    - The TOILERS OF THE SEA pic is fantastic (though wildly inaccurate, of course), and would make a great wall poster!

    - As upset as I am about Hitler's defamation of Octopuses, for some reason I'm just a teensy-weensy bit madder about his repulsive characterization of Jews. :x For some reason.

    - Nevertheless, the Holocaust -- like slavery -- is an inescapable part of the world's history, horrific though it may be, and becoming informed about it is one safeguard against repeating the past (not next weekend, but next century). So, Clem and everyone, thank you for presenting these pieces of history, not only for the sake of Cephiana but as a cautionary note to the younger people who may be reading this thread.

    - Hey Tentacular, don't be ashamed of your work as a teuthsome rubber-clad dominatrix! As a matter of fact, I am a tall voluptuous swordswoman who wears a metal bra and tunic, breathes fire, mixes it up with gods, and throws a mean chakram. Unfortunately, I can't make it to TONMOcon 'cause there's this short blonde chick who follows me around all the time, and I can't afford two round-trip chariot tickets.

    Tani Warriorteuthis
 

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