China's Great Leap Forward

Words: 624
Pages: 3

USA POV
In the USA propaganda video, President Eisenhower introduces the threat of China’s Great Leap Forward. Unsurprisingly, the United States was actively anti-Communist at this time, and the Red Scare induced fear and hysteria in many Americans. Hence the line, “Who knows who could be one—your milkman, your neighbor, Michael Jackson?”, which shows that the paranoia that ran rampant among Americans caused them to believe that anyone could be a Communist. Including this line in a propaganda video only heightens such paranoia for any US citizen, effectively turning them even further against communism and any potential Communists.
Eisenhower also mentions the containment policy, which had the goal of keeping communism at its current borders. As usual, communism is depicted as an extreme evil in Eisenhower’s speech, and he accuses it of brainwashing one’s children and
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By creating communes that took away the farmers’ privacy and right to ownership, their motivation to work disappeared, which meant no one tried their best in working the farms. There were crop failures and the economy shrank, and over twenty million people starved to death. Therefore, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was nothing but a huge disaster. This information is necessary for the propaganda video, since it reminds Americans that communism doesn’t do a country any good—the leader of the People’s Republic of China ultimately failed in trying to modernize his nation’s economy and brought on an immense number of deaths of the Chinese, all because he took away their private farms and put them into shared ones instead. President Eisenhower tries to aggressively convince his audience to never practice communism, since they could die like the Chinese Communists. His scare tactics would surely have an effect on the Americans, brainwashed by