Octopus & Propaganda

[o.vulgaris]

ummm... having trouble keeping up with the story line, is this the climax of the story, where's the rising action??? 8)
clem, ying-yang my brother..

[Clem]

ummm... having trouble keeping up with the story line, is this the climax of the story, where's the rising action???

O.,

A small topical digression stalled over the thread, I'm afraid. It's my fault, I never should have mentioned food.

I'm trying to find one of the more famous octopus in propaganda, a WWII poster depicting Imperial Japan as an enormous cephalopod taking in Southeast Asia and reaching for Australia. Sound familiar?



Clem

[Steve O'Shea]

'fraid not Clem, but it sure sounds interesting. Should you find it then a copy online (copyright?) would be interesting.

Food ... now there's a thought. Off to the golden arches.

[TaningiaDanae]

'fraid not Clem, but it sure sounds interesting. Should you find it then a copy online (copyright?) would be interesting.

Food ... now there's a thought. Off to the golden arches.

Excellent idea, mate, and while you're there please have a Kiwi Burger for me. (We can't get them here, you know.... )

[TaningiaDanae]

ummm... having trouble keeping up with the story line, is this the climax of the story....

Nah, that was just the entrée -- the climax is dessert, for which you have a choice of chocolate mousse, mango sorbet, or tiramisú. Kindly inform your waiter, Stephen, of your selection, and don't forget to leave him a generous tip -- he's saving up for a Neil Diamond t-shirt.

:D

[Steve O'Shea]

Tanks Tani. Tintentontoontinfisches day will come.

[o.vulgaris]

I'm trying to find one of the more famous octopus in propaganda, a WWII poster depicting Imperial Japan as an enormous cephalopod taking in Southeast Asia and reaching for Australia. Sound familiar?



Clem

Clem, I recall seeing a poster similar to the one you describe but i'm no sure, you could give the link to the pic, that won't violate any copyright issues...Will it?

[o.vulgaris]

take a look at this, clearly not propanga but it might influence a person's criteria somewhat and lead to the conclusion that octo's are evil lol.
http://members.aol.com/jeffsines/doc/48.jpg
I seriouslly took the time to read this article, was interesting, might be a bit boring but since when is the octopus satan????
clearly to christian's their share a similarity, weird.
here's the link:
http://www.tldm.org/Bayside/Messages/bm760624.htm

[Clem]

O.,

Yikes. That "Feathered Octopus" illustration is really something; the old pulp fiction magazines had some terrific illustrators. As for the Satanic octopus, well, some octopus are red, and their arms have occasionally been described as "horns" in pre-modern texts. Fishermen in the Sea of Cortez call Dosidicus gigas, the Humboldt squid, "The Red Devil," and cephs have long been lumped together under the "devilfish" name (along with large rays).

Clem

[TaningiaDanae]

I seriouslly took the time to read this article, was interesting, might be a bit boring but since when is the octopus satan????
clearly to christian's their share a similarity, weird.

Not so, o.v. First of all, the language in the article comparing the Octo to an evil force was purely metaphorical. It simply referred to the multiplicity and flexibility of arms (I've heard the metaphor also used to describe political movements and business monopolies). Secondly, I have a netpal who is a hard-line Traditionalist Catholic, and while we may disagree on how Archis got here (creation ex nihilo vs. creation via evolution), we both think they are some of God's most beautiful, extraordinary, and majestic creations.


Peace and blessings,
Tani

[o.vulgaris]

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! :)

[TaningiaDanae]

.... 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! :)

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 . 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. :)

Blessings,
The Tanster

[Tentacular!]

Well said Tani.

[TaningiaDanae]

Thanks Tentacular! :) 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

[Tentacular!]

And BTW, where did you get that great avatar?

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 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. Lucky I wont be making Tonmocon or my shallow facade would be shattered.
Rachel

[Clem]

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."



Mon dieu.



Clem

[Clem]

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

[Tintenfisch]

It seems the misunderstood octopus continues to represent evil in modern cyberspace...

Fighting the Octopus

:?

[o.vulgaris]

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 . 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. :)

Blessings,
The Tanster

hello again :) , 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.

[o.vulgaris]

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. :)