Read on Twitter
now here is where the fun ends. if you want to be depressed, read the actual comments. and then trace the links in the channel. https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1297510964489641984
It's not really a generation longing for another Red Alert game. It's a generation longing for another world war. https://twitter.com/typhoonjim/status/1297522773766615040
Beyond the editing skill -- the guy who does this is a kind of idiot savant Leni Riefenstahl -- the sort of pan-militarism here (virtually every power -- the Allies + Axis, every side of the Cold War, every side of the present conflicts) is a rather obvious tell
I think we're rather lucky that none of the artistic talent is being used by actual state militaries.
But then again, it may not be long before it is. And perhaps it doesn't matter anyway.
In watching these I begin to really understand why Italian futurism was so compelling at the time.
You can see militarists of virtually every sort -- Eastern bloc tankies, pro-Axis fascists, revanchists from fallen European colonial powers, Hoxha bunker enthusiasts, "precious bodily fluids" US wingnuts, etc -- gathering in the comments in accursed virtual convention
The only thing they have in common is their sense of boredom of everyday life, their longing to fight each other again, and their fetishism of dynamic machinery.
I also encourage you to watch these simply to disabuse yourself of the idea that propaganda requires advanced technical skills, deepfakes, or whatever new bullshit that people yap about https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1297519898214760448
As the comment notes, you can -- simply via basic film editing techniques and the selection of a proper soundtrack -- take an incompetent Gomer Pyle-esque recruit that is about to drop out from basic training and make him look like Rambo
The best example is the video where, quite literally, you just see a loop of Soviet paratroopers just driving (in reality, the people in the video likely were bored and miserable) and make it look like the Imperial March from Star wars https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1297522361265258497
The channel editor, as a sort of challenge, can take virtually any military faction regardless of what they actually fought for and make them look intimidating, powerful, and glamorous. Sometimes the juxtapositions (1930s USN w/ Japanese funk) is jarring
Much of it reminds me -- just on an aesthetic level -- of not just Riefenstahl or her Soviet counterparts but also how Frank Capra (a rather hardline Russia hater) could make a better pro-Soviet propaganda film on commission than Stalin's own propaganda men
In "The Battle of Russia" (1943) Capra gets tasked by Marshall to try to motivate a country that had spent the period before the war hunting Reds to embrace Stalin. This is a challenge because Capra himself is a big Red-hater
Capra has to rely entirely on clips from prewar Russian movies, Soviet propaganda materials, and Western newsreels, editing them together and syncing them in order to get Americans to love Uncle Joe
Communist ideology is almost entirely stripped from the film, instead the film presents the Russians as a warrior culture that trounced the Germans first in 1242(!) rooted in faith, family, and folk (all of the things the USSR tried to destroy).
Graphic footage of real German atrocities is juxtaposed with stirring montages of Red Army forces on the march, with little inconvenient things like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Ukraine famine, or Stalin's purges totally vanishing
The end result is so relentlessly and brutally effective that it utterly dominates the thing (Soviet propaganda for Western audiences) that it is imitating. The student has become the master. The red-hater becomes the ultimate tankie.
Capra goes on to perform similar incredible feats in other films, such as making "The Battle of China" (1944), a pro-KMT banger that accomplishes the equally difficult task of selling a heroic China to a country that banned all immigration from Asia in 1924 and
China in particular in the 1880s. Naturally, Capra goes about this with gusto because he's Frank Capra.
US: I am Big Racist against Chinese ppl
Capra: u are like a little baby watch this
US: EXPEL THE JAPANESE BANDITS FROM THE SACRED GROUND OF ZHONGGUO
US: I am Big Racist against Chinese ppl
Capra: u are like a little baby watch this
US: EXPEL THE JAPANESE BANDITS FROM THE SACRED GROUND OF ZHONGGUO
When I first watched those movies, I was at first impressed and then terrified because I imagined a counterfactual world in which Capra defects to the Axis to target US domestic audience with psyops like Tokyo Rose
and same talents for compelling militarism is then spent creating -- via lavish funding from Axis piggy banks -- films extolling the "misunderstood" Reich or the obvious virtue of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
I don't think, fwiw, propaganda is all-powerful. Looking at the comments of the thread's films I think you can see what kind of audiences they most appeal to. Hardware fetishists and generalized "1914-1945 was just the warmup" stans
But there's still an impressive amount of them https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1297528257823354880
and as I said earlier, you should generally come out of the study of cinematic propaganda less impressed with propaganda about new propaganda and more terrified of the power of techniques that do not change much in 100 years https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1297529757316386817
