/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>1811619
>It is the most insidious, insipid self-aggrandizing tripe you could ever think to imagine, and that colored the perceptions of the middle ages for over a century
He was dunking on slave owners so its fully justified.

>>1811676
Anon it's satire because it's a mockery of how fascism sees the world, they see their enemies as bugs and themselves as handsome chads when in reality their enemies are human beings and fashoids are as degenerate as anybody else.

>>1811623
Starship Troopers isn't trying to parody fascism by doing the soyjak method. The whole point of the movie is to explore the seductive nature of propaganda. Whether or not it succeeds at that is a separate question from the fact that that's what the intention is. Saying that we should just portray fascists as the soyjak or otherwise make them out to be cringe hypocrites is missing the entire point that this is the wrong way to look at politics. It doesn't really matter if /pol/ users have no chin. They're not bad because they're ugly. They're bad because of what they stand for and what they do. You don't need to introduce any other problems or flaws to make them out to be bad guys, in fact if you do add some element like that to clearly signal the fascists as bad guys, you take away from any commentary you make on why the fascism itself is bad.

>>1811682
See my problem with that is that in the "reality" of starship troopers, the bugs are literal bugs and the handsome chads are handsome chads. I mean, that's how Jean Claude Van Damme is in real life. Are we going to now say that Birth of a Nation was a "satire of racism" because it expressed white supremacist views, as silly as those views may actually be? And it's not like Fascists respond by saying "NOOOOOOOOOOOO! STOP SAYING OUR BELIEFS ARE JUST RIGHTEOUS HUMANS VERSUS EVIL SPACE BUGS!" They've more than happily claimed it and said: yes, this is 100% what I believe, this is what I think a good society should be.

I mean, to be perfectly honest I've watched Starship Troopers with quite a few people over the years. We're all having a good time laughing and quoting shit from the movie:
>"I'm doing my part!"
>"I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!"
>"The only good bug is a dead bug!"
Yes it's campy and we don't take the film too seriously. But the line between irony and taking it "seriously" is razor thin. Y'know you get to the Klendathu Drop scene where the first wave of conscripts get slaughtered, and one of us says "Man, could you imagine having to fight in that hellhole?" Like you're already picturing yourself as part of the Fascist regime there.

Let me use another example. I've seen that webm of the Romanovs getting executed plenty of times on here. Does any Leftist feel like they're the subject of "satire" watching it? If anything I'd say we've reclaimed it, to the point we're just calling it "based" when we see some NKVD guy gunning down literal children. We've got a copypasta on here from Leninhat justifying the execution of the Romanovs. If someone were to come around here and say "Nooo, you don't understand, that video of the Romanovs getting executed is just satirizing how Leftists see the world!" I guarantee a majority of us would say "No, that IS our beliefs." If they were gonna make all the NKVD officers handsome, and portray little Alexei or Anastasia Romanov as vampires, would we think the satire is any less relevant to us? Or insulting? Or somehow striking a blow against our beliefs? Or would we just laugh in good humor and reclaim the thing as a semi-ironic piece of propaganda?

>>1811691
Others have said it well in the thread Anon, you aren't going to reach fascists with anti-fascist satire. The point is to reach ordinary people and see how a fascist worldview can only function in a literal fantasy setting where your enemies are giant insects.

>>1811700
She had concentration camps bro.

>>1811701
I thought this was common knowledge but the difference between morally grey and evil is whether the villain is hot. If a fascist dictator looks like a hot woman, then they’re morally grey.

>>1811706
My argument is that if it’s satirizing Fascism it does as good a job as Triumph of The Will. Shit there are people who played Bioshock and got interested in Objectivism/Ayn Rand’s philosophy despite the whole message of the game, shown explicitly, is that it doesn’t work. If a game where Objectivism specifically turned a society into some nightmare city of drug addicts gets people interested in Objectivism, what does a movie that depicts an idealized form of Fascism do? Bioshock at least shows Objectivist society being some nightmare dystopia.

Like if I were to just broadcast Triumph of The Will would I get a pass by just winking at the audience and saying “This is what Fascists actually believe, folks!”

It’s something I’ve been thinking about playing Helldivers with my friends. I’ve seen plenty of people ironically change their fbi.gov status to “spreading democracy” and spout shit like “every bullet is a ballot!” And it seems almost as if you can sleepwalk people into goose stepping as long as you convince them it’s “ironic.”

It might just be because I watched “Look Who’s Back” and the whole message of that movie is that, essentially, people fall for Fascism if you present it as some meme or inside joke. And so seeing a bunch of Germans literally be buddy-buddy with Adolf Hitler as long as they have some distance or can convince themselves that it’s just “ironic” to throw up a Nazi salute is, frankly, unnerving.

Honestly I think Look Who’s Back kind of ruins starship troopers in that regard. Because it shows a genuine danger in “ironic” fascism. Worth a watch at least.

>>1811704
No, that was the public opinion at release >>1776234

>>1811724
Anon, how about you come down your self-righteous enlightened high-horse for 5 minutes?
> It will attract fascists
> Maybe you should ask yourself why you find the society of Starship Troopers to be desirable?
Nobody is born a commie, liberal or fascist; proletarians end up in these ideologies because they think they address their issues. Given our present conditions, if you produce, even ironically, unabashed propaganda people will evaluate it at least somewhat positively. So, instead of moralfagging over how you didn't fall for it, you should dig for the material reason as to why it had such effect. Note again that even upon release a lot of people and critics evaluated it as a fascistic piece of media >>1776234

CPusa anon cites a much better alternative for what the movie was aiming for and failed at >>1774446

Aesthetics matter. If you don't know this, you haven't learned anything
Read Hegel's derivation of essence and appearance.

>>1811683
>They're not bad because they're ugly.
Aesthetics just matter. Full stop. You can portray nazis like the evil spinless cowards they are in real life but it's important to make them look like shit too just in case a mass of fullblown retards tries to spin the narrative like with Starship Troopers or Star Wars with the Empire.

>>1811952
Honestly as annoying as it is to be called a Fascist (especially when arguing that Starship Troopers' problem is it's too subtle in its satire of Fascism) I do feel a little bad his post got deleted. Important to be warned of the dangers of becoming a Fascist myself.

>>1811958
See I wholly understand the point the guy was making about it being framed as propaganda from the Fascist government, rather than an "objective" lens, but my problem remains the same. Like, you literally see a news report where soldiers get slaughtered en masse by bugs, just saying "Well, it's propaganda" doesn't change the fact that unless we're using "propaganda" to mean that everything is staged and the bugs aren't exactly how they look through our glimpses of them in the film. I know people have shown pics of Nazi propaganda portraying Jews as monsters or ugly or rats or what have you, but the difference is I don't think even the Nazis did news reports of Wehrmacht troops being ripped apart by 8 foot tall rat-Jews. Like for all the Nazis racial pseudoscience and propaganda, I'm pretty certain most Germans didn't think the Jews were literal rat people.

Now to the film's credit, there are quite a few parts where it can make you say "Hey, wait a second." But the thing is they're subtle enough that it's easy for a casual viewer to miss on the first watch. There's a character who says she signed up because she wants to be a mother and it's "so much easier to get a birthing license if you're a citizen." You've got the gag of a "murderer" being arrested, tried, and executed within the span of a day. Again, that's fucked up.

But again it goes back to what I was saying, where when there's a backdrop of existential war people are far more willing to tolerate shitty government. And then you've got to ask how people who enjoy Starship Troopers treat it. I'm sure there's some of its fans are just laughing the whole time watching this bumbling Fascist regime get tons of people killed, but how many people "ironically" enjoy it? How many people "ironically" drink the Fascist regime's Koolaid? Like I said, I've watched the movie a couple times with groups of people, and we're all drinking or smoking and playing along with the propaganda: "I'm doing my part!" "The only good bug is a dead bug!"

As I said before, just saying, "Well you don't get it. It's satire. The movie is literal propaganda, how do you not understand that?" Doesn't really work when the movie's so good at hooking you with catchy slogans and handsome people. Shit I'd say even the stuff hinting at how dystopian the society is (again, a trial and execution happening in a day) doesn't work because modern Nazis LOVE ironically playing up how evil they are. George Lincoln Rockwell was touring around the South in something he literally called "The Hate Bus" and propagandists like Stonetoss or MurdochMurdoch get a kick out of portraying themselves as plucky Homer Simpsons who just want to commit a genocide.

Again, if you haven't already, everyone here should watch "Look Who's Back" if they can. I'd say it totally deconstructs Starship Troopers because while they're both satire, "Look Who's Back" goes to show just how dangerous "funny Fascism" or "ironic Fascism" is. Seriously you've got all these seemingly normal Germans who get giddy when they see Hitler. As long as everyone's convinced "Oh it's just an actor" or "Oh it's just satire" they just play along with him… even when he's being 100% serious. He'll talk about immigration and his race politics to their very face, and quite a few people who are all buddy-buddy with fake Hitler pause and start to agree with him. It starts off innocently enough, like it's all one big joke, but then you've got German politicians admitting openly they'd support Hitler if they lived back in the 30s.

So yeah, we're all watching Starship Troopers and having a big laugh. "The only good bug is a dead bug!" Hey! It's satire! It's cool to be spouting Fascist propaganda because you're doing it ironically. It's all a big joke.

Until it stops being a joke. Until, after all the laughter and the clapping, someone in the audience says "Well y'know they had a point!"

>>1813433
And shit, just to reiterate the point, there's an Italian version of "Look Who's Back" too, though naturally replacing Hitler with Benito ᴉuᴉlossnW. Haven't watched it yet, but if the trailer is any indication you've got a ton of people willing to "ironically" jump back into Fascism. "Ironically" giving Il Duce the Roman salute. The satire lies in everyone "knowing" ᴉuᴉlossnW and Hitler are dead, yet being receptive to the same old ideas, said by the same old person, as long as they think we're all just joking around.

>>1765114
wolf of wall street is not sympathetic at all
maybe im not enough of an androphile to be particularly disarmed by dicaprio's looks, but his character is really an obvious piece of shit from the start all the way to the end, and it's not made ambiguous in the slightest

>>1813433
Of course the funny thing is that the Starship Troopers movie wasn't even meant to be a Starship Troopers movie; it was originally called like "Bug Attack on Outpost Nine". The directors tried to pitch that idea to the execs but that failed, so they just slapped the "Starship Troopers" name on it for name recognition and the executives greenlit it.

>>1813433
You know, as I looked onto how the Nazis operated, it sort of demystified them and made me realize they were a bunch of violent losers playing a game of pretend and forcing everyone else to play along.

>>1813511
The Nazis being mystified as cold and evil hardasses is a Hollywood creation. Their own contemporaries viewed them as stupid clowns.

>>1813525
>>1813511
the truth is somewhere in between, at heart Fascism is above all else contradictory, the Nazis were a lot more brutish than people realize. The early Nazi party, especially, was closer to a street gang of thugs with basically an identical excuse for their violence. People forget that Hitler was actually a homeless bum who got radicalized by street pamphlets and other early Nazi party members like Christian Wirth(also homeless for a while) and Adolf Eichmann(used radio salesman) who were just disgruntled soldiers. Initially fascism was neither explicitly left or right in its policies, other than disavowing communism really. Much of our dichotomy of left and right today results from the impact of fascism in the 1930s and 40s. ᴉuᴉlossnW made a hard right turn during his rise to power in Italy where fascism was birthed, and we know Hitler previously relied on the popular view of socialism to win over many of the working class Germans. Fascism can be adaptable and is fundamentally opportunistic. It will always play on issues that will win populist support and ultimately betray those who help it.

Jack Saint covered this topic really well in his Dune analysis

Aesthetics are everything. If you don't know this, you haven't learned anything from Infrared.
Read Hegel's derivation of essence and appearance.

>>1765114
>moralising language
tldr stop watching capeshit and read theory

>>1836924
It sounds like you learned the wrong thing from Infrared. Stop consuming slop.

>>1769437
When it comes to the "Helldivers II is satire of fascism" discourse: I've come to think that at least some of the kind of people who really want to live under Managed Democracy aren't- as everyone labels them -mouth-breathing basement-dwelling fascist boot-munching idiots. I think you could just as well say it's people who genuinely, deeply wish that our real-life democracies 'worked'- as in, did big, impressive things, brought people together for common causes, etc. It's wish fulfillment for a glorious, muscular democracy instead of the quotidian actuality.

PV literally did not understand fascism when he wrote the Starship Troopers movie, and seems to have genuinely confused fascist propaganda of being disciplined, duty-bound warriors at face value instead of recognizing how much it actually encourages indulging in hideous excesses.

>>1775552
The makers were liberals to the bone. No surprise they rehabilitated fascism to the end in that shit ending.

Damn, Shubel morgen got into a yt block

ok ok BUT how does this intellectual wankery help the working class

>>1840265
Satire doesn't work. Make movies where communism wins.

>>1765114

I get the point in that Wolf of Wall Street (and all the gangster movies by the same director) quite clearly make being a gangster seem fucking baller.

And the point too that US's parodies of fascism are not very good and don't work well because the audience "goes through the looking glass" so to speak, and the medium of the film invites you to do exactly that. Starship trooper stuff is the example because the rightoid flare up about that was pretty clearly them KNOWING it's retarded and seeing how far they could go with it. It's almost exactly the template for the game Helldivers and it seems hard to miss that the point is that in this universe the soldiers are ground meat, at best, their society is fucking retarded, and they are dying for nothing. But its playerbase does roleplay being a fascist soldier with enthusiasm and you're sort of required to do so to participate in the game.

I think you have to make the horrible, and yawning and dull, consequences of what is happening be felt and seen by the audience, which these movies don't like to do because they kind of kill the vibe. And Americans hate being bored. That's why they see Orwell's stuff as the worst thing imaginable. It's that it's boring. There's no bloodshed or spectacle at all. It's about a guy going to work in a cubicle and his boss is a bastard.

And again I get it, why you don't really have to do anything or make changes to satirize a book like ST, which offers this hilariously superficial philosophical groundwork for joining the army– that you get thanked for your service– and supports it with this jarhead story about using shoulder-mounted nukes to kill space bugs. It's so ridiculous you don't NEED to change anything. But the army loves that crap.

>>1840209
He was faithful to the books in many ways, so It's kind of like that Scientology episode of southpark but the words flashing on the screen are THIS IS WHAT THE ARMY ACTUALLY BELIEVES. But the thing is that really is what the army believes so army men love it.

>Wait a minute, is this play about us?
>AYO THIS PLAY IS ABOUT US!!

>>1840310
It wasn't just that, but he also made a comment on how they were sexless in a shower scene "because they're fascist"

>>1839813
I also think, only somewhat related, that when it comes to 'gamer radicalization', people are a bit- just a bit, but definitely that bit -too harsh on young/teenage dorks who fall down the slide of an ideology that is engineered entirely around seeming really, really fun to be part of. Calling them stupid works excellently, in favor of the people telling them that nobody else will ever accept them.
I can't comment on the specifics of Helldivers II as I haven't played it (just not my type of game), but in terms of the appeal of managed democracy to people, I think it comes down to, I'd say, the growing perception that liberal democracies face that they are ultimately timid, seemingly too slow, too partisan, divorced from the common good. The idea of a democracy but it's just that much more authoritarian I can see at least having more appeal in the immediate term, compared to that perception of liberal democracy.

>>1840538
Yes and no. You have to understand that these people literally go to die for the bourgeois in Ukraine already and will enthusiastically enlist to wage a genocide against the Chinese people tomorrow. People really enjoy separating "fascism" when in truth these tendencies are always there in all bourgeois states, we are all impacted by them. This doesn't mean that these guys are actually very bad personally, but more that "fascists" are all "normal" for a bourgeois society people.

>>1840605
How many people who were radicalised by call of duty went to Ukraine?

>>1765114
Stupid thread. Masses, Élites, and Rebels shit from the guy that wrote Masses, Élites, and Rebels.

>>1840637

I hope they all went to Ukraine. Russian artillery and fighter bombers are good.

thoughts on this?

>>1844744
He's correct, but he should not say such things.

>>1844744
Absolutely correct. I pisses me off that westoid youtubers promoted this movie for no reason other than it reminds them of tarkovsky and other arthouse bullshit cinema some soviet directors produced. Westoids love soviet movies russians don't really like and the opposite. They didn't like Gaidai comedies yet the whole country loved them.
*Reminds me of how humans like to smell flowers but dogs love to smell piss and shit.*
I wish westoids paid attention to a movie like Liberation. Now that is a good war movie.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7EqAsBxqGghxpGk1zzWiK2OrV8z2e5Ky

Also, Im gonna post some soviet action movies from the late cold war period. Westoids also dont like them, but we love these movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClXK2ATu9Ds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNBEu74iiY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A13A_78zkQY

>>1846975
>>1846975
>I wish westoids paid attention to a movie like Liberation
The three part WW2 war movie, 1968? Watched it not two weeks ago bitch no joke. Check mate.

>>1846985
5 part but yes. Based westoid.

>>1847010
Are You American?

>>1844744
Ironically this is a very western approach to film analysis, taking it completely literally rather than attempting to express an idea or relate an experience.
>By the end there is a reverse montage of Hitler, which ends with Adolph a an infant. Flyora stops shooting the poster with Hitler's image.
>What's the point of the scene? That Hitler once was a baby?
lol

>>1813448
you don't understand the "literally me" effect