Comparing the sophistication of Russian propaganda to US propaganda is like comparing a toddler playing with marbles to a thousand supercomputers playing 3D chess for a trillion years to map out every possible move. There is no comparison at all.
The more I think about the topic, the more I am astonished how literally every aspect of the US economy without even one exception is singularly devoted to propaganda. Movies, shows and comics either push explicit US political propaganda, or at the very least social propaganda (like the stupid incompetent sitcom dad and his super empowered wife who can do anything). No other regime in the history of the human race comes even close, not even Nazi Germany. At least German movies and books were allowed to just be entertaining without propaganda in every line. I’m not saying Americans can’t self publish a book and sell 12 copies. You certainly can. But if you want your book to be a NYT best seller and win the Nobel Prize in Literature, it has to be propaganda.
Speaking of nazis, today I came across the opening cinematic of the famous video game Wolfenstein. Note that I had heard of this game, but had never played it and had no opinion on the matter.
The opening frames show Nazi Germany inventing the atomic bomb first and using it to nuke New York City. Oh no, the nazis invented the nuke and used it to destroy a city, the bastards! What kind of demonic monsters would do such a thing? Hold that thought.
The next scene shows the Germans occupying Paris, and a German forcibly kissing a (presumably French) nurse. Of course this is a direct inversion of the famous “sailor kissing a nurse” photo from 1945, which happened in the USA.
Note how the posture and body language of the two people has been modified to more explicitly connotate a rаре. Though it’s just one moment, this is clearly meant to state that the theoretical nazi occupation of France would mean mass rapes. That’s perhaps the strangest accusation in this video, because the Germans did occupy France and there were no rapes. But you know who did commit mass rapes in France? The USA.
So this video does two things. It inverts blame for historical US crimes, and also removes a historical adversary from context and places it in a simulacrum. The Wolfenstein nazis are a group of generically evil baddies who can be used as a placeholder for whoever the enemy of the US is at the moment, and then all of the crimes of the US pinned on them like a propaganda voodoo doll.
The video actually gets weirder and more surreal. We see the infamous Great Depression breadline photo, but with nazis.
“If the nazis win, they’ll bring us this bad thing that we literally already had.” Quite the argument, isn’t it? Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, every shot in this video is propaganda and is serving a specific political narrative. Parodying the breadline is meant to white wash the suffering throughout American history, and psychologically pin it on the “bad guys” who oppose US domination. I also interpret this moment as “We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” Every adversary, even if he’s on the other side of the world without even a hypothetical way of harming Americans, has to be depicted as an existential threat who will attack America and steal our freedumbs unless we spend trillions of dollars and kill millions of people defeating him.
And there’s some nonsense about nazis executing a guy during a sports match. Why would they do that? Because, umm, they’re evil or something.
Wait a minute, wasn’t there literally an Olympics game held in Berlin? How many people did they execute there? Oh, and nice trident patch, referee guy. I guess this game will need to be modified and re-released to properly respect our Ukrainian partners.
Next, the nazis are shown destroying the monument on Mount Rushmore. The video game makers could have picked any monument in the US, and yet they chose this one. Why? Well, I have a theory. Rushmore is very explicitly a symbol of US colonialism that intentionally desecrated a native holy site. I actually laughed when I watched this part, because it implies that the nazis are the good guys liberating Native Americans from oppression. But it’s not a joke. The explicit message here is that US colonialism is good, and anyone who opposes it is bad, literally nazis.
In fact this is the favorite talking point of American liberals. “Yes, I acknowledge that US colonialism is bad, but [insert enemy here] is a bad nazi dictatorship, so we have to genocide their whole country down to the last man, woman and child.” On that point, the video game does a good job of balancing conservative hysteria with liberal pseudo-intellectualism. It discredits enemies of US colonialism as evil, and justifies the most extreme atrocities against them. In the name of stopping nazis, of course.
The next two scenes are even more blatant inversions of history. First, a shot of the nazis suppressing a protest in Red Square, Moscow:
And then executing protestors in Paris:
The nazis are so evil they hate flowers, and step on them deliberately.
As I said, this cinematic does a lovely job of balancing conservativism and liberalism. Any leftie boomer flower child who smoked weed and held signs in DC back in the ’60s will imagine himself as literally resisting nazism.
Back to the Moscow/Paris comparison, it is again a direct inversion of reality. The Germans were very nice and polite to the French. Even the French themselves comment that the western allies were much more brutal and rapey than the Germans. To depict the Germans damaging the Eiffel Tower is particularly hilarious, because the WWII Americans were famous for treating everyone else’s cultural heritage as garbage to run over by their tanks and crushed under the heels of their boots.
However, the same cannot be said for the Soviet Union, and showing Moscow as existing at all in this world is the most blatant historical inversion. In addition to having roughly 80% of the Soviet population exterminated, Hitler also planned to have Moscow completely destroyed and flooded so it could never be rebuilt. It’s actually quite a shocking contrast to the rest of the video, which depicts nazis as ridiculous cartoon villains who do mean things for no reason. But the actual mean thing they wanted to do, and based their entire ideology and national economy on doing, is completely retconned out of existence. The motive for this is very obvious. It is important to not portray Russians in any way that is good or sympathetic. That’s also why US propaganda is so schizophrenic. They whine about nazis 24/7 and compare all of their enemies are nazis, but on the main points that nazis actually believed, the US agrees 100%.
I already expect people to read this on my channels and comment “It’s not propaganda” or “You’re reading too much into it” or “It’s not propaganda if it’s true” or something like that. Which further proves how effective US propaganda has become. It’s actually invisible to most people.
All that said, I did enjoy the video. It is very funny that this game was marketed as “Imagine the darkest, most dystopian regime possible, literally hell on earth” and it’s all just stuff that the US casually does every day to keep the price of bananas down, or protect billionaire pedophiles.
You can watch the cinematic below: