Hello everyone, I have been neglecting my own blog lately and sorry about that – I started to become quite active on Quora and gained a large following there, and it was difficult to balance writing in more than one place at once. So moving forward, Quora (along with Facebook and VK) will be my “stream of consciousness where thoughts start, and their final edited resting place will be here.
In my posts about propaganda on Quora, there are commenters saying things like “but American movies don’t dehumanize Russians, they just show normal people struggling under an oppressive regime” – yes that’s literally what propaganda is, good job. We’re at a point in history when it is no longer necessary for American propaganda to convince audiences of something. Propaganda now just repeats ideas that the audience already accepts as unquestionable fact.
Did you know when Enemy at the Gates was released in Russian theaters, Stalingrad veterans were so deeply insulted by it they petitioned the government to revoke the movie’s distribution rights?
When a typical American is exposed to media that suggests Russia isn’t an evil regime that rapes and tortures people for no reason, he will instinctively reject it as propaganda. He accepts propaganda as truth, and rejects truth as propaganda. This is the advanced stage of indoctrination that is almost impossible to reverse, it resembles a lobotomy.
Russian propaganda is quite tame in comparison to American propaganda, and I think it’s due to differing cultural attitudes. Russians tend to be more cynical, and struggle to take propaganda seriously, even their own. Even the most hardcore Stalinist war films have much less propaganda than the average Hollywood film (Hollywood films that have nothing to do with war will still reflexively insert disparaging statements about Russians or Russia, even if it is unrelated to the plot).
Watch any Soviet movie and you can see for yourself that the characters don’t thump their chests and monologue about how “the Soviet Union is literally the best thing to ever happen in the history of the universe and our enemies are evil disgusting subhuman vermin who must be exterminated.” Of course none of the characters outright say the Soviet Union was bad, but it wasn’t sugar coated anywhere close to the extent that Hollywood movies sugar coat the USA.
Marya the Artist is a 1959 movie about a retired Imperial Russian soldier returning home and encounters a boy who needs help rescuing his mother (Marya) from a greedy water spirit. Ballad of a Soldier is another 1959 movie about a young Red Army soldier who travels home to visit his mother before returning to the front. It is interesting that these two movies made around the same time have a similar plot about a soldier attempting to return home and being interrupted by necessity to help the community. Both soldier characters are presented in a positive light, but nobody licked their boots and said THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE, THERE IS NO ONE BRAVER THAN OUR SOLDIERS!
The first Rambo movie is about a corrupt local sheriff who treats Rambo the Vietnam veteran like a homeless vagrant (he is a homeless vagrant) and I really can’t think of a Soviet equivalent. But that’s because Rambo is propaganda against the American anti-war movement. “If you are anti-war then you literally hate our soldiers” is the moral of Rambo. I can’t think of any Soviet movie that suggested it is bad to be against war. Also notice how Rambo paints the villain in a politically correct way acceptable to liberal Democrats in the 1980s. The villain is a bad white rural sheriff (and probably a Republican). For a movie set during the Vietnam anti-war movement it would be much more realistic to portray Rambo’s enemy as a black guy (maybe he could wear a beret) or a liberal hippie on the city council, but these aren’t allowed stereotypes in an American propaganda movie. I think actually this would make for a more interesting film (though with far less action). Imagine the script writers struggling to portray both characters with good qualities, but moral nuance isn’t allowed in Hollywood movies either.
Rambo was such effective propaganda, it gave thousands if not millions of people actual pseudo-memories. There is no evidence that anti-war protestors spit on soldiers, but Rambo says that happened to him, and just like that the story got repeated everywhere. If you actually question Vietnam veterans about it, they’ll generally admit it wasn’t a thing that happened to him specifically, but he heard it happened to his brother’s friend or an uncle, or something like. It’s pure disinformation to delegitimize anti-war protests, and I can’t think of any Soviet or Russian equivalent.
American propaganda was always cruel and bloodthirsty, and it’s gotten noticeably more so as time went on. Consider Jennifer Lawrence movie Red Sparrow, where she plays a pretend-Russian who is forcefully recruited into a bad evil Russian intelligence program to undermine American democracy or whatever. The movie is full of graphic violence and rape, and this serves two purposes. One is to completely dehumanize Russians as monsters, and it also serves to desensitize American audiences to violence and rape. So Americans assume that Russians commit mass rapes because they’re evil, but raping and torturing Russians is okay because they’re evil.
Ian Kummer
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