/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche
Freddy, Freddy Krueger
Addendum to this cause I remembered how I brought this back to Nietzsche.
This to me indicates a problematic mentality. A peasant mentality. Call me Niccolo cause I am everything you hate. Try out becoming a tyrant or a warlord. Then we can have a proper chat.
When you reach a certain level of development you can be both pro and anti Nietzsche.
Peace.

This whole thing reminds me of how media can shape common preceptions. Are you all familiar with the whole notion that medieval people didn't bathe and thought the earth was flat? most of those ideas are almost entirely the fault of Mark Twain
During the Enlightenment at large, they disparaged the medieval era, just as they had during the Renaissance, but never to the outrageously legendary degree that it became during the Victorian age. Petrarch and Newton and Franklin all knew that Aristotle had determined the Earth was round and that everyone since him knew it.
Around 1820, a Scottish author and scholar named Sir Walter Scott wrote a deeply researched medieval novel called "Ivanhoe" that proved immensely popular and resulted in a surge of medievalism. Unfortunately it also proved popular with exactly the wrong sort of person - American southern slave owners, who suddenly began to style themselves as medieval aristocrats.
This cased Mark Twain to effectively crusade against this book, and wrote "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which started and popularized every single myth about the Middle Ages you could possibly think of for the sake of the self-emolument of 1880's New England, because it was just sooooo so much better than those poor backwards savages who couldn't read, who thought the earth was flat, who bathe once a year, who didn't know colors other than grey or brown, and who didn't even have the brain cells to understand Leibniz' theory of Calculus or Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the Market. 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; even today, despite the numerous attempts to rehabilitate medievalism since Tolkien, the myth is so ingrained in Hollywood that every medieval production looks like it was filmed through a camera covered in mud.

>>1811619
Mark Twain was a redditor

>>1765262
Ding Ding Ding. You have to make your reactionary enemy look and act as cowardly and lame as possible while your leftist heroes are the charismatic chads with the cool uniforms like with Judas and the Black Messiah. Like in real life. Liberals and Conerservaturds have been fighting a propaganda war against commies and never stopped. It's time to do the same.

So I think I figured out the issue I have with Starship Troopers as satire.

Now, in my personal experience the "satire" argument has always just seemed to be "Well it's satire because people say it's satire." There's not much given to what makes it satirical. It's campy, sure, and the world its depicting ain't a good one, but is that enough to make it satire? Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" has a scene where she justifies the deaths of a couple of children because their dad works for the IRS. You could take Atlas Shrugged and not change a thing when adapting it to a movie, and if the director just winks and says "Uhh, well, it's satire" does that change anything? Sure there are elements in the work that seem satirical, what with its stark division of the world into "Looters" and "Producers" but the thing is that was Ayn Rand's real view. At what point do you play something so straight that it goes from satire to genuine propaganda? I was listening to an excerpt of the new QAA podcast and they're discussing Starship Troopers, making fun of the reviewers who call it Nazi-like with snide "Well you were so close to getting it!"

Like, does just saying "No, you don't get it, it's satire" As gorgeous, patriotic, young people kill bugs do anything? Will you do a 180 and say "Man, I was a bit worried about Triumph of The Will but now I understand the director made it as a joke." It feels a lot like some horny teenager asking for Overwatch skins where you can see everyone's feet and trying to justify it using flimsy excuses to pretend he doesn't have a fetish.

But beyond that, it got me thinking to how Fascism sustains itself. I mentioned elsewhere on here Trotsky's apparent prediction that the Third Reich would end with some internal rebellion, and if it didn't then clearly they'd have to rethink some fundamentals of Marxism. I think Starship Troopers helps us understand that mindset for a bit. Just taking it at face value, for however much it's "satirical" we see the bugs as completely alien killing machines. We see them bisect some poor fucker, melt some people, suck out dudes' brains, and it's horrifying. Are we supposed to imagine that they adhere to some "rules of war"? Or that they conduct diplomacy? Like, if the humans in the movie lost their war, does anyone even think they'll be getting some peace with honor? That it wouldn't mean the death of every human on earth? You can say the state kicked the hornets nest, you can point out how awful it is, but at the end of the day are you going to risk the bugs winning?

Traitors are loathed in every society but traitors during wartime, especially existential wars, have their names kept alive in infamy. Benedict Arnold, Andrey Vlasov, Vidkun Quisling, Pierre Laval, etc. We've got an instinctual revulsion against the man who would throw open the city gates during a siege, and lionize those who stand by their nation even should it be a tyranny. Rommel is remembered as "the good German" in WWII, while even as he claimed to be fighting for the ideals of 1917 or an end to "Stalinist Dictatorship" Vlasov is remembered as the scumbag who sold out his people.

We can call it the result of decades of propaganda, but I think it goes back further than that. When the first Humans warred amongst each other or struggled against nature, we likely had the ideal entrenched into us that the man who turns against the tribe is a unique evil. A person who poisons his own peoples' wells, destroys their defences, all behind their back is something societies couldn't afford.

Even if one acknowledges that the society of Starship Troopers is horrific and fascist and insane. Even if you think the state kicked the hornet's nest and the people were paying the price. Even if you acknowledge that the bugs are on one side of the galaxy and earth is on the other. You'll still have to reckon with the fact that you don't want the bugs to win. If they win, then you can imagine everyone you know and care about being annihilated. It doesn't matter if your government started it, given the choice between the artillery firing on your home or theirs, you're gonna choose theirs.

And I think this is how, to some extent, the Nazi regime could survive without a mass uprising. Even when the Red Army were shelling Berlin and even when the Nazis were conscripting children to die for their cause, a German would be more willing to run or take up arms against the Soviets, rather than turn their weapons on the people who'd put them in such an awful situation.

The same happened in WWI. I believe the German Social Democrats justified supporting the war citing fear of "reactionary tsarist Russia" subjugating them. It's what makes Lenin such a unique historical personality for being against the war to the point he actively hoped his nation would "lose" in some sense. That isn't to say people are inherently pro or anti war. Rather, one of the great social taboos is to actively advocate for your people losing a war. You can acknowledge the war is terrible, but once the artillery starts shelling your home, the last thing people want to think is you'll be shouting "Here! Bomb over here!"

Starship Troopers just takes it a step further, by not just portraying a dehumanized enemy, but an inhuman one.

>>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.