Patriotic propaganda funded by the private sector - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14575395
The Canadian government paired up with the private Bronfman Foundation (of former organized crime fame) to produce a series of nationalist propaganda shorts that were broadcast on state television in the 80s and 90s. They were called Heritage Minutes.

That this Soviet style cartooning of Canada's nasty corporate-genocide history is funded partially with corporate money (a company that distributes liquor owned by former bootleggers) is startling in its PPP beauty.

You can watch some here. Be sure to invite Paul Bunyan and Crocodile Dundee to join you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00n67k-f7Yw&list=PL1848FF9428CA9A4A

Soviet style - Nazi style nationalistic propaganda from.... raw capitalists. Interesting. Do "left" and "right" even mean anything in reality?
#14575397
Do "left" and "right" even mean anything in reality?


It has a meaning inside a competitive liberal political system (the thing they call a democracy on tv) but that's the only use of this notion.
#14575402
This stuff is so badly made that it becomes hilarious:

Getting your fucking head blown off by Japanese Fascists in Hong Kong: A part of your heritage
[youtube]auJB0VJRMsY[/youtube]

Poor Canadians, they can't even do propaganda without making it look absurdly humiliating. Do they need some help? You wouldn't think they eventually came back and won that war in the end, by the way that they tell it. I literally cannot stop laughing.
#14575406
Rei Murasame wrote:This stuff is so badly made that it becomes hilarious:

Getting your fucking head blown off by Japanese Fascists in Hong Kong: A part of your heritage
[youtube]auJB0VJRMsY[/youtube]

Poor Canadians, they can't even do propaganda without making it look absurdly humiliating. Do they need some help? You wouldn't think they eventually came back and won that war in the end, by the way that they tell it. I literally cannot stop laughing.


That's what you got out of that? I've seen similar scenes in war movies with Japanese soldiers... Except they weren't saving their friends and fellow warriors, only removing the humiliation of witnessing their impending defeat.
#14575408
And that makes all the difference. It's all about the situation, the presentation, and the behaviour of the actors.

These Canadian actors can't act even a little bit, and it makes everything unintentionally hilarious. All it does is reinforce the old things that people used to say about all North American soldiers, which is that "without artillery cover, these people are not really fighters" (something which was statistically true throughout the war).

So when they play advertisements like that, it looks ridiculous rather than noble.
Last edited by Rei Murasame on 27 Jun 2015 20:21, edited 1 time in total.
#14575412
Rei Murasame wrote:And that makes all the difference. It's all about the situation, the presentation, and the behaviour of the actors.

These Canadian actors can't act even a little bit, and it makes everything unintentionally hilarious.


Oh, that

Yes I must agree with you there; people don't 'do' even the impersonations of Duty and Sacrifice for anything very well anymore. Hollow Men with Hollow Chests.
#14575413
Indeed, I imagine that the real person who they are talking about did not do it the way that it was done on screen there, and that the other soldiers did not react with the absurdly comical faces that they reacted with there either.

But overall, they should not have been highlighting such incidents anyway, since when they do that they are playing to their weaknesses. They were good at some things and pretty bad at others, and they've chosen to highlight a thing that they were really bad at and which is not even telegenic. If they had to choose something they were statistically bad at, they should have at least acted it well, and not put the text "a part of our heritage" under the comical 'ewww wtf' facial reactions of the other soldiers to the guy's exploding head.
#14575416
Rei Murasame wrote:Indeed, I imagine that the real person who they are talking about did not do it the way that it was done on screen there, and that the other soldiers did not react with the absurdly comical faces that they reacted with there either.

But overall, they should not have been highlighting such incidents anyway, since when they do that they are playing to their weaknesses. They were good at some things and pretty bad at others, and they've chosen to highlight a thing that they were really bad at and which is not even telegenic. If they had to choose something they were statistically bad at, they should have at least acted it well, and not put "a part of our heritage" under the comical 'ewww wtf' facial reactions of the other soldiers to the guy's exploding head.


Well said, they could've used incidents taken from the valorous service of Canadian troops during World War One, or any number of others. Similar mistakes made in the US and other places backfire to absurd effect, as I remember commercials from the 1980's American 'war on drugs' being.
#14575419
annatar1914 wrote:Well said, they could've used incidents taken from the valorous service of Canadian troops during World War One, or any number of others. Similar mistakes made in the US and other places backfire to absurd effect, as I remember commercials from the 1980's American 'war on drugs' being.

Pretty much. I think it's also that they just don't seem to know how to sell what it is that they are fighting for, so they resorted to weird and badly choreographed stuff like that.

This is what happens when basically Canada admitting that when it comes to the Greater East Asia War, they basically do not have a narrative other than "our boys were being fired upon". They should be able to at least make something up if they don't have a narrative.
#14575423
Rei Murasame wrote:Pretty much. I think it's also that they just don't seem to know how to sell what it is that they are fighting for, so they resorted to weird and badly choreographed stuff like that.

This is what happens when basically Canada admitting that when it comes to the Greater East Asia War, they basically do not have a narrative other than "our boys were being fired upon". They should be able to at least make something up if they don't have a narrative.


Ah, I see where you're slyly going with that .

It does happen to be true-and in this day and age should be a tautology but isn't-that people don't fight as well for things they don't believe in as much as other things that they do... Irrespective of whether something is correct and right or not, if it isn't in the heart, it won't be fought for with total devotion and conviction.
#14575522
Rei Murasame wrote:...they just don't seem to know how to sell what it is that they are fighting for, so they resorted to weird and badly choreographed stuff like that.

This is what happens when basically Canada admitting that when it comes to the Greater East Asia War, they basically do not have a narrative other than "our boys were being fired upon". They should be able to at least make something up if they don't have a narrative.


The main point of this propaganda campaign is to convince Canadians that they are just like the action heroes in American movies. Notice the production values and characters? They're right out of Hollywood.

Why Canadians go to war is absent entirely in all of these glossy vignettes. The reason that Big Money funded them is because Big Money is in the war business, and war requires this kind of silly nationalistic lies to create patriotic killers.

What's sad is that more Canadians don't see this for the pro-Empire (Oh, you're so amazing Canada. I just love how you die for me without even knowing why) propaganda that it is.

Virtually the entire series is full of cartoon simplifications of official Canadian heroes - portrayed as characters from USA movies. As if the fakeness makes them more real to the brain-damaged Canadian TV viewer.

Image

Another privately-funded patriotism-builder is this 200-ft "Mother Canada" statue being proposed for a beautiful cove in a national park. No one in Canada says "Mother Canada" so this is as Stalinist as the Heritage Minute propaganda.
#14575528
QatzelOk wrote:Mother Canada

Disgusting nationalist idea, but on the bright side, we'll have something to knock down when we overthrow this dictatorship.
#14575540
Soviet style - Nazi style nationalistic propaganda from.... raw capitalists. Interesting. Do "left" and "right" even mean anything in reality?

Of course not, they are sociolinguistic labels. Is it not alarming how the majority of folks simply do not understand weaponized behavioral psychology & propaganda in general? QatzelOk, if you read through our posts and then read the replies, you may come to the conclusion that each person (poster) is unaware of how unaware they are. I'm not going to dig up old topics or posts, surely PoFo has enough material to deconstruct their own political position & personal situation.

BTW, I'm liking the new sig
#14575698
Rei Murasame wrote:without artillery cover, these people are not really fighters"


This is a beautiful thing, one of the truly admirable developments of the modern world. Fighters are simply thugs with an elaborate code, like the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. The appropriate response is to ignore or bypass them (as in the island hopping campaign). If you are absolutely forced to engage them, they should be liquidated with industrial efficiency - it is absurd to engage them on their own level. Honor codes are for losers. Sherman knew this. Patton knew it: "make the other poor son-of-a-bitch die for his country."
#14575705
The same thing happened when North American soldiers engaged the Germans as well. They'd get shredded to pieces whenever they faced German soldiers directly, but they be much more successful when under cover of artillery.

I can't remember the precise reason for why it was like that in every theatre, but it was something approximate to the fact that the American system of industrial production was more advanced, and so what was happening that was that Axis Europe and Greater East Asia had the 'warrior ethic' because it was economically predetermined as necessary. It was not merely an affectation, but a requirement when facing a stronger enemy, that you try to hit them on the thing where they are weakest, and that you make yourself more willing to accept casualties in the hopes that fanaticism can stun and confuse the enemy into making mistakes.

It's a gamble that people who are materially less prosperous had to take.

A thing which is often forgotten about that war, is that Germany was not a rich country at the time of the war, it was a 'proletarian nation'. Japan was at that time something even more 'strange', it was the most developed country amongst a group of weaker Asian countries, Japan was a country which had only just exited semi-feudalism, 50% of the country was still agrarian in 1941.

This stands in contrast against the way that war is usually portrayed, since Axis is usually portrayed as the stronger group which was brought down by 'heroism of North Americans' or whatever. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

The same applies during the South East Asia campaign, where North Americans and Britons were getting afraid of the prospect of having to fight against everything including South East Asian and Indian girls between ages 13 - 25 (seriously, people couldn't join fast enough once they heard that it was time to train for a final showdown against the white exploiters), because having to crawl through half of South Asia while being shot at by racially aggravated Asian people was not the Allies' idea of the best fun they could've been having at Imphal.

So instead the Allies leveraged shock and awe artillery against them, and captured plenty of those girls after they wandered/charged into 'pockets' and couldn't get back out. But of course Canada would never present the war like that, because they aren't willing to be realistic about what is happening. At the same time, this causes them to be incapable of understanding why other people didn't learn the 'lessons' from that war that they think everyone 'should have' learned.

Instead of learning 'war is bad mmkay', instead everyone has learned 'try to make sure not to be lagging behind on the development of productive forces', and 'use A2/AD capabilities as a stop-gap if you have to'.
Last edited by Rei Murasame on 28 Jun 2015 20:36, edited 1 time in total.
#14575713
Artillery as they say is god of war. In terms of causalities inflected Artillery was at the top in both world wars. Plus Proximity Fuze gave a very significant advantage to Americans. Apparently they thought this to be such an important weapon that its secret was guarded at a level of Nuclear secrets.

Rei wrote:So instead they used artillery, which they had lots of.


Yeah, while Germans basically used their air-force for first half of the war as an artillery wing of the army specially during French campaign.
#14575716
fuser wrote:Artillery as they say is god of war. In terms of causalities inflected Artillery was at the top in both world wars. Plus Proximity Fuze gave a very significant advantage to Americans. Apparently they thought this to be such an important weapon that its secret was guarded at a level of Nuclear secrets.

Pretty much.

fuser wrote:Yeah, while Germans basically used their air-force for first half of the war as an artillery wing of the army specially during French campaign.

Also, the CAS role in today's warfare is a bit like that as well, depending on whether the plane can loiter and choose targets as it pleases. For example, I fell in love with the A-10 Thunderbolt II precisely because it is the kind of platform where you can immediately see the intent behind it and where the designer is drawing the 'lesson' from.

If there is a list of things that the presently-existing America's partners need to get hold of somehow, I often think that things like this should not be overlooked, producing planes that do CAS specifically, is seriously something that people need to do. I was pretty unhappy to see that India hasn't gone on that quest for the perfect A-10 equivalent yet.
#14575895
Well, Indian air force seems to be fan of Attack Helicopters, they do have one CAS squadron shich mostly consists of Attack Helicopters and some outdated CAS plane models but according to some sources there is a plan to buy Sukhoi Su-25 by 2022.

A-10 vs Su-25

Image

Oh and on topic, just saw the videos, it was one great propaganda fail.
#14575899
Rei Murasame wrote:This stands in contrast against the way that war is usually portrayed, since Axis is usually portrayed as the stronger group which was brought down by 'heroism of North Americans' or whatever. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

The whole history of WWII does not make any sense if you see it as the conflict between allies and axis. Someone who tries will see only madmens trample with betrayals, cowardries and stupidities. Spain, Phoney war, the sudden surrender of France, the sudden surrender of Czechs, the hopeless defence of Poles, Italy's ambivalence. It's difficult to live in the world of madmen of fools. So I don't understand how can anyone interpret all this history anything except the conflict of the UK and the US solving their problems through the proxies.
#14576106
Neither of the world wars makes any sense. It seems like Canada was fighting to maintain a web of unfair and frankly racist trade and diplomatic relationships in both cases.

Which, if this is what we were doing, makes us goons for the mob, and not heroes from Disneyland like the Heritage Minutes seem to suggest we are. I realize that most people would like to believe the Heritage Minutes, but that doesn't make what they say true - wanting it to be true.

You have to look into it.

The main reason most Canadians would deny being goons for the mob is because... they want to continue making money off this role in a mob-devastated economy of constant corruption-followed-by-austerity.

This kind of desperate, profit-driven 'patriotism' is propaganda driven and the result of poor governance by hucksters. TV and Hollywood have given us a pro-huckster education that is now killing us.
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