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Oct. 2, 2019 - I Don't Speak German
01:11:19
Episode 32: Captain America

Daniel and Jack take a relaxing detour back into discussing pop culture and consider the Marvel movie Captain America: The First Avenger... along with the MCU more generally, the links between the Military Industrial Complex and Hollywood, how Nazis watch Marvel, the ways fascism is represented in movies, etc. Content Warning TRANSCRIPT: https://idtg.net/32 FULL TRANSCRIPT LIST: https://idtg.net/ Show Notes: Bisexual Steven Rogers Steven Atwell: Steve Rogers Isn't Just Any Hero Lyndsy Ellis on The Ideology of the First Order and Woke Disney  

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Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Daniel tells me what he learned from years of going where few of us can bear to go and listening to what today's far-right, the alt-right, white nationalists, white supremacists, Nazis, etc.
Talk about and say to each other, in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, their live streams, etc.
The Waffle SS, I call them, and do they waffle.
Daniel listened, so we don't have to.
Needless to say, these are terrible people, and they say terrible things, so every episode comes with a big content warning.
Daniel and I talk freely about despicable opinions and acts, and sometimes we have to repeat the despicable things that are said, including bigoted slurs.
So be warned.
Okay, welcome to episode 32, and a bit of a mental health break this week.
A bit of a relaxing, less taxing episode for us, because we're not going to be talking about anything serious.
We're going to be talking about a movie, and maybe some other things as well.
We're going to see where it leads us.
Sorry, Daniel, what's the movie we're going to be talking about again?
We're going to be leaning into the stereotype that all these Nazis have about us, and we're going to be talking about a Marvel movie today.
We're going to be talking about Captain America, The First Avenger.
Right.
The movie, the only movie about punching Nazis.
That's what this is.
No, just we realized from the last several episodes that things got really, really dark.
And I, you know, again, I don't want the listeners to slit their wrists or anything.
And, um, Jack and I both kind of come out of like talking about movies and TV shows and books and, you know, through this kind of leftist political lens.
And we thought, and we do get requests from people who remember us from those days, like, Hey, it'd be really nice if you could do an episode not about Nazis for once.
And so we thought, eh, let's do a movie discussion just as a little bit of a palate cleanser.
Although we will also be talking, I think a bit about like how, like, The modern alt-right and the modern, you know, kind of far-right movements kind of interpret pop culture Because they do a lot of that stuff and we'll kind of like talk about how these themes work into that So it's still kind of on brand for us.
We're not gonna make a habit of this Although we do have lots of requests of particular movies people would like us to cover so we may you know Let us know what you think of this, but this is sort of a little bit of a break episode I'm just doing a little something different and giving people a little bit of a palate cleanser.
And then next week we'll get back to the real hardcore Nazi stuff, and I'm going to do a news roundup episode the next one.
So look forward to that.
That's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of Catwell bullshit, even more than in the last one.
So, yeah, that's kind of what this and the next episode are going to be.
Great.
I'll have to see if I can source some copyright free sort of news TV show music.
You know, that sort of da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da sort of thing.
I'll have to see if I can find some for the next episode.
Yeah, so this one is about Captain America, the first Avenger and, you know, assorted phenomena.
So I think you like this film, don't you?
I have a, and again, just to be clear here, the Marvel movies are my kind of comfort food these days.
They're big, they're dumb, they're stupid, they're relentlessly pro-American imperialism.
You know, I cannot defend the war politics of these things, I cannot defend them on really any kind of artistic merit, but I do have a And enjoyment of these.
I really like these films and I like this one quite a bit, although I have some structural issues with it.
I kind of like the thematics.
I like the characters.
I don't like, you know, kind of kind of the the structure of it.
I don't like kind of the way it basically doesn't have a third act.
It's kind of all set up and no payoff.
But I do enjoy this.
I do.
You know.
You know, when your movie ends with, and then your hero freezes for 70 years, it is kind of difficult to figure out a good third act structure, I guess.
But yeah, no, I largely like the film.
I like the franchise.
I like the character.
I like Chris Evans as the character.
And I think there's some kind of interesting stuff going on here in terms of the way it kind of plays with some of its You know, some of the character beats.
And so, yeah, no, overall, I do enjoy this, although, you know, again, I get accused all the time by Nazis of like, you get all your politics from the Marvel movies.
Yes, that's exactly what happens.
I get all my politics from watching the Marvel movies.
Clearly, I agree entirely with the politics of Captain America, First Avenger, and in fact, get all my moral rectitude from that because I've been programmed by, you know, those people with the three parentheses around their names.
Yes, that is exactly true.
That is exactly what's happening.
That's right, yeah.
We both do get all our politics from Marvel movies.
That's why we're both so incredibly fond of billionaires who own towers with their names on.
Exactly, exactly.
That's why I'm a huge Elon Musk stan, you know?
I'm just constantly fawning over Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
George Soros, obviously.
Praise be to Soros.
That's right, praise be upon him.
Moving on.
But you're not a big fan of this one, right?
No, I don't like this film.
And I do enjoy quite a few of the Marvel movies, just as you say on the level of switch your brain off and sit back and have fun entertainment.
I enjoy quite a few of them on that level.
But this one, I do not like this one, no.
I find this really very trying.
Like you say about the end being just he freezes and then he wakes up and the waking up in the present day is the last five minutes of the film.
I think, I mean apart from the fact that I'm just, even by this point, I'm so sick of origin stories.
I think it would have been a much better idea to skip the entire World War II, like what is actually, in actuality, the body of the film, and just make the film about Captain America waking up in the present day and dealing with something, like in the present day throughout the entire film, with flashbacks to his origin during the war, if you want to.
And then it could still be the Red Skull, because that's the classic Cap adversary, but it should be the classic thing where the Red Skull is woken up in the present as well, like the Demolition Man thing.
You don't need to worry about originality with these things.
Yeah, ripping off the plot of Demolition Man counts for originality as far as these scripts would be concerned at this point, right?
Absolutely, yeah.
Yeah, because I just don't, I do not like this.
Look, aside from that, I have all sorts of problems with this.
Firstly, a lot of this film is kind of about Bullying and embarrassment.
And those are just things that I just have a visceral reaction to that.
I do not want to watch anything that's focused on as plot beats.
bullying and embarrassment and like I would say two-thirds of this film is the you know what's he called Steve Rogers is this little squirt who's being bullied and he's being embarrassed but but because he keeps on trying to join the army and he's being embarrassed because his friend has to get him dates because he's so tiny and he keeps on getting rejected and humiliated and beaten up and bullied and then he manages to get into the army and he spends most of his time in the army being
ridiculed, and bullied, and humiliated, and things like this.
And it's only really... And then he gets turned into Captain America, and then he spends a whole load more of his time being humiliated, and ridiculed, and bullied, because he's forced to be this sort of ridiculous propaganda figure.
And that, for me, I just find it grueling to watch.
I don't know how that's entertainment.
I don't know, maybe that's just me, my personal reaction to it.
No, that's interesting that you have that.
There's a nails-on-a-chalkboard element to the film, I think, for you.
To me, I think it doesn't grate, and I do wonder sometimes when we talk about these things if some of the tone that...
It doesn't bother me that bothers you or kind of vice versa is sometimes just a difference between these sort of American versus British cultural sensibilities.
Because I don't think this is, you know, I mean, it does kind of focus on the fact that he's like bullied and miserable and, and unhappy, even as you know, like super soldier Chad, you know.
There's definitely a Virgin-Chad dichotomy going on here, which is kind of interesting.
I did try to re-watch this film as a Nazi would see it, and maybe we can get into that.
Even though I couldn't find anybody talking about this film specifically, I think it would be interesting to sit and talk about it.
Not to derail you, but I do, you know, I have thoughts about this.
The fact that, you know, the character pretty much explicitly goes from being, you know, an untermensch to being an übermensch, and that's kind of his arc.
Through the film, you know, I think there's a certain irony to that.
And, you know, his entire appearance, really, especially after the procedure, it's, well, I mean, he looks like he looks like a neoclassical fascist statue.
And I think there's there's a whole complex of irony centered on that, isn't there?
Right.
And that comes directly from the comics, which I mean, the character is, I believe from the 1941, I think it's when that, so I'm not, I'm not, I never got into comic books as a, as a kid.
And I think that's part of why I enjoy these movies more than a lot of people is because I don't have these sort of like preexisting relationships to these properties, except for just from the sort of like cultural zeitgeist kind of idea.
But I think there's, I mean, if you just want to kind of get into that idea, I mean, you know, certainly one of the big criticisms that, uh, you know, the alt-right figures, you know, like, uh, like Enoch kind of talks about this, they, these guys did kind of grow up with comic books.
And so they'll A, spend an hour like blaming us on the, you know, blaming us for getting all our morality from Marvel movies and talking about Marvel movies and such.
Oh, they're going to cheer when they see this episode comes out.
They're just going to laugh and laugh and laugh.
And yes, that's right.
Never enjoy things.
You have to talk about race science all the time.
But, you know, the big criticism is that these are all like all the original sort of comic book characters all were written by like Jewish teenagers, essentially, and created by, you know, kind of kind of young Jewish men living in New York in the in the 30s and 40s.
And so there's this sort of like they call like the the You know, the comics medium, like the four-color Jew, for instance.
And so that idea that, you know, in real life I'm weak and scrawny, and I'm this like sniveling little Jewish character, etc., etc.
Those are not my thoughts.
This is sort of like the interpretation that they kind of give this.
And then but really I have this like magic thing that's going to make me be like the uber mention that's the thing that I'm always supposed to be in real life but ultimately on the inside you know I don't come by that honestly it's not like who I am who I am is the is the scrawny kid and Having the kind of powers that Captain America gets, that Steve Rogers gets, that allows him to, like, beat up the Nazis, but ultimately, you know, it's a fantasy.
It's embracing this sort of slave morality that, you know, we're supposed to be weak.
We're supposed to protect the defenseless.
As opposed to being strong and working together and to keep the kind of people who are subverting our society out and so they'll say it's just this like hugely like quote like this Jewish narrative just runs over the entire thing and like infects your brain and they talk a lot about like sort of how pop culture just does that to people it's just sort of like in and so they they actively try to avoid absorbing any of this any of these any of these kinds of films because or any really any kind of like pop culture any television you know it's like cancel your netflix
all that kind of stuff they avoid these kinds of cultural products because of the uh perceived uh jewish influence that teaches horrifying lessons like genocide is bad yeah i bet they don't really well and then there are some guys like uh there is a there is a show called the pause button and it's a part of the kind of extended trs network um
And it's run by this guy, Borzoi, who is also the co-host of The People Square with our good buddy, Eric Stryker.
One day we'll get to that episode.
We'll see.
He's got some news happening, so we'll come back to that.
You know and so he actually does a movie like a movie and TV podcast where they'll sit and talk about like movies and TV shows and you know and kind of run it through these this kind of like Nazi ideology run it through like from their perspective and you know ultimately really that's a podcast that I'll listen to maybe like 30 minutes of you know if I've kind of seen the movie or the TV show and I want to get some context of it and then usually turn it off because it's a really kind of obvious Like they don't really go into any kind of depth onto like the properties.
It's just about like, oh, this is all kind of Jewish and degenerate and like this, you know, and it's very rarely at all like interesting on more than like, OK, I get your idea.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it's not Aryan enough, whatever, you know, or they put like these totally bizarre things into things that they kind of like, like save it for them.
I don't know.
It's kind of interesting.
I'd have to like pick an example, but You know, they did not do this movie that I've seen, so unfortunately I didn't get to listen to that to play some segments or anything.
But yeah, no, there are, you know, people who will talk about pop culture, but a lot of ways, like, they'll sit and they'll, like, watch, like, one episode of Rick and Morty and then, like, criticize the entire thing based on, like, well, then Morty's just kind of gross.
Like, why would you want to, you know, or Rick.
Rick is, Rick is, why does he have vomit on his mouth?
I mean, it's just this, like, Jewish stereotype of, like, it's just disgusting.
Like, why can't we, like, look towards the ideal?
And like completely miss like yeah that's kind of the point you're supposed to think he's nasty and disgusting like like there's no subtlety to like these observations right there's no sense of you know yes it's trying to do this they just think the whole thing is just programming from these dastardly Cultural Marxists or whatever.
It's weird to listen to these guys try to criticize media because they're just so bad at it, but it does give you a real sense of what their overriding perspective is.
can see the film industry is this sort of like, you know, this industry built on like competing actors who, you know, competing firms, companies, and then, you know, actors trying to get ahead, and everybody's kind of squabbling and kind of doing their thing.
And, you know, kind of producing in this, you know, kind of massive capitalist economy and trying to, you know, kind of draw profits off of it.
And also trying to, you know, please their, you know, kind of the big name stars.
I mean, I can look at the industry as an industry with horrifying things kind of going on inside of it, and etc, etc.
But, But like it's possible to like understand this and then to kind of draw conclusions based on that.
Ultimately, when you know, like these guys talk about it, it's like, well, obviously, they're just Jews, and they're just trying to like subvert you.
And that's that's kind of the end of the thing.
So how you do for our podcast, and that's kind of your answer?
Well, Yeah, it's very difficult to listen to, which is why I don't listen to much of it.
Anyway, sorry, I've been talking too long and not about Captain America, so we should maybe get back to it, I guess.
No, no, that's really interesting.
Although, you know, as so often happens with this, I'm kind of theoretically fascinated by this peep I get into this little subculture that I know nothing about and very few people know anything about.
And yet at the same time, as so often happens, it just turns out to be, well, they just sit around for hours blaming the Jews.
So it really just seems to always be they sit around for hours blaming the Jews.
It's slightly more sophisticated than that.
I mean, but then it becomes like, oh, well, it's just like, you know, homosexual degeneracy, which is ultimately something that is like fed to by the Jews, which is, you know, ultimately.
And so, you know, and it's all about like how, you know, there's no sense of like, like one of the things that I find interesting in terms of like sociologically or sociopolitically about like these films about and about the franchise in general is that, you know, in the Mid 80s, there was an explicit project by the Department of Defense to essentially, you know, give away materiel to the film industry, so long as they gave script approval to, you know, to the to the Department of Defense.
So all these movies are made with the, you know, with the explicit endorsement of the, you know, U.S.
military apparatus.
And no, not like the Jews in Israel, OK?
It's a different thing, you know.
But so and literally there's like a handful of people who have just like certainly who just gone through all of the scripts that have been like made that have any kind of military theme for the last 30 years and it's been this explicit project of like after Vietnam they made a bunch of movies that made the US military look less than spectacular and we want to make that not happen anymore and Top Gun is kind of the first like big example of that
But all these films are made with the explicit endorsement of the U.S. military.
So, of course, they're going to portray the U.S. military as heroic and victorious.
You know, like any kind of even even glancing critique gets blunted by being kind of shunted off and kind of used in their various ways of kind of doing that.
And so, you know, these films, you know, ultimately, like, you know, this this becomes most apparent in the most recent one, Captain Marvel, in which the lead character literally starts wearing the colors of the U.S. Air Force because of like heroism and raw Americanism.
It's one of the most like tone deaf things like imaginable, you know, and, you know, any any kind of systemic critique has gone completely out the window.
You know, even pretending to exist by by the by the modern by the by even by the more recent films.
So, um, yeah, but again, that's something that like, you'll never hear them like talk about like, Oh, there's an explicit project by the department of defense to do this.
And if they do bring it up, it's like, well, yeah, because they're like ultimately obeying their math, their corporate masters in Israel.
Yeah.
But that's something that you and I get to say and go, this is an obvious thing that affects the entire world that these films are presenting.
And this is a material thing that's in this history, that's literally in the closing credits of every one of these films, that we have to acknowledge before we can even begin to talk about how these films deal with American imperialism, American exceptionalism, etc.
And I know that that's something that you've got kind of on your mind in terms of talking about the film.
So I don't know.
Do you want to try to kind of move into that?
Well, I mean, you were talking about that real integration now between the United States military and and Hollywood, which is a very real thing and a very, very big thing.
People don't.
I mean, you mentioned that crop of post-Vietnam movies.
You know, you've got You've got The Deer Hunter, you've got Apocalypse Now, you've got various movies of that kind, and some of them are very fine movies.
I mean, I think Apocalypse Now is an amazing film, but to be honest, you know, I'm trying to think.
There is one, the Brian De Palma one.
What's it called?
Oh, Casualties of War?
Casualties of War.
Yeah, that's possibly the strongest in terms of, you know, its critique of what the US Army got up to in Vietnam.
But even that, it's very individualised.
It's very particularised.
It doesn't take in the broad sweep of it.
I mean, let's be honest here.
The US attack on Vietnam was a historic crime.
It was practically genocidal.
It was an act of aggression.
And what the U.S.
got up to in Vietnam is absolutely beyond atrocious.
And this crop of movies that are still, you know, spoken of routinely as, you know, anti-Vietnam War, anti-U.S.
military, very critical, very, you know, platoon and all that sort of... I mean, if you look at them, a lot of them, most of them, I would say, They don't really live up to anything like any sort of systemic critique of the U.S.
invasion or U.S.
imperialism at all.
I mean, certainly Apocalypse Now, which I think is the greatest of them, that's incredibly racist, to be honest, in the way it represents indigenous people in They're actually in Cambodia, aren't they, where they're filming?
And, you know, The Deer Hunter is an incredibly racist film.
It's written by John Milius, who's a very right-wing guy.
He invents this thing where US prisoners are being forced to play Russian roulette by the Viet Cong, as they call them, etc.
And, yeah, even so, these films that are essentially about how bad Vietnam was for the Americans, you know, they are routinely trotted out as evidence of... I mean, and we have this whole thing, the Vietnam Syndrome, which was, you know, after the Vietnam War we had The perceived, and I think there was a lot of reality to it, reluctance on the part of the American people to countenance wars, particularly ground wars, you know, with troops going in.
And the US establishment put an awful, a huge amount of effort, very consciously, into trying to counter that ideologically, you know, throughout the Reagan years and onwards.
And I think this collaboration between the US military and the State Department and so on and Hollywood is a very deliberate part of this.
And, you know, here I am trying to, you know, I don't want to be a vulgar Marxist.
I want to look into the sophisticated way in which, you know, culture interacts with ideology and how they You know how the you know etc etc and then you know you look into it and that the army just paying Hollywood to present them in a good light you know so you have you know vulgar Marxism gets the job done in this instance you know to an astounding extent like there's one famous instance of a movie Rules of Engagement
Which is, I think it's mentioned in the Jack Shaheen documentary Real Bad Arabs that we were talking about just recently on another podcast, where he talks about the original script.
It's supposed to end with this very ambiguous thing because it's about a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, I think.
Who opens fire on a crowd of people outside an embassy.
And it's supposed to be this very sort of questioning, ambiguous piece about what happened, and there's multiple viewpoints about why he did it, and what he saw, and what was happening.
And as I remember the story, basically the US military having Having supplied loads of materiel and props and stuff, and their funding and so on, and their script approval, they said, yeah, you're going to have to change the ending.
And so they just change it so that all the people in the crowd that the US soldier guns down, it turns out they all had machine guns.
So it's just amazing how direct it is.
Yeah, no, I mean, and it's completely, you know, just just built around this this concept of, you know, the the again, you can't do the systemic critique.
There's there is no systemic systemic critique, even films which get painted as being, you know, kind of kind of aggressively antiwar are really, you know, sort of there are a few bad apples kind of kind of films, you know, ultimately.
You know, you don't get the the sense of like, no, the entire thing that we're doing in Afghanistan is an occupation of, you know, an oppressed people.
And like we're going in and murdering them because that's just what the that because we want oil ultimately and we want geopolitical strategy.
And we'll, you know, bomb Cambodia as a way of preventing the spread of communism to, you know, whatever.
And, you know, and again, that kind of complicated material, you know, reality versus kind of the ideological construct and what that means for like the project for a new American century.
And, you know, the kind of the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan and blowback from Al Qaeda and all that really, really fascinating stuff.
None of which is ever brought up on American screens virtually ever.
My favorite example, I mean, I haven't seen Platoon in a number of years.
I remember quite liking it when I saw it, you know, maybe 10 or 12 years ago.
It's probably worth a rewatch.
Actually, now I'm having this conversation.
I want to rewatch a bunch of those old war movies and kind of, you know, go through them with a little bit more politically sophisticated lens.
But, you know, that's a film that's based on Oliver Stone's own experiences fighting in Vietnam, you know, and, you know, a lot of those characters are kind of one to one recreations of people he knew.
And even then you sort of get the sense of, you know, like there is this sort of futility and sort of like being a soldier and you're, you know, you're just kind of fucked up on drugs all the time.
And, you know, You're trying to do well, but the system is not kind of allowing you.
But even then, it really just kind of comes down to, well, you've got the hippie military guy in Willem Dafoe, and then you got the hard-ass Nazi kind of military guy in Tom Biringer.
And, you know, it becomes this kind of like dichotomy.
It becomes this sort of, you know, well, if we can only just have more like warmongers, More of our military officers should be more like Willem Dafoe as opposed to like the bad guy.
So even that it doesn't seem to like kind of question that imperial logic, you know, it kind of says war is hell and war is bad, but it again is incredibly focused on the on the US soldiers experience and the Yeah, it's it's all about trying to correct for that later in his career.
But like he makes several films that are essentially about like how bad it was for for US war veterans, which to be like, not to counter signal that not to say that that isn't real, but it doesn't really get at the core thing that was really kind of going on in that conflict.
Yeah, which was the essentially genocidal mass murder of millions of people in a country that was just invaded.
And then you have the relentless carpet bombing of a country where most of the people are peasants.
You know, completely defenseless, and to the point where they dropped more shells than they dropped during World War II, and you still have shells going off now, and you've still got people, you know, babies being born with deformities because of the chemicals they dropped.
You know, yeah, absolutely, we should have stories about how bad it was for the for the for the young men who were sent there because it was it was dreadful and about what a bad time they had when they came back absolutely it shouldn't be all we talk about but there shouldn't be an entire population of people who were subjected to a historic war crime who were just almost completely written out of the conversation
But the crop of Iraq movies, war on terror movies that came along after, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan and everything, the same thing happened again.
You know, we have this orthodoxy that we had this whole raft of very critical and thoughtful and questioning American movies about the war on terror.
And if you actually look at these movies, you know, the Green Zone and the Hurt Locker and stuff like this, they're really not very good at all.
Like there's a couple that Funnily enough, I think it's Brian De Palma again.
Redacted.
He made a movie called Redacted, which is probably the strongest of the crop of movies.
But again, none of them really get at the real... But even then, it's like one kind of bad guy is the...
Yeah, like in Platoon, you know, the two, the good soldier and the bad soldier.
They're like Charlie Sheen's shoulder demon and shoulder angel.
And it's about, you know, the battle for the soul of the young American man, which, yeah, OK, that's a story we can tell, but it shouldn't be the only one.
Well, the thing with the Green Zone, it was built, it was based on this book, which I really loved.
I mean, I'd want to probably revisit it.
I read it back when it was, it was new, this book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which was this sort of systemic critique of like the way that, you know, war, the way that the occupation of Afghanistan was, was, you You know, even accepting sort of the basic logic of the invasion, it was just completely mishandled.
And the, just like how it was sort of set the stage for the, for the extended later conflict.
And obviously the book was written long before, you know, kind of the rise of ISIS, but ultimately, you know, ISIS lies in the, in the, in the, you know, waiting in the wings based on, you know, things that happened in the first months of this occupation, ultimately.
And, um, it was quite, I remember being quite a, a, um, systemic and sympathetic book.
I would, again, want to, want to revisit that, but then it gets turned into like Matt Damon's star vehicle and, you know, any kind of, again, any kind of real critique then just kind of comes into, you know, uh, Matt Damon running around and like solving the crimes of like he was doing the terrible things in Afghanistan.
There's this one guy, it's almost like a Scooby-Doo villain, right?
We're going to unmask him and then the war's going to be okay because we found the one guy, he was the bad guy, who fucked all this up for us.
Would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for that meddling Matt Damon.
And I hear from these right-wing guys, when they do talk about this pop culture element, when they do talk about war movies, it's like...
Or even sort of like the history curriculum, you know, like from my perspective, these films, even the critical ones are incredibly like, you know, jingoistic and incredibly looking at sort of American imperialism and American exceptionalism as, you know, maybe, you know, kind of like poorly run, but ultimately sort of a positive for the world.
I mean, there's no sort of like critique of that, you know, but they see these kinds of films as being like, where's the where's the where's the American heroism in this?
I mean, literally, we're talking about a movie called Captain America, the first Avenger.
You've got a superhero wearing the American fucking flag or, you know, some approximation thereof.
Literally a member of the U.S. Armed Services that was made in 2011, which is the the the one of the basis of this giant film franchise, this much beloved character, a, you know, an Aryan superhero.
And it's like, you know, where's the where's the where's the pro-Americanism?
You know, it's like.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Well, Cap assembles his team, doesn't he?
And they're carefully demographically selected to be multi-ethnic.
Well, there you go, right there.
That just ruins the whole thing.
Yeah, no.
Well, you know, who each have about, like, two lines of dialogue in the thing, you know?
That's right.
Their ethnicity and their personalities are essentially the same thing.
Right, yeah.
You've got the one black guy, the one Asian guy, the one, you know, and so suddenly they each get, like, one little quirk.
I've seen this referred to as the United Colors of Benetton casting.
Yeah.
Well, and from my perspective, it's like, this is, and again, just from, you know, like sort of, sort of the, the issues of like representation in these films, etc.
You know, this is ultimately, it's a SOP.
It's a thing that you throw in to say, Oh, look, we got a black guy in the movie, like, great, you know, etc.
You know, you know, we gave him lines even, what else could you possibly want?
There's like one black guy.
But from their perspective, it's like, why do you got to put the black guy in?
Like, you're just like, and not make him just stupid.
Like, you know, you know what these people like, you know, and it's like, it's just, you're just, you're just shoving it in my face by having a black guy with two lines of dialogue.
It just ruins the whole movie for me.
Yeah.
Why do we have to pretend that any black people fought in the second world war for God's sake?
When we all know that none of them did.
Yeah.
But, you know, it shows that we're looking at it from completely different assumptions, doesn't it?
Because, to me, it just looks like a completely cynical exercise in putting this politically correct gloss on this completely ridiculous fantasy version of history, where there's the little bit of sexism that Agent What's-Her-Name has to deal with at training camp, but she...
Yeah, Agent Carter.
She does her badass boss lady thing and they all respect her instantly.
This is one of the things I really hate about this film.
And it's kind of unfair to pick on this film because almost every pop culture representation of the past now does this.
But I don't know, there's just something about it in this film that just winds me up.
This rewriting of the past.
Kind of everyone was always liberal and tolerant and wasn't really sexist and wasn't really racist, weren't they really?
I mean, there might have been a couple of people here and there that would make a remark, but all a woman had to do was stand up to him and he'd respect her then.
And, you know, maybe there was a little thing where, you know, one guy might say something to the black guy, but the black guy would prove himself in battle and then they'd all be comrades again.
You know, it's just this complete sanitization of the past so that there's no racism and there's no sexism.
And America always stood for this sort of perfect utopia of equality.
You know, and this film is an absolutely prime example of that in action.
And it's just, oh, God, it just it gets right up my nose.
It just gets right up my nose.
Right.
And of course, one of the, I mean, the challenges there are, you know, if you do kind of portray it accurately, then ultimately you're making, you know, women and people of color and, you know, people who aren't cis white dudes, you know, sitting in the theater, you're kind of making them wallow in this experience that like you don't necessarily you're kind of making them wallow in this experience that like you don't necessarily want, you know, you do want it to be sort of like
You know, like, like you don't want to suddenly, you know, talk about like segregated units and the suffering that kind of happened in that situation.
And, you know, sort of, you know, where we came into this to watch, you know, Captain America, you know, beat some skulls in.
and that's what we're here for, right?
If we actually had adequate conversations about this and adequate education about it elsewhere in society and elsewhere in culture, then fine.
We could do this thing where we put it aside for a couple of hours to have.
But the fact is that for millions of people, stuff like this is kind of where their views of history and the past and politics and stuff, this is where they're manufactured.
And this is the only place where they get sort of normative ideological views of how history works and politics works and so on and so forth.
And so that it has this smothering ideological sort of blanket of silence over things like this, that's the problem with it.
Right.
Yeah, no, I don't, I don't, I don't at all disagree with that.
I mean, you know, ideally, we would get like kind of real proper education on these issues in our history classes and in documentaries, and it would just sort of be kind of a well known thing.
And I mean, that is that is the power of this of this propaganda.
It is the power of this thing.
I mean, That's the thing with the Nazis aren't wrong that these, you know, films have like enormous ability to sort of shape public opinion.
You know, they're just wrong about everything else.
You know, they've just missed the entire point because they're focused on this, you know, perceived like Jewish influence.
It's subverting, you know, white Christian, you know, society, Gentile society.
Well, exactly.
They think it's a crude sort of, you know, Jewish paycheck to Hollywood producer, to writer, to, you know, the brain of the sheep in the cinema or at home watching the television that's watching it.
They think it's this sort of crude model where Soros pays for a direct ideological message that is just transmitted directly into people's heads.
Whereas we're actually talking about very complex issues, you know, of how culture gets reproduced.
Exactly.
And, you know, we're talking about like, you know, that this then just becomes this image that just, you know, like suddenly you'll see, you know, kind of, you know, real, you know, kind of World War Two, you know, documentaries that will use like footage from these things or will use, you know, it's sort of like background filler because it's easily available or suddenly it becomes like the image of the way that this stuff kind of gets represented.
And then we just kind of smooth over the difficulties in our past.
And that's something that like very much after World War Two, there was this Um, you know, kind of explicit desire to sort of like, uh, pretend that racism was over.
And that's sort of that, the, the baby boomers.
So just kind of, you know, like they, they, they see their, you know, you know, Oh, we, we passed the civil rights act and therefore, you know, we're all good now.
Right.
And of course that, you know, again, without looking at the systemic critique, you know, it's wallpapering over the nasty bits as a way of, you know, pretending that, you know, everything's good now.
And yeah, the way that this stuff rewrites our past is incredibly disingenuous and dangerous.
And ultimately I can say that and then also think, yeah, but I kind of like the film because I like, you know, I just kind of like it for popcorn reasons, you know.
Well, yeah, I want to be clear, you know, I don't draw any sort of direct line between, you know, I disapprove of the politics or the ideology in this particular work of art and therefore I don't enjoy it.
I love loads of movies, loads of books that, you know, I have serious problems with the politics.
Including loads of movies and novels and things where I find the politics actually obnoxious or sinister.
As I've said before, I'm a Lovecraft fan.
It's not that I think this is a bad film because I disagree with its politics.
It's not a crude thing like that.
And I don't think that sort of crude view is anywhere near as common on the left as a lot of people that are That sort of have this caricatured prejudiced view about the killjoy lefties.
I don't I don't think it's that common Right.
I mean, you know like ultimately the kind of conversation around like the way that the films like this sort of present issues Becomes kind of its own discourse.
It becomes its own thing, but that doesn't mean a we can't enjoy the product for what it is or be You know, you know, it's it's an orthogonal thing to our enjoyment of the product and you know also Like, to be able to sit and to enjoy it.
Like, the Nazis used this term, bug man.
It's a very common term they use.
If you're interested in like, you know, they were making fun of me for being interested in beer.
I was tweeting about beer for 10 minutes and suddenly it's like, oh my god, soy boy cock, you know, likes to talk about pilsners and all these things taste like grapefruit.
And like, how dare you have an interest that isn't like saving the white race, right?
You know?
Um, but they call these things bug man interests.
These are things that are supposed to distract you from your, like you're an ant in an ant hill and you're just, you know, sort of like distracted by video games or you're distracted by movies or distracted by sports or you're distracted by, you know, like, uh, you know, fast food and, and, you know, that sort of thing.
I mean, it's instead of focusing on sort of the real things that you should be focused on all the time, you know, and ultimately the stuff, you know, it kind of gets in your brain and it's just reprogramming you to think the Jews aren't terrible, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And, you know, I mean, it's just such a joyless existence that these guys seem to lead sometimes, you know.
And again, you and I will – you and I have already kind of started to – I mean, we have these conversations all the time, just not on this podcast.
You know, we can talk about, you know, the real, like, imperialistic agenda kind of at the heart of these things and the real, like, horrors of this war and treat that, like, completely seriously and still, like, feel like being engaged with that, you know, like, like you can separate the poison from the promise of these things, you know, and that's,
It's just something that I see these guys, like, I think that, you know, I've kind of said this before, one of the reasons they produce so much content is just to, like, give people something else to do as opposed to, like, watching Netflix.
You know what I mean?
Because Netflix is just poisoning you.
It's just the Jews putting poison into your head.
And so listen to, like, four-hour live streams of us, like, bullshitting and playing Honkler memes for, you know, instead.
Um, and it's, it's, it's just this, it's just this like kind of alternate world.
I mean, and it's not unique to, to the Nazis, obviously.
I mean, you know, sort of the evangelical subculture in the United States kind of does the same thing.
You know, you make these Kirk Cameron movies and you make these like Hallmark movies and all this stuff, and it's a replacement for, uh, you know, for this kind of poison filled, uh, you know, kind of secular, um, entertainment complex.
And there, they're not kind of blaming Jews explicitly.
They're saying kind of more like, I don't know.
I just, I find, I find the psychology, like, I understand, like, not wanting, like, I don't watch a lot of TV, you know, and in particular, I don't like to watch TV with ads in it.
Like, I find, like, when I do sit down, I'm watching, like, like something on commercial TV, on cable TV or whatever.
Um, and having an ad break every seven minutes.
Like, I feel like it's just being like, like a, like a ball peen hammer, like hammering a spike into my skull with this stuff because I'm just not like aware of it anymore.
I just don't experience it in the same way.
Whereas I used, you know, I was a kid, I watched, you know, I was a kid of the eighties and nineties.
I watched TV, you know, it's a thing, you know, but when you're away from it for a while and then you come back to it, suddenly it's just this like incredibly painful experience.
And so I don't know, like I have sympathy for that of like disconnecting if it's if it's something you feel is is toxic.
And I'm never going to kind of blame that.
But the the logic that they use in this sort of the thing that they're actually trying to protect themselves from is just such an obvious like it's just obvious nonsense that it leads to sort of a healthy impulse of getting away from sort of capitalist subculture or capitalist culture, capitalist, you know, sort of consumerist production.
And it becomes a You know, like kind of a mantra in and of itself.
I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but... Yeah, no, I mean, like a lot of things these people say, it seems to have like a germ of truth in it somewhere.
I mean, yes, we live in a consumer capitalist culture, and it does offer endless distractions and endless temptations.
Yeah, I mean, you do need to just occasionally unplug and just do something that's good for you just because it's fun, just because it's relaxing.
We all need that.
And if you spend your entire time obsessing over the problems of the world, even if we're talking about the real problems of the world rather than the illusory problems of the world, which is, you know, the Jews are trying to replace us all with Muslims, even if it's not that, but the real problems, you can't think about that all the time because you just go crazy. you can't think about that all the time because you And yeah, undoubtedly, you know, consumer capitalist society does keep a lot of people distracted from more important issues through stuff like that.
I mean, I'm not exempt from this.
I should definitely spend a lot more time thinking about what's going on in the world and devoting more time and energy and effort and money to stuff like climate change, you know, because the Amazon is on fire at the moment.
The environment is, we're approaching an ecological catastrophe.
You know, we've got the capitalism is inherently a problem that needs to be gotten rid of and replaced.
But even putting that aside, neoliberalism is becoming increasingly fascistic, in my opinion.
We've got all these sorts of huge problems in the world.
I should definitely be devoting more time to them than I do currently.
At the expense of, you know, horror movies and science fiction and chips.
Definitely, definitely, definitely.
So yeah, and a lot of us can say that.
So that's a true thing.
But it's not a big conspiracy to, you know, to inculcate you with slave morality.
And that's a real crudification and a misunderstanding of a problem that has a reality, but it's a much more complex reality, which is, again, it's to do with how capitalist culture reproduces itself.
So yeah, as I so often feel with these guys, it's like they start from a place where they've noticed that there's something wrong, and then they've just swerved completely off the road into the ditch, you know?
Yeah, no, it's absolutely the case and it's just such this, I don't know, it's tough.
I like your point about the mirror image in the evangelical Christian culture industry as well, the sort of bubble culture industry that they've created with their own replacement movies and replacement
stuff for mainstream culture, because that actually has a kind of similar thing to the Marvel movies, which is this superficial wokeness, this sort of pseudo-wokeness as an alibi on top of it, where you'll have a black character who's treated equally by the white pastor.
But as you say, because these things are deeply invested in this incredibly conservative A reactionary view of life.
They inherently, tacitly reproduce white supremacy and patriarchy and stuff like that, despite the fact that they will pay this lip service to, oh no, women are fantastic, and oh yeah, black people are great, as long as they're Christians, etc.
And, you know, if the Muslim girl rejects her stereotypically abusive, domineering father and rejects Islam and comes over to and gives her soul to Jesus, then she's just as good as any white Christian, you know.
But at the same time, it's it's covering.
And the Marvel movies have this world because one of the things And I want to reiterate, I do enjoy quite a few of them, but they do, all the way through them, there is like, we talked about sort of Captain America's very carefully selected band of ethnically diverse buddies, you know, and like, I mean, you know, I've written about Iron Man in the past, but Iron Man is absolutely a product of the War on Terror era.
For me, it's actually the most acute and telling of all the quote-unquote war on terror movies.
You can ditch the rest of them, it's all there in Iron Man.
It goes to great lengths to try to avoid any accusation of Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias, and it does it through this This manufactured idea of the Ten Rings as kind of this multi-ethnic, multi-language, multi-faith group.
And yet, underneath all that, what is that but Orientalist racism and Islamophobia in the context of the War on Terror that absolutely whitewashes American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan?
To me, it's just obvious that that's what it's doing, but it does it under this kind of lampshade of political correct liberalness.
And it's like when people like the guys you're talking about, they just see the lampshade.
Right.
And they don't see the thing buried underneath it.
They don't see the the larger cultural context.
I mean, you're in.
I mean, this is something that I think we could we could we could talk about with with the first Avenger with Captain America is, you know, Captain America doesn't actually fight the Nazis in this movie.
No.
You know, like this is like like like one of the questions you run into, you know, whenever you kind of depict this era of history, If you're going to put a superhero in it, it's like, okay, so why can't Captain America prevent the Holocaust?
Like, you know, because if Captain America doesn't do something about, like, we want him to sort of win the day and we want, like, he's supposed to be the hero and he's supposed to succeed, ultimately.
Like, that's what he's there to do, is to give us that power fantasy, right?
But ultimately, you know, if you portray him as, you know, having intervened in the Holocaust and losing, then, you know, you don't get the power of fantasy.
But if you otherwise, you got to, like, portray history didn't happen the way history happened.
And so ultimately, the way these films get around that is they say, well, Cap wasn't really fighting.
There's this other group that was building these super science Nazi weapons.
And he was kind of over there dealing with the Red Skull instead of like kind of fighting the like the more traditional war.
And then suddenly, you know, any kind of connection, any kind of like real material connection to real history then just kind of gets lost.
There is no sort of like real.
So we're pretending we're punching Nazis, but in reality, we're punching Hydra.
And then in the future films, Hydra becomes this again, this like group of bad actors, this group of just kind of bad people who are subverting the inside of what's otherwise a perfectly fine and good U.S. military establishment.
This sort of world, you know, kind of U.N. superstructure, et cetera.
Yeah.
And if it wasn't for those dastardly Hydra guys, then everything would have been fine.
Right.
So it becomes, again, a way of avoiding the systemic critique.
It becomes a way of, oh, we're just going to kind of do this thing off to the side instead of like actually answering, asking the questions of like, why was World War Two ultimately fought?
And like this very superficiality then gets critiqued by the by the Nazis, who, again, are You know, sensing something, like there's something not being discussed, there's some real history that isn't being, but they don't see that it's sort of a gloss on, like, we're trying to make a billion dollars here.
They again see it as this sort of, like, you're just painting the Germans as, you know, uniquely bad.
And again, it just becomes this whole, like, thing.
I just want to shake them sometimes when they talk about this stuff, like, get your hand under your fucking ass, you know?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I remember when Winter Soldier, which is the second Captain America movie, when that came out, we, I mean, there was a lot of people saying, oh, this is really interesting because it takes a skeptical, almost, you know, a radical or cynical, you know, paranoid view of the American government and the intelligence services and stuff like that.
And it's like a, it's like a conspiracy.
And they deliberately evoke sort of all the president's men by having Robert Redford in the cast.
Yeah, but if you actually watch the film, the actual organs of the American capitalist imperialist state are never mentioned, or only obliquely mentioned, and they are completely unimplicated in anything whatsoever.
And it's all about S.H.I.E.L.D., and even S.H.I.E.L.D., which metaphorically is like the instantiation of the American capitalist imperialist machine as an engine of virtue, as heroism, It's Captain America, World Police, ultimately.
Yeah, exactly.
Even S.H.I.E.L.D.
is only this way because it's been infiltrated by HYDRA.
HYDRA being this completely alien, inexplicable, sort of foreign other, which is characterized by just this completely contentless fanaticism.
I mean, HYDRA has no ideology.
And you can say this about all... because you said the thing about Captain America the First Avenger is he doesn't... Cap doesn't fight Nazis.
That's true.
He doesn't fight Nazis.
He fights Hydra.
And yet, in another sense, he does fight Nazis because Hydra are absolutely emblematic of what Nazis and fascists generally always are in this kind of pop culture.
Because they're always represented exactly the way Hydra is represented in Captain America The First Avenger, which is as completely stripped of historical context, completely stripped of ideological content, completely stripped of any meaning whatsoever, except their aesthetics.
They're just turned into the uniforms, the swastika, or the pseudo-swastika, in this it's the sort of Scultipus emblem, Pseudo-swastikas are another question in themselves.
There's a whole, I mean I could write an entire essay about pseudo-swastikas belonging to, like the Ten Rings have a pseudo-swastika, and like the rebel Zygons in the Doctor Who story, the Zygon invasion, they have a pseudo-swastika.
That's an entire essay to itself.
Yeah, this is what Nazis and fascists always are in this sort of pop culture, like the Empire and the First Order in Star Wars.
It's absolutely fascistic, but it has no ideological content, it has no historical context.
The Death Eaters and so on in the Harry Potter films.
And so on and so on and so on.
It's just this completely empty sort of alien, foreign, inexplicable, fanatical other that can also take in left-wing, things that are superficially left-wing.
Loads of this sort of pop culture just lumps socialism or communism or the left in with the right as just this alien fanatical other that is the bad, you know?
And that's all it is.
That's what fascism has been completely reduced to.
Yeah, you know what those extremists are like.
They're bad people on both sides of that aisle.
It's ultimately in support of this kind of neoliberal consensus or this sort of establishment kind of ideal of civility and we're just going to kind of sit and debate things.
Look at existing power relations or possible power relations or kind of where this comes from and I mean that's that's what's so you know insidious about like this this kind of entertainment is It's not just sort of a lack of looking at the kind of systemic critique It's the the lack of historical context and that becomes like oh we know Nazis are bad because they're always gonna come and they're gonna wear swastikas and they're gonna be you know, they're gonna
Look a certain way and they're going to act a certain way and say certain things But then when they change the swastika to a Kekistan flag or to a Pepe frog or when they say no I'm just joking.
It's fine I'm just I'm just like you look at how nice I am and they wear a dapper suit and then suddenly, you know The establishment just goes.
Oh, that can't be a Nazi.
I don't see a swastika on that guy.
Come on and um Nazis used that as a way of infiltrating this larger culture.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, this is another thing.
One of the side effects of this pop culture treatment of the Nazis, its complete adoption of the Nazis and the fascists as just this all-purpose boogeyman, completely stripped of context and content and reduced to aesthetics, is that I mean, they're always glamorized, you know.
Nazis now, to us, look, you know, loads of people now think of Nazis as kind of, they're either glamorous or they're overtly sinister, you know.
So when guys, as you say, wearing, you know, Kekistani flags or whatever, gathering at Charlottesville, although a lot of them, as we've talked about before, are kind of cosplaying as the SS, as you say, people don't see it.
People don't see it, because they think Nazis look like Darth Vader stomping around with his shiny helmet, or they think Nazis are going to be wandering around in black robes like Death Eaters.
Right, or that they're going to look uniquely bad, and that they're not going to have positive qualities, they're not going to be charming, they're not going to be clever, or if they are, it's in this overtly sinister kind of way.
It doesn't help, of course, that every time the United States has wanted to justify A ferocious act of imperialism in the last half century.
It's picked upon whoever happens to be leading the little state they want to invade and devastate for imperialistic motives that they were probably in bed with five minutes ago.
They've called that guy, whoever he happens to be this week, the new Hitler.
You know, that doesn't help either.
Right.
No, my favorite was the Iraq War, sort of the run-up to the Iraq War era, the way that the term Islamofascism just suddenly became like the buzzword on everybody's, you know, and that's not to say that you can draw parallels between You know, these far right repressive regimes in the Middle East and sort of fascistic ideology.
I mean, you know, that's a that's another subject.
But also the way it's used there is just to like tie is just to tie brown people to history's evilest monster.
And therefore, like we need to go invade and, you know, rescue, rescue the you know, we need to liberate the people by killing millions of them.
Well, you can always draw parallels with the American imperialist structure does.
Yeah.
You can always draw parallels between anything, because political power and political structures always work in certain ways.
But, you know, Islamofascism was such a ridiculously incoherent, ahistorical term right from the beginning, because it was meant to lump together al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist party and the Iranian regime, and these were all, I mean, you know, there's variants within Islam, religious variants, there's political variants.
These people all hated each other.
They were enemies.
You know, the idea that we had to invade Iraq because they were in league with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, they were enemies, they were rivals.
You can't just tie all these completely disparate things together.
By saying, well, they're all Muslims, so it's Islamo, and they're all bad, so it's fascist.
So, you know, it's so idiotic.
Right.
And it's just, again, like I know we really haven't talked much about the movie.
I think this was always the way this was going to go.
But it does, you know, part of the point of doing this was just to let us just kind of talk about something that was interesting to us for a while and use this movie as kind of a lens for it.
But it also like for me, it's just like this is like if fascists had a coherent ideology, they would be having these kinds of conversations for themselves.
And instead, they don't like there's no sort of looking at any kind of material history because Fascism isn't about that.
It's just this bizarre thing to listen to them talk for four hours and have three sentences worth of actual content.
It's just routinely bizarre.
Well, fascism isn't really an ideology.
As it's been said, it's a scavenger ideology.
It's fundamentally a political reaction that people will find themselves in the midst of, and or aligned with, or whatever, for various different reasons.
And it will just scavenge its particular ideology from wherever it can get it for whatever purposes it needs at any given moment.
And what really unifies it is an aesthetic.
It is aesthetic more than anything else.
It's something else we've talked about before.
And Walter Benjamin talked about how fascism turns politics aesthetic.
It empties it of content, it empties it of context, it turns it all into imagery and stuff like that.
And the irony for me Is that that is precisely what our culture industries in, you know, the liberal capitalist culture industries, that is precisely what they've done to fascism in the stories we tell about it.
As I was talking about before, we've just turned fascism in our cultural representations into an empty aesthetic, which is kind of an inherently fascist thing to do with a political category.
Exactly.
I want to say, I think Hugo Weaving's German accent is excellent.
That's probably the finest fake German accent I've ever heard.
To the point where I think if I didn't know who Hugo Weaving was, and I'd seen him in this and this only, I'd probably think he was German.
So I have to give him props for that.
Whereas Toby Jones's German accent is terrible.
Yeah, well, Toby Jones is Toby Jones is Toby Jones doing his doing his Toby Jones thing.
My favorite actor who's doing the thing that he's that he was hired to do is Tommy Lee Jones, who, you know, in other films even made like later in his life.
I mean, you know, like No Country for Old Men.
I think he's amazing in that.
The three burials of what's his name?
Melquiades Estrada.
Yeah, that one.
I think he's I think he's really quite good there.
I think he's he's been a perfectly wonderful actor.
And here he's just sleepwalking through it.
It's just such a it's just such a like, OK, give me like standard gnarled, you know, military guy.
Yeah.
He's just been hired to be Tommy Lee Jones, and he's just turned up on set and been Tommy Lee Jones.
And that's fine.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not it's not a bad performance, but it is a sleepwalking performance, ultimately.
Yeah.
I do.
I do.
Again, just just sort of a brief thing about, like, just sort of the themes of the film.
I do find that I had someone who was looking to make sort of anti-fascist memes and was like, Looking for like kind of superhero characters to sort of use with these, you know, it was kind of like we were like just spitballing some ideas and I'm like, well, you know, you should you should use, I mean, Captain America punches Nazis.
I mean, that seems kind of an obvious choice.
But then from an anti-fascist and anarchist perspective, it becomes really difficult to use those semiotics without also embracing the sort of America's own kind of imperialist oppressive qualities.
And so it's very difficult to sort of use Captain America in that way without in some sense kind of being a part of this whole kind of racist white supremacist system, which I thought was interesting that they kind of ran into that kind of specifically trying to make these memes.
It turns out that Spider-Man is the easiest character to turn into anti-fascist memes for kind of interesting reasons.
But that's interesting.
I was going to say, maybe you could create your own version of Captain America and make him Captain Antifa.
But that wouldn't work at all because Antifa is leaderless and non-hierarchical.
So, you know, if you if you have a Captain Antifa, that's instantly a betrayal of everything Antifa stands for.
Well, there is this like thing, and I think one of the things that I really like about these films is sort of, and this, you know, wait for the soy boy cuck things, where it's like, I was on Tumblr kind of back in the day, and I really loved the sort of the fan conversation around some of these films.
And in particular, sort of like what this sort of, you know, not, not, you know, Captain America in turn, if you kind of treat it, if you're trying to read it critically, but you're also reading it just as the character, he's supposed to be sort of the good stuff, like the actual sort of ideals of like truth, justice, the American way, all of those like the actual sort of ideals of like truth, justice, the American way, all of those sorts of, you know, all that, all that sort of like old whorey, you know, kind of 1940s
And, you know, part of the idea is that, you know, he kind of gets frozen and comes back and it's and it is sort of a reaction to sort of the ugly realities that that that were ultimately kind of buried in it to begin with.
And I think that, you know, these films do not do a good job of handling that.
But I think the fan culture around them really they're.
There is a lot of like really neat stuff that fans have kind of created some some some fan fiction and you know and art and memes and that sort of thing that really do Sort of look at like, you know, well, okay if you know You know
Steve Rogers was woken up today I mean he would absolutely be like sort of this like fight for 15 kind of guy he would absolutely be you know in favor of trans rights and you know all that sort of thing and there's this if you want to go google for that if you google like bisexual Steve Rogers you'll find a lot of like really like neat stuff that like you know nerds on the internet made like a few years ago um that like sort of like leans into you know what a what a kind of inclusive Steve Rogers would be and what like
Not leaning into, like, explicit, like, anti-capitalism, but at least sort of the progressive, aggressively kind of progressive, like, sort of, sort of character, what this ideal should be in this sort of, like, idealized area.
And I think there's some really, like, nice, gentle, but very nice stuff that kind of came out of that community.
And I think it gives me some sort of a warmth towards some of these properties that the properties themselves don't necessarily justify.
But again, that's a way of, you know, like little people, like individuals making art on the internet are able to do things that these giant capitalist behemoth corporations trying to make a billion dollars and that need Department of Defense funding to do that are simply not going to be able to make.
And again, that comes down to the material realities of how these films are made.
And so I think there's I think there's some really interesting kind of dynamics going on there.
Yeah, it comes down to issues of political economy that are just outside the ken of the fascists.
Because, you know, it turns out if you have people creating stories or elaborating on stories that already exist for the purposes of their own interest and their own delight and their own communication with each other, Then you have these stories suddenly unalienated.
You know, in the Hollywood system, these stories, they're alienated by the profit motive and, as you say, the intervention of the imperialist state and so on.
But if you have people take... I mean, you know, you've got the issue of the medium.
They're using social media, that's corporate, etc.
None of it's unmediated.
But even so, we're talking about people taking this and doing something with it collectively and in a community and for their own reasons.
And this is, in a sense, it's a kind of unalienated creative labor, or it's getting towards that.
And some of it has this amazing recuperative power.
It's a really good example, you know, by Steve Rogers.
And, you know, some of it's daffy and silly, but some of it's great.
And you can say that about a lot of what people do with these properties.
And I think it, I mean, it gives the lie to this incredibly simplistic idea that the Nazis have of, you know, from Soros's checkbook directly into your sheep-like brain, you soy boy cuck, you know, because it's not like that.
People do, you know, deter and recuperate these sorts of things.
And they do it via engaging with them critically in, you know, maybe I flatter myself, but maybe in the way that we've been trying to do, you know, and just to sort of not be a passive consumer.
But, you know, You know, eat it and enjoy it, but study the ingredients, you know, is what I always say.
And even if it's bad for you, if you enjoy it, that's its own kind of good, but you should know what you're putting into yourself.
And I think this sort of resurgence of popular, crowdsourced, collective criticism from below, it has its problems, but I think it's one of the markers of the way culture is going, and I think there's a lot to be said for it, I really do.
And funny, it also gives the light to sort of the crude left-wing version of that same idea, which is, you know, from the political economy of capitalism straight into your brain, you sheep-like, hoodwinked, false-consciousness proletarian, you know?
There is a left version of that, which is equally crude and reductive, and it gives the light of that as well.
Yeah, I think... Yeah, no, I think that's a good place to leave it.
Okay, great.
Well, that was fun.
Yeah, no, definitely.
I have had people send me, I mean, I get a lot of messages, and I have had people, you know, ask us to do, like, to discuss more, like, movies in this context.
I didn't have anybody ask for this particular one.
Jack and I just kind of decided to do this.
Um, but I have had people kind of, like, request more of these, and I don't want to, like, make the podcast about this, but we might do a couple more of these as this kind of winter comes on, and, you know, kind of, like, lighten the mood kind of episodes, and if you do have, you know, films you'd like to hear us kind of, kind of talk about in this context, let us know!
Um, Taxi Driver is like kind of high up on my list.
I've had, I've had several people sort of message me and say, you should really talk about Taxi Driver in this context.
And, uh, so maybe we'll do that.
I don't know.
Well, Jack and I can kind of talk off mic about what, what might be reasonable, but, um, yeah, we definitely, we definitely want to know we will, we're not going to make a habit of this.
This isn't going to be like a, you know, like a every week sort of thing, but it was really nice as a palate cleanser.
And I hope that the audience has enjoyed this as much as we've enjoyed getting to You know, kind of take our brain off of some of the real nastiness for a week.
So, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think this episode was originally going to be about the Dark Knight, wasn't it?
And somewhere along the line, we decided to make it about Captain America instead.
And we have had several ideas for films that are kind of relevant or tangentially relevant to the main subject of this podcast that we could talk about.
I mean, there is Taxi Driver.
We've chucked a few ideas around, haven't we?
Death Wish was another one.
Yeah, so I don't know.
Maybe we can talk about Joker.
That's an interesting one that's coming up.
Yeah, but do let us know what you think.
I want to wait for the cultural discourse around that one to pass us by a little bit.
Oh, is there a cultural discourse around that film?
I haven't realized.
I have curated my Twitter feed to the point where I only see the very broad outlines of it, and even then I'm just kind of like, that's enough.
I follow Nazis around.
I don't need to deal with liberals arguing about in-cell gun violence.
It's not a thing I need to worry about.
But yeah, let us know if you like this.
Let us know if you want more of them.
We can also potentially put them on another feed or something if people just really don't want this cluttering up their thing.
Yeah, we're going to do kind of a news roundup next week, and I'm looking forward to that.
That will be really hardcore.
You're going to have to bone back up on a lot of these characters if you haven't listened to the whole catalogue, because we're going to run through a whole bunch of really nasty people and the total bullshit that they're doing to each other right now, and it's kind of hilarious and kind of awful.
So yeah, that's what we're doing next week.
Great.
Well, thanks for listening, and see you next week, and goodbye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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