I was expecting this comment to go in a more sinister direction but we're not quite there yet.

It's priming. You have to present very obvious scams, to then conflate the concept of being scammed with political ideology... which doesn't necessarily follow.

Propaganda is really interesting in the way it carries a narrative. It's like a good movie, gives you an idea about what you're going to watch, and then slowly flows to the places you expected it to go to, but it does it in unique and interesting way.

There is certainly something innate in the human mind that loves these predictive narratives.

> Initially thought it was aimed at avoiding being scammed of your hard earned cash by shysters.

Well, that too really. Just a different breed of shyster, but they'll come for your wallet as sure as they will your freedoms.

Italian*

Littering? Did I miss something?

It is literally propaganda. Very good propaganda with a very good and truthful message. (Except maybe a bit of too much idealizing the US and also the role of the catholic church but the main point is fine.)

I guess the confusion is because in Western societies people are used to the doublespeak of only calling something propaganda when it is done by the "other side". The other side is "spreading the narrative" you are "reporting facts".

You use different words to describe the same thing. Like the good guys are "rebels" and the bad guys are "terrorists".

There is nothing wrong with propaganda. It can be used for good or bad. Just don't start falling for your own one.

My wild guess is that most people who are aware of this film recognize that it's a kind of propaganda.

Of course you're going to get nationalism-tinged anti-fascist propaganda from the US Dept. of the Army in 1945.

There are large voting blocs who need to hear and comprehend the message of this film that happens to be propaganda, right now.

What problems?

The post did dive but it managed to cling to the frontpage.

https://hnrankings.info/45573025/

My condolences for your hat.

Did you lose faith in humanity gradually or all at once? :P

so, we can agree that will be fedora?

People are more likely to have good intentions when they expect a good payback (including non-monetary as well as monetary ones) from the good intentions they gave out. It's more of a trade than care.

Organisms on this planet require resource to survive, but resource is limited. The nature is fundamentally a zero-sum game so that's what everything tends to fall back to when hard time comes. This is so predictable, played again and again, like we're cogs in a machine. Well, maybe we really are.

That is interesting that it was actually composed recently, of course he was going for period-accurate and that seems to be his thing. But it's just fascinating to me, the sort of social norms around, and the mood or feelings that are evoked by, that kind of music, compared to a modern "serious" monster movie like Cloverfield or something (of course silent vs. talkie is a bit apples-to-oranges but it just feels culturally worlds apart even though they're kind of going for the same thing).

Definitely but would you disagree that there is homogeneity to it that would be out of place in say a NYC street scene today? Look up pictures of Straw Hat Day. Just interesting to me given the wide world of fashion choices and styles that developed soon after.

By talking to those apathetic and talking to those that think this isn't a problem. There is a war for your mind.

The people who need to watch this are precisely the ones on HN, because we have outsized money and power.

Keep in mind it was the tech elite that helped elect Trump. Some of them are here and will see this. Lets see how long until this post is flagged...

It seems to me as though you're reading a lot in to that second paragraph. Are you disputing the basic facts outlined, about "masked agents roaming the streets kidnapping people in broad daylight"? Because that is, in fact, a thing that is happening in cities all over the country right now, and simply pointing out that it is happening is not a partisan act.

I posted a substantial reply to this comment but immediately deleted it. It's impossible honestly to take issue here without crossing into culture war territory.

First of all, half of Americans didn't vote for Trump, at best a fourth. Look up voter turnout and of those that voted. And yes, not voting is legitimate when you believe both parties don't represent you. This idea that half of Americans voted for Trump makes no sense.

Not only that but most people don't approve of his immigration policy.

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

He is going against the will of the people with unpopular policies

> The opposition of "Rule of Law" is "Rule of Men". If we don't follow the immigration laws defined democratically

We are advocating for the rule of law to be applied to everyone, not just people who "look foreign".

The gall to bemoan the "rule of men" when we've got masked paramilitary gangs ransacking apartment buildings in the middle of the night.

The problem isn't that immigration law is being enforced. The problem is the manner in which it is being enforced. Someone breaking the law is not a justification for whatever you want to be done to them. Someone breaking the law is not an excuse to violate other people's constitutional/natural rights by association. And the law not being enforced for a long time is not an excuse to eliminate what little accountability there was for people tasked with enforcing the laws. I hope some day you will realize these things.

You do realize crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor right? Do you see how masked agents violently taking people without due process does not align with the severity of the offense?

Due process is being followed?

> same sort of comic-book evil even though it's every bit as obvious.

The same as the video? Where is this happening and how is it so obvious?

I noticed you didn't include any bipartisan examples. I'll help with that,for example believing Joe Biden was sharp as a tack is more damaging than any examples listed, and is probably the primary factor in Trump's reelection.

> I suspect we're seeing WWII anti-Nazi propaganda being promoted all over social media in an attempt to shock people into a moment of introspection. Someone watching this propaganda piece today doesn't even have to make substitutions. The man on a street-corner ranting about immigrants could be a talking head on certain current "news" programs. However, the shock relies on the viewer's perception of Nazi's as irredeemably evil.

Anti-Nazi propaganda from WWII has been a staple of American and broader Anglosphere culture for the entirety of my life; and so has the counter-phenomenon of people deliberately using Nazi symbols to be shocking or provocative.

Anyway, at the time this film was produced by the US government, legal immigration from foreign countries to the US had been heavily curtailed for a generation by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924, and immigration would not be liberalized until another generation later in the 1960s.

Is that all you think this is about, being racist and sexist?

I agree with OP, this video shows how easy it can be a sucker. There are two parts to it, one is being the sucker, the other is the specific content and time.

OP is pointing out that the sucker is in every echo chamber because these chambers get filtered to only allow extreme viewpoints thrive.

Citation needed, I guess. There are studies that show that social media platforms drift to extreme content automatically. In Austria there went from a vanilla tiktok account to extreme right wing content, in every county, just by doom scrolling.

And what happens if you see this content constantly? Not only to adults but also to teenagers?

I believe it's this one: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

If Iryna Zarutska were more Bayesian, the correct prejudice and acceptable amount of racism would have saved her life. Unfortunately for her, her priors were from .ua, not .us.

[flagged]

> minorities

The UK has a population of 55 million whites. Bangladesh has a population of 171 million, Pakistan has 241 million, India has 1.4 billion, and China also has 1.4 billion. In the UK, there are more Bangladeshi alone than there are whites (all whites, not just British) in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and China, combined. Yet they are "minorities", while the people that will soon become outnumbered by foreigners in their own country [1] are the "majority".

The reason whites are unaware is because they are propagandized 24/7 to be unaware (including by their own state [2]), while you are encouraged.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/03/white-british-mi...

[2] Moffat even talks about the idea he mentions above — the excuse of “historical accuracy” that some people often give to justify an all-white cast — “[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’” - https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/moffat-on-diversity-in-doctor-...

Nazi Party == direct control of the media.

Both our statements are true.

What is the ultimate point of burning books? Does it represent the manufacture of media or the control of it?

This film is an attempt to ignore the economic causes of the war and entirely pin them on the population of Germany. This film mostly seeks to reduce the power of American public participation and labor organization by inferring that anyone who engages in the necessary steps to achieve them must be a type of "proto Nazi" to be ignored or feared.

There hasn't been great scholarship on the buildup of Fascism - or at least there are some big missing pieces.

So many records were destroyed, and until very recently, propaganda was still sacrosanct.

In Communist countries, Fascism had to be Capitalist reaction to working class solidarity. In Western Countries, there was more freedom, but there was a strong stigma against any analysis that violated Atlanticist principals. Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" raised too much controversy for claiming Eichmann was just a joiner, not hateful.

Until recently it wasn't just propaganda, but a basic human decency not to ask certain questions too loudly while the survivors of the Holocaust were still alive, and their persecutors lived unpunished.

For example, there's little willingness (in the West) to discuss the role Russian emigres played in supporting Fascism? They were obviously being opportunistic, as were Ukrainians and Finns.

I learned very recently that in late November 1918, weeks after World War I ended, the British told the Germans they could expand Eastward, rearming if necessary, to prevent the Bolsheviks from advancing.

The Germans had already disarmed, and no longer had functional militaries. But they were able to raise self-sustained militias that moved into parts of Poland and Lithuania.

Later on, Nazi propaganda played up this fact, while Allied propgandists chose to ignore it. It likely had a role in convincing Germans they had a "natural" claim to East Europe.

Looking at the news, the German army recently held marches in these places, as a sign of support for NATO against the Russians.

> Ah, but how exactly did the Nazis reach that point when they didn't have that capability?

The economic crises of the 20s and 30s. This is very well documented.

> Perhaps... the things in the video?

Speeches on street corners? I find that notion absurd. I find the presentation incredibly ignorant and manipulative.

We’ve gone from CCP control of the media spigot to pro-US regime billionaires controlling it. One step forward and another step back.

The public square is a recognized American institution for political change and messaging. The first amendment covers way more than freedom of the press. This video, to me, seems to deride it.

The quote is a call for unity, so I felt it inappropriate to end by attacking my fellow citizens.