Stranger Than Fiction

But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be?

Yeah, especially when they ran the EXACT SAME PLOT in their Napoleon Arc a few seasons ago. And then they expect us to root for the French this season.

Srsly, folx.

~K.H.

Demotivation.

Around the Propagandaministry, we liked to have a lot of posters. I mean, that's what propaganda is all about right? Posters? Pamphlets? Chick Tracts? Commercials, feature films, sitcoms? Little Joe-Boss probably would have been cross with the sort of things that we would come up with in our spare time, but now that the war is over and all of the bitches are dead, icanhazcheesburger.com and their affiliates have started to uncover some of our rejected efforts:



Have the contents of Mr. K's wastepaper basket from beside his old desk at the Ministry been destroyed, or will they, like everything else, resurface to appear on the internet for teh lulz?

Only time will tell.

And maybe photoshop.

~K.H.

Begin the Lolocaust.

So you know, if I was making a Time-Travel-Romantic-Wtf? movie about the Holocaust, I would totally cast Britney Spears as the female protagonist.

You know, for the lulz.

A little bird killed you.

Things dead nazis like:

• Tanks.
  
• Schapps.
  
• sendups of 'the downfall'
  
• Twitter
  
• Boots
  
• lulz
  

Ja, we have a twitter now. Why?

I don't have to answer your damn questions!

I will never escape the Propagandaministry.

Not even in WoW.



And last night, Johan Gasmask and I rolled a Gnomelock and a Gnomemage too.

Yes. I play on an RP server. Not PVP. I leave PVP to... others.

Who knew that propaganda could be so badass?

Joe Mama, that's who.

And cracked.com

Humorpolitiksiche!

Authoritarian humor is fight. So says Hoover.org, in the article below, which is chock full of lulz like the following:

two European communists are rewarded with a trip to the glorious Soviet Union, but only one comes back. At work, the fellow traveler is quizzed by a colleague,

“How are living conditions in the Soviet Union?”
“Wonderful. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“And how is the housing? How is the food situation?”
“Splendid. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“But what happened to your friend?”
“Oh, he’s in Siberia. He did believe his eyes.”

Now, the article has the following to say about lulz during the 30's and 40's:

The sentimental axiom that jokes in, or against, authoritarian societies are liberating certainly does not stand up to scrutiny in the singular case of Nazi Germany. German jokes — and, in particular, those of working-class Berliners, who seem to have conjured up most of the gags — were unusual in that Nazi leaders, not Nazi ideology or the state apparatus, were their butt. This idiosyncrasy would seem to indicate that, at least until very late in the war, many Germans identified with and accepted the regime and its aims. Given that the Reich lasted but 12 years (half of which was occupied by fighting) and the Soviet Empire lasted eight mostly peaceful decades, Germans were not given the same opportunity to witness the Big Lie.

In the German case, political jokes were neither “tiny revolutions” nor pain relievers, but good-natured fun akin to jokes in democratic societies where the political structure is assumed to be legitimate.

I would suggest that telling a derisive political joke was only revolutionary in the period during the war, which the article points out, was fun for that one could be (in theory) put to death for it. Anyway, while the above does not seem unusual to westerners, it was unusual in an authoritarian government, where the State tends to be the target, not the leaders. But you didn't tell jokes about Hitler (especially not during the war), and as is pointed out above: yes, most people of the time were legitimate national socialists. I do have a bit of a niggling issue with the phrasing there, "the regime and it's aims." You all can probably guess this, but I would rather not get into what amounts to Apology, and a subject for other posts.

But let us stop that, for some quality period lulz:

"...on their wedding night, his wife awakes and catches a naked Goering waving his marshal’s baton around. “What are you doing?” she asks. “I’m promoting my underpants to overpants.” Victor Klemperer’s remarkable I Will Bear Witness, 1933-1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years (Random House, 1999) records just one joke between 1933 and 1941. It contrasts the 1917-18 punchline to the question, “How long will the war last?” with its modern equivalent. During the Great War, the answer was, “Till the officers have to eat the same food as the men”; during the Second World War, “Until Goering fits into Goebbels’s trousers.”

And we all know who had pants, don't we?



Now, speaking of:

"As for Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, jokes about him ridiculed his deformities, height, and complexion. It was only his many enemies in the party who tended to circulate those more waspishly commenting on his propagandistic distortions. Ernst Röhm, the brownshirted sa commander executed by Hitler in the Night of the Long Knives, generated a huge number of jokes, all of which harped on his homosexuality, towards which an “innocent” Hitler averted his eyes for a suspiciously long time (as a 1934 joke went: “Just imagine how upset the Führer will be if he gets to know Goebbels has a club foot!”). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only leading Nazis to escape laughter were Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and his chief executioner, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (whose unusually high-pitched voice would otherwise have marked him as a prime target)."

Yes, I know-- everyone is shocked that somehow (within the reich, anyway), Glasses Himmler escaped ridicule. Open ridicule anyway. I WONDER HOW HE MANAGED THAT!?

Bush and Godwin, sittin' in a tree...

Former President Jimmy Carter recently wrapped up a trip to the Middle East, which included talks with leaders of Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group that controls the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said at Israel's 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to Israel's parliament, the Knesset.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Whether or not Hitler was exactly the kind of fellow one could reason with when it came to things like total war, the fact remains:

Passing the torch.

How Timely.

Hopefully that link will work, as ushmm.org links sometimes have problems, but yeah.

HAI CHINA, U noes who even started the Olympic Torch Run? HITLER!

SUBTLE OLYMPICS ANALOGY FAILS AT SUBTLE.

A Subtle? NOT YOURS.

(That said, Go go go the Dalai Lama. Srsly, who could hate that guy? He has Bodhisattva awesome. I can think of few awesomes that are awesomer.)

Speculation Jones.

from inhaltsos on el-jay:

the Was Eminem a Nazi Polka!

LULZ!