(Part 2) Top products from r/PropagandaPosters

> Russia won the Space Race.

Won the first round, until the mid-60s. Then Korolev died, Khrushchev was ousted, and their space program lost all its initial tremendous energy.

Meanwhile JFK was delivering the "by the end of this decade" speech, the American giant was waking from its slumber and starting to flex its muscles. And then Armstrong set foot on the Moon, and America won round 2.

I speak as a former Eastern Bloc kid.

> Change my mind

Eh, you're not entirely wrong, and not entirely right either. The whole affair is pretty complex. They definitely won the first 10 years.

I recommend these books:

https://www.amazon.com/Korolev-Masterminded-Soviet-Drive-America/dp/0471327212/

https://www.amazon.com/Von-Braun-Dreamer-Space-Engineer/dp/0307389375/

Check out this book. It's quite long, but has pretty interesting stuff.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 - by Tony Judt

The Gulag Archipelago

It's extremely long and I'm afraid I have no idea where that particular anecdote is in the book. That link is to just the first three parts. I'm not sure which translation I used because I actually listened to the audiobook version, which is well done (some British fellow with a crisp accent and a wry inflection). It is filled with marvelous stories.

If you want something shorter to start out with you could try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is about life in the Gulag.

>Actual gulags disappeared some time after Stalin's death.

Like I said, you're right in a sense. What endured until the end was more than an ordinary prison but less than the gulag at its peak. If you're really interested, I recommend this.

>do people got in gulags for exercising they right to live, to work or to have a healthcare or vacation?

I mean, for example, the freedom of speech, thought, assembly, etc. Things we today recognise as rights enshrined in law. They were enshrined in the USSR and while they existed, they were often severely limited. For example, you had the right to let words tumble out of your mouth but only up until they resembled anything that could be construed as critical of the state.

If you ever feel like finding out how wrong your statement just was I highly recommend this book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-William-L-Shirer/0099421763

There is an audiobook version too. It's about 57 hours long.

Even if you don't read this book, learn about National Socialism and its rise to power. Because you are doing yourself no favours by believing what you just said.

https://www.amazon.com/Human-Nature-new-Preface-Revised/dp/0674016386

https://www.amazon.com/Sociobiology-New-Synthesis-Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary/dp/0674002350

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/1501264338

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Society-Its-Enemies/dp/0691158134

Here's a start. All these were instrumental in dismantling communist ideology.

It's from a celebrity tweet. It's supposedly from this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Hollywood-Hitler-1933-1939-Film-Culture/dp/0231163932

The Soviets did posters that were full of infographics and text.

This website has a bunch done in the 1950s:

http://www.the-forum.com/posters/RUSSIA2.HTM

The cover of Alec Nove's An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. has a German-language version of a Five Year Plan poster:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Economic-History-USSR-Pelican/dp/0140228233

We don't do posters like this because they are visually cluttered, and lack a visual central focus.

Wow, this takes me back.

That said, for some reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just incredibly prone to stupidity, even more than most other troll-infested issues. When I was at university >20 years ago, there was an ongoing propaganda war between the "Israel Action Committee" and the "Muslim Student Union", who'd regularly gather at the entrance to campus to scream at each other while students tried to get past.

They had an ongoing flyer tit-for-tat, with really bad (this is pre-Photoshop) manipulated pictures. It was so awful that when I tried to take a course on the topic, with a really excellent Israeli professor who tried incredibly hard to present a moderate, totally even-handed view, the two groups would sit in the same seating areas in the lecture hall every session, glowering at each other. The moment one of them raise their hand, you knew that you had one of three options:

• kick back and enjoy the shitfest
  
• get out a paperback
  
• leave
  
  ...because at that point, the class was just lost.
  
  On that note, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Mark Tessler is a great read.

I was reading D-Day: Battle Normandy by Antony Beevor last night, where he claims that paratroopers were issued with condoms, but a Catholic padre preached something about going into battle carrying tools of sin and immorality, so many threw them away. Not sure how much truth there is to this passage but if true, I'm sure it wouldn't have helped!

that's just a ludicrous statement, and i usually go out of my way to denigrate both the Catholic Church and the CIA. it is true that some few groups in the early National Socialist movement emerged from Catholic organizations, which in a primarily Catholic country can be said about any group, but the Nazis in power were quite hostile to the church. maybe read up a bit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany#Persecution_of_German_Catholics

from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany

for further research: http://www.amazon.com/Catholicism-Roots-Nazism-Religious-Socialism/dp/0199843457

wtf:
http://www.amazon.com/Cigarette-Wars-Triumph-Little-Slaver/dp/0195140613

can anyone photoshopscale it up to shirtprint?

> Ahh, you sure love to repeat the same BS over and over again.

I repeat it because you refuse to address it and just reiterate your points which are lies about what Comicsgate is.

So let me answer you by reiterating things I've already said.

>So please tell me, Mr Not-At-All-A-Child,

>> I'm not going to take the bait and argue that I'm old; but I will say: what difference does it make?

> what is the lovely "Comics Gate" opinions?

>> They're saying that forced political plot lines in comics, suck.

> And only them can decide what is a "forced political point"?

>> Determining that is a matter of taste and opinion.

> And even by your Dawkins interpretation, it makes no sense.

>> I am using the both definitions but specifically referring to the second:

an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video)
or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through
social media

> So everything that was spread in comicsbooks at that time that was amusing or interesting is by your definition is a meme?

That's another strawman argument. I never said that. You seem awfully fond of this tactic. I can tell you that it doesn't work, unless you are speaking to people that already agree with you.

Meme's are themes that are replicated and transmitted throughout a culture. I'm not going to be your single source for this. If you are truly interested then I suggest you start with the Selfish Gene and then move on to Not by Genes Alone finally Memes in Digital Culture.

But I truly doubt that you are here for any serious discussion about anything other than to smear people that point out your fallacious statements.



> That would make the comicbooks a meme in and of itself.

No. Comic books are a medium for transmission of information that may or may not contain memes. "Comic books" in general is not a meme unto itself.

> Because in my opinion, and I am not strawmanning everything here, this whole Comic Gate BS is just the same people that did the Gamergate BS which is the same people that is in the Alt Right BS, it is people who dislike seeing women and minorities in comics so they whine about "forced politics". This have been going on for so long and they grew tired of harassing game devs that they decided to go harass comic book writers and artists instead.

You are entitled to your opinion but it doesn't reflect other people's opinion. That is, what actual leaders of comics gate actually think is divorced from what you say they think.

Conflicts of Interest.

Not focusing on WWII, but it goes from the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and two wars between Japan and its imperial neighbors China and Russia. There was an exhibit of the prints at the St. Louis Art Museum a couple years ago.

> opposing sides over Christmas.

That happened once, only in 1914, sporadically in 1915 and completely forgotten by 1916 with the Somme/Verdun & use of poison gas erasing any sense of civility.

>Can't let humanity get in the way of your war!

I've read a first account book, Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918, that describes a lot of "live & let live" moments on the Western Front. For instance, heavy raining causing the trenches to flood & both sides realize they need to get the hell out of there, but can't shoot at each other because they're in the same situation. So they just sort of stood out of their trenches, shrugged at each other & retreated.

However, the author describes what we know now as false propaganda. He describes the Germans consistently using "explosive bullets" & "reversed bullets" which we know now is entirely false: but shows how such rumors existed & were encouraged in order to spark a greater hatred. (While such things existed "explosive bullets" were early tracer rounds, mostly used to take out balloons & "reversed bullets" were early anti-tank rounds: precursors to the K-Bullet.)

The Barthas book is also interesting, because he's in his 30's when the War breaks out, and he's was a Socialist. A lot of his writing comes from a "I'm too old for this shit" & writes from a very socialist perspective of the war.

A truly powerful example of the kinds of influence the media can have on a war.

Especially when they only get to see one side of it. Nobody was taking any pictures of NVA massacres. If you want a real comprehensive view of the Vietnam war, try the recently released book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy by Sir Max Hastings. Hastings was an on-the-ground reporter in Vietnam, and he lived alongside the troops, participating in an era of combat journalism that had never existed. He didn't just document the war as thoroughly as he could, he spent fifty years afterwards researching, talking to veterans, talking to victims, talking to people from North Vietnam. The massacres and deprivations and brutal crimes of communist terrorism are reliably sourced in that book, but they only come from interviews with principal participants. No pictures. No newsreels. It took fifty years for the reality of the North Vietnamese regime to come to life, while the reality of the South Vietnamese regime was in living color as events unfolded.

That's why combat journalism in the modern age is heavily regulated and restricted. Journalists don't go where they want like they did in Vietnam, they go where they're allowed.

Lehi (also known as the "Stern Gang") occupied something of a hardcore fringe position in Zionism, and assassination of British government figures was sort of their thing. The point was essentially just terrorism; motivating the British to vacate the Mandate by way of killing their officials. Also revenge killings for executions of other terrorists.

Earlier this year I read Bruce Hoffman's book on the topic, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947, and would recommend it.

>It would have been if nukes weren't invented. WWIII would have occured. Notice how WWI and WII were so close together? Industrialied humanity has a fetish for massive wars.

and communism would have solved that problem how?

>You act as though capitlists just sat back and let communism thrive:

So all the failures of communism can be blamed on a few minor interventions in a civil war in the 1920s? Including the failures of communism in cuba, china, vietnam, cambodia, and eastern europe? ANd that none of the support given by the west to communism at different times mattered at all? And neither did communist attempts to undermine capitalism?

>Its leadership was Stalin, and in no way related to what Lenin/Trotsky had in mind.

How absurd. Lenin set up the checka, lenin set up the red terror, and lenin wrote enthusiastically of violent, bloody revolution his entire life, as did marx. The differences between him and stalin were, at best, a matter of degree, not kind.

Someone who reads about the conflict?

Normally I think Wiki is a good source, but in this case I think it's pretty heavily biased. The Republic didn't have a broad majority, it had just regained power after losing to the right, and it won by something like 2% of the popular vote. Moreover, it acted immediately with not only radical policies, but also against a background of increasing violence in all areas. Just as an example, imagine that the Secret Service, in response to an assasination by a terrorist movement loosely aligned with one of the more extreme parties of the opposition coalition, then, decides on its own to assassinate the leader of the political opposition. It wasn't as simple as 'economic crisis makes people vote for left-leaning government'. For starters, the depression didn't really hit Spain much. The roots of the war were much deeper.

The book I'm reading now on the subject is The Battle For Spain. In the opening pages is a summary of the fourteen different political groupings that made up the main players. It is exhausting to follow the twists and turns of domestic politics, but one thing that shines out is how bloodthirsty both sides were, and how eager to kill off their political opponents. The Spanish civil war was just that - a civil war where people had already decided to kill each other for their own reasons, not some simplistic political just-so story. The later imposition of the ideologies sweeping Europe (Communism and Fascism) are often mistaken as causes of the war, when in reality they were at best minor side characters. Another counter-narrative is that the left wing parties, had they lost the elections, were planning a revolt against the central government, which would also have touched off a civil war.

I believe targets in a conflict are often the best indication of motives but there are other factors. The nature of many provisional-IRA civilian attacks involved bombings, many of which targeted business in an attempt to cripple the economy of Northern Ireland. These bombings were often pre-warned so many of the actual attacks had few casualties and only destroyed infrastructure. Of course this was not a perfect war plan, mistakes were made that lead to the deaths of hundreds of civilians one of the most disgusting atrocities of the troubles was the omagh bomb 1998 killing 29 people. A confusion in the RIRAs warning lead to the police forces directing people towards the bomb instead of away from it. Another atrocity from the IRA was the Eniskillen bombing, 11 civilians killed at a WW1 remembrance service, IRA claimed that it was targeting the army there. A theme of attack on military personnel and Infrastructure would suggest a more militaristic campaign that the IRA had been fighting since the 1910's.

Loyalists on the other hand were not in the same type of war, they were not fighting an 'Invasive Force' and many of the casualties were from within their own organisation they killed twice as many Loyalist as republican paramilitaries due to internal disputes. The atrocities they are well known for are the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, un-warned at rush hour with 33 deaths. The Shankill butchers, a gang of murders who abducted, tortured and killed at least 23 civilians in the most horrific ways possible. And a rogue gun-man 'Michael Stone' who attacked a cemetary during a funeral of 3 IRA members who were killed (Unarmed) by the SAS in Gibraltar. Stone killed three funeral attendants with grenades.

Of corse the lines defining Military organisation, paramilitary and thug or gangster are heavily blurred and many people will disagree with the points I have raised. Generally the republican paramilitaries had a more cohesive front with military experience from earlier days. The loyalist attacks seemed more sporadic, and down to the actions of gangs like the butchers or gunmen like stone.

Make your own conclusions, read Wikipedia on all the topics I mentioned if you want to go further Brian Feeney, Alvin Jackson, Dairmaid Ferriter, AJP Taylor have spent decades of research on the Troubles a good book for a start is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Troubles-Northern-Conflict/dp/024196265X