It says two films but the Japanese title for Daughter of the Samurai is 新しき土 which means New Earth, so the two films appear to be the same one? I can't read the article because it's paywalled
And wow, starring Setsuko Hara
edit: I found this interesting review that explains how the Japanese title's release was adjusted for domestic audiences, so it is another version of the same film:
> Harun Farocki's juxtaposition of the way American and Nazi propaganda films represent hands in Der Ausdruck der Hände brings out that obsession of Fascist propaganda with the sexualisation of machinery, that is, through the act of touching and caressing—something essentially passive and supervisory where the machine is almost worshipped for its power (yes, as a phallus). Crucially, what we must recognise here is the automated process in which the human is a mere appendage. Compare this to the portrait of skilled labourers in Allied propaganda, hands that truly work, hands that actually appear to belong to a human—that creature who designs and builds, repairs and heals. So, why is this relevant to the German-Japanese co-production, Die Tochter des Samurai? First, what you will be struck by is the overwhelming emphasis on machinery—automated machinery. It is a cosmopolitan story* with a central Japanese character, Teruo, who returns to his home after many years abroad being educated by Germans. But then there is also Setsuko Hara's character—ah! the eternal virgin! Now we have the clash between quaint old Japan—obviously dealt with in some of the most painfully 'non-exoticising' exoticised terms (yes, there is even a sequence in which Hara plays with deer in front of the Itsukushima Shrine; gag) where the camera acts like a brush dripping (and I mean fucking dripping) with the paint of romanticist slop—and the ideals of 'the modern world', symbolised by the lack of free will, militarism, and the subjugation of Manchukuo (for the greater good, of course). Contemporary Japanese viewers must have found it really quite hilarious when they weren't furious about being condescended to; it's as if the makers just wanted to cram as many identifiably Japanese things into the movie without any mind as to how horribly they were distorting them. Ultimately, the film gets even worse once it edges into blood and soil territory, but we've all already given up hope by this point so it's hardly much of a let-down. The fact of the matter is contemporary Japanese people thought it abysmal, and that was even after Mansaku Itami had managed to get the film changed from Fanck's version for domestic release. I believe this was the version I saw, and I can hardly imagine how terrible the 'properly Nazi' one was. Perhaps my half-star rating is somewhat of an overstatement, but considering how much I respect and adore Japanese filmmaking during this troubled yet incredibly creative decade, I can't help but despise this film.
> I say this without a single ounce of hyperbole: you will not find a Japanese propaganda film from the 40s which is even SLIGHTLY as vile as this.
> In truth, the story is certainly not a work of cosmopolitanism (how could it be?), but insofar as Japan does have virtuous qualities (in the eyes of Fascists), cosmopolitanism must be presented first as the kind of initial stage in the overcoming of those unwanted traditions (already very much nonsense in every way).
> Another note: it is important to remember that the notion of “progress” always played a significant role in the authoritarian ideologies as a “reduction of historical time to an automatic and unthinking mechanism”. Thus, this film focuses on automated machinery not only to load its idea of modernity with this image of the powerful machine working for the greater (read: Nazi) good but to also inextricably tie the automatic machine with history itself, i.e. to assert the absolute necessity of ‘progress’ and everything that it involves (the rape of China, the cultivation of land in Manchukuo, etc.)
> One more thing on this note: it is essential to recognise the dangerous conflation of power and authority in authoritarian ideologies. A clear example in this film is the scene in which Sessue Hayakawa’s character goes to the Kamakura Daibutsu to seemingly draw strength from it, described by one contemporary Japanese critic as treating great Buddhist statues “as if they wielded an absolute power.” There is nothing religious to this sequence; it is the perfect expression of the secular world and bourgeois man “whose life is completely determined by the category of usefulness, so that he desecrates everything he thinks about.” (Del Noce) Hayakawa’s character visits the statue in order to draw power from it, just as his son talks of Manchukuo as nothing more than land ready for cultivation, i.e. use. Traditions only have value when there is some specific use to them—a belief as closely at home in Nazi Germany as it is the liberal technocratic world order.
> Conflict between the two directors began almost at once. Itami was alarmed by the raw political intent of the film and by what he considered were the many misinterpretations of Japanese life. Fanck, however, refused all compromise, insisting that this first German-Japanese film collaboration had to have a clear, pro-Nazi message. It soon became obvious that the project would collapse if a compromise was not worked out.
> It was – but in the most surprising manner - each director would make his own version of the picture. Fanck shot all of his scenes in the daytime. Itami, using the same sets and locations, shot his at night. Difficult as this was for them, it was even harder on the cinematographer, Richard Angst, who had to shoot both films, and on the actors who had to work all day and all night, and on the studio, where costs for the film doubled.
Oh interesting. Never heard of another production like that
edit: looks like it was common practice in 20s/30s Hollywood to do this for different languages, such as with Dracula having a different simultaneous production in Spanish
Today: Trumps America and Putin's Russia. Trump has gone way beyond just standing up for his own countries interests. He is literally echoing Kremlin talking points every chance he gets, probably to the detriment of his own country.
Do you hear yourself? YOU are a propagandist on a mission of suicide via nuclear holocaust. Three years of fighting and Ukraine has made zero progress. It's high time to give up the delusions of victory before more people get killed. We CAN peacefully coexist with Russia, and they may help us reign in China.
So what do you propose? What is Ukraine's path to victory? Conscript the 18-24 range so that when Russia's economy collapses in 1-2 years time they'll have no male population left?
During WW2 a lot of US propaganda was based around things like showing full store shelves stocked with cheap goods. The best sort of propaganda is the truth, because ultimately there's no argument against it beyond attacking the person who said it 'Blah! That's just filthy imperial capitalist propaganda!'
But the briefest glance at history (or the past few years) will emphasize that the 'good guys' don't always tell the truth and the 'bad guys' don't always lie. Such is the nature of war that in reality the person most likely to be telling the truth is the person winning, and the person most likely to be lying is the one that's losing. It's in large part for this reason that wars often end only years after they've been really decided, which ultimately achieves little beyond hurting the losing side even more.
You may not have realized but China needs more room and resources, and Russia has them. Russia is a natural ally with us against China, if we let them be.
>Nuclear holocaust? lol
The left used to march to stop nuclear war, now they laugh about it maniacally on the Internet... You are truly unhinged.
Well first off, I do agree - Russia will never be an ally against China. That's like imagining Russia trying to ally with Canada against the US. But there is no "letting" anybody do anything. We pumped hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, provided them endless intelligence capabilities, state of the art comms, carried out the equivalent a nuclear strike in sanctions, endlessly escalated in the terms of arms being sent, and more. But it simply didn't work.
This was all horrifically miscalculated, very much in the same vein as Afghanistan was, and at this point Ukraine starting to literally run out of people. So there are some extreme options left, but they are basically just more or less declarations of WW3. That rapidly devolving into nuclear annihilation is not a 'threat' - it's simply a reality. We've wargamed such scenarios endlessly and always came to the same conclusion. This [1] is exactly why our relations with the USSR went from escalatory/hostile to de-escalatory. We discovered that we were building up to a war that had no win condition.
I see no reason the US, Russia, and China can't trend towards overall positive relations. Things like the Ukraine War are not really an argument, because it probably would never have happened in the first place if there were positive relations between the US and Russia. War is the inevitable outcome of bad relations.
The US made poor judgement in the invasion of Afghanistan and then leaving. Then with the invasion of Iraq and leaving. Now we make the same mistake with wartime support of Ukraine and abruptly cutting it off. US foreign policy is schizophrenic and we are wholly unreliable.
Now we are moving toward a multipolar world where regional powers with nuclear weapons can engage in conventional war. Perhaps moving back in time to great power struggles of the 19th and 20th century.
Nuclear non-proliferation is dead. As Pakistan’s leader so pragmatically said decades ago - “we will eat grass but we will have our bomb”. It is insane to not be armed at this point.
With Pax Americana now ended a more brutal world is going to emerge.
And MAGA supporters aren’t going to be some unshakable disciples. Once the economic reality sets in and there is enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt - they will tear themselves apart. Blame will be thrown and they will deny even knowing their messiah. The only way to stop an absolute electoral obliteration will be to suspend elections or completely suppress them.
Putin played his big Diplomacy game very well - but he might think Americans are a bit like Russians. They are not. Greed and prosperity hold this country together, not bonds of shared suffering. MAGA is doomed, the world is a more unsafe place, and we are all poorer for it.
The thing is people keep making this assumption that we could just win if we tried harder or stayed longer or whatever else. We occupied Afghanistan for more than two decades. And it's not like we were there just occasionally droning people. We were actively engaging the Taliban with local proxies on a very large scale - total deaths were in the hundreds of thousands. And we spent in excess of $2 trillion on that war! For some scale we spent $4-$5 trillion (inflation adjusted) in WW2. These are absolutely massive efforts.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was bungled, but the problem was being there in the first place. If Bin Laden was ever there, obviously a wide scale occupation is going to cause him to leave. So the entire idea was just nonsensical to begin with. If you're ever going to enjoin a war, you need a realistic plan. For these wars that plan did not exist, and we ended up trapped in inescapable quagmires. Getting out of Ukraine after just a few years is perhaps the smartest military decision we've made in decades.
And I disagree with you in regards to overall safety in the coming era, but from an economic point of view. As the world becomes more multipolar, the US's ability to export our inflation will fade, and along with it the endless printing of funny money. War is much more difficult to carry out when you have to really pay for it. Keep in mind that in spite of being on the winning side in WW2, that war practically bankrupted Great Britain and led directly to the end of the British Empire. Money being "real" completely changes the nature of war.
“Printing of funny money”? Are you referring to the Fed purchasing mortgaged backed securities after the financial crisis of 2008?
What do you mean when you refer to “real” money? A gold backed currency? Currency is an abstraction of value. “Real” money doesn’t make that much sense. Who is going to decide what is real?
Great Britain after WW2 is not analogous to the US now. The US has 300+ million people, a vast military, a huge land mass with enormous natural resources, the world reserve currency, and a leader who has followers who don’t understand the US rules based world order.
GB didn’t collapse all on its own. The US with its strength after WW2 coerced them and the French into following its lead. Eisenhower sided with the Soviets regarding the Suez for example. The Breton Woods agreement strengthened the US currency at the expense of everyone other signatory.
Reinventing the world into a multipolar mercantilist patchwork of competing powers is not going to be some brilliant strategic maneuver. It’s creating a power vacuum.
I really want to be wrong but this is more like the Asimov Foundation series. The empire didn’t forget how their technology worked, it forgot how their system worked. Otho is not going to save the US or make it great. He’s destroying the current system and replacing it with an older inferior one. Strength through contraction requires intelligence and sophistication. Not blundering oafish incompetence.
I wasn't exaggerating when I said we spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan alone. But that number should send off your bullshit detector. That's $15,000+ from every single household in the US. Even spread out over time that's an obscene amount of money. So where did the money come from? Well the US gets money/debt by selling treasuries. And the largest 'private' buyer of those treasuries is the Federal Reserve who has infinite money. The war was funded by money printed out of thin air, funny money. But of course there is a cost - inflation.
But the US has historically been in a unique place owing to a number of factors to export our inflation [1], particularly after our bait and switch with Bretton Woods. But many of those factors (largest consumer economy, global reserve currency, petrodollar) are on the way out or already, more or less, done with. And as those factors decline we get economically closer to Bahrain, Maldives, Laos, and Cape Verde - our distinguished economic peers in terms of debt:GDP ratios.
So long as we don't just replace the USD with the Yuan, this will be the case for all countries in a multipolar world. Money having value dramatically changes the cost:reward ratio of war. For instance I think this is the main reason China is implicitly accepting of a worsening situation in Taiwan. It's not because they don't think they could win, but because they don't want to pay for it. And so a deteriorating situation is seen as more desirable than a costly war.
You really want me to acknowledge that $2T so I will. The Republican Party started 2 wars and spent trillions of dollars. The democrats spent billions in dollars in military aid. Neither party achieved their objectives, both parties had their positions reversed after they were electorally defeated. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of these mistakes.
And now you think the US should default on the debt so money is worth money again? Is that not tautological?
And the argument is that war should be expensive? If the US can default on this old debt and create dollar 3.0 what would stop it from defaulting on this new “real” money in the future? New money, new wars, new debts, new defaults.
I don't expect the US will default on our debt. Rather I expect we will continue to print money endlessly. But what I am arguing is that the world becoming multipolar will mean that the result of that will be more in line with other countries who might try such things - which means you mostly just end up pumping up inflation.
What this means is that the US will need to gradually cut down on spending, and eventually work on also bringing down our debt, or at least our debt:gdp. As will other countries who have gone a bit too far down the funny money hole. Well that, or just enter into stagflation. And should this prediction hold true, then war is going to become much more difficult to wage in the future.
It’s easy to talk about stagflation and have this little academic discussion. However when this political motivated recession drops your party’s popularity drastically - which will happen - what will you do? How will you keep the ball moving? Do you think it be done before mid term elections? Or are elections irrelevant now?
This isn't about any given party or their actions. It's about a changing world order as well as the emergence of larger economies. In the future money printing will increasingly be met with little more than inflation. To some degree we're already seeing this. The COVID inflation is still nowhere near gone, let alone the dramatic increase it had on CPI.
So you think this greater good is going to happen in less than 2 years?
Inducing a recession to change the world order back to mercantilism isn’t going to be popular in practice. Drunks in a pub might think it sounds great over their back of the napkin math - but that’s just talk. When the rubber meets the road and the Republican party fails here, which it will, what happens? They either have a perfectly executed plan and everything is miraculously wonderful or they lose the midterms and that’s it. So either the plan is to suppress or prevent elections or just transfer wealth and lose while the world order gets overturned.
I don't really know what you're talking about here. Perhaps I did a poor job of explaining myself. To be clear, I think this has absolutely zero [directly] to do with any specific US party. Our special economic position in the world was simply the result of a perfect storm of a variety of different factors all working in unison. It was never sustainable so it wasn't a question of if it would end, but when. Of course it's not binary, but a gradual decline, and I think we've already entered well into that decline.
But this is a good thing for everybody, including the US. Because so long as the world doesn't just blindly replace the USD with the Yuan (which seems to have an approximately 0% chance of happening), then this new scenario will apply to every single country. I think a more level playing field, with some positive competition, will bring out the best in everybody.
What I’m saying is - permanently changing the world order and inducing a recession is not going to be politically popular in the US over 4 years. Republicans will lose the mid terms and the presidential election. Their plan will be blocked because it’s going to take a long time to unwind the current order. How will they protect their incomplete plan and maintain it over the long term? If they are not successful over the short term then over the long term it will unravel. So what’s the plan?
Elon will be uplifted into the next level of the simulation? Is that the plan?
None of this has anything to do with the current administration, nor is it any part of their plan.
For instance you previously mentioned the USD being world reserve currency, which indeed it is. But here [1] are those data. Q4 2024 hasn't been published yet but Q3 has it down to being 57.39% of global reserves. Very soon the USD will no longer be a majority reserve currency, down from a post Bretton Woods peak of 71% in 2000. People are gradually stepping away from the dollar, which reduces our ability to effect change on other countries' economies through monetary policy. And this without any clear replacement for it, yet.
And that's just one factor among many that's changing. These things were all happening long before the current administration, and will continue to happen regardless of who's in power or what they do. Getting back to business as usual would be more likely to accelerate these changes more than anything.
“We’re even looking at Treasuries,” the president told reporters. “There could be a problem … It could be that a lot of those things don’t count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we’re finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.”
The fact that Trump is now talking about "very fradulent" activity in the treasuries increases the probability I assign to the event that his administration will default on US debt. He will justify it by claiming that many/most of these debts are not real, and the government therefore does not need to repay them.
When Trump says something like that, take him seriously.
The legacy media is not a reliable source for his comments as they tend to take tidbits and intentionally take them out of context to mean something other than clearly intended, often to the point of absurdity. I couldn't find a transcript for that presser and would really like to know what the context was, and also what was said in those ellipses.
The timeline there corresponds 100% to probable fraud DOGE discovered at the Treasury and I'm fairly certain that's what's being referenced. They found something like $100 billion/year in entitlements being paid to accounts lacking a social security number or even temporary ID numbers.
EDIT: Ok yeah LLMs are actually good for some things. I found the 'transcript' (actually a video) here. [1] And yeah it's exactly what I thought. The media is lying as usual:
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Reporter: On spending you found some maybe questionable expenditures or Elon Musk?
Trump: Not some questionable, the whole country looks like it's a fraud. It's fraud waste abuse but it's a tremendous fraud. And what Elon and his group of geniuses have found is unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And that's just in USAID. Soon we're going into education. You'll find the same thing but bigger. Soon we're going into the military and you're going to find a lot of bad things happening there.
Trump: You'll find it because our government has not functioned properly for many many years and we're going to make it function properly. We're even looking at treasuries there could be a problem. You've been reading about that with treasuries. And that could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent. Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought of.
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The thing the media ellipsed out is specifically him mentioning "you've been reading about", completely removed that the comment was in reference to DOGE, as well as that it was in the context of a laundry list of fraud discoveries. The context makes it clear that he was referencing the already publicized fraud DOGE found at the Treasury, which he then mistakenly called treasuries rather than treasury payments.
Note the reporter could have asked for clarification because his comment wouldn't make any sense when taken at face value (there was nothing written about fraudulent treasuries that people had been reading about, nor had DOGE investigated such), and this would have been a HUGE revelation if true. But she didn't want clarification, because she obviously knew what he was talking about, but wanted to lie with some plausible deniability.
I’m actually American, former military, and a physician. As a “middle aged” person myself I can tell you’re not “very highly educated”. You’re an idiot. And you’ll die on idiot hill. Good luck.
We can't defeat Russia in a regional squabble, much less strategically (as the risk is too high if we let it escalate). The potential for more conflict in the future is not an excuse to never seek peace. If you think there is another conflict coming, we can prepare for that, but this crap can't go on. There won't be any Ukrainians left at this rate.
Do you mean the soldiers dying by the thousands, their girlfriends partying in nightclubs as it falls apart, the ones profiting from the war, or the ones who fled the country? Regardless of what anyone thinks of my concern for the Ukrainians, they aren't winning and continuing to fight will impoverish the US and lead to perhaps millions of additional deaths.
I care about Ukrainians but not enough to start WW3 over. If you're not suicidal, you'll think the same.
The reason the western allies wanted to make peace with Hitler was because they had a role in creating him and re-arming Germany in order to create an anti-communist bulwark state. They were surprised when this Frankenstein creation backfired on them and then told a big story about how they are the good guys.
If you think about Poland, they were probably psyched that this insane anti-communist regime was moving eastward.
Do you hear yourself? You are being hyperbolic, Putin made the same threat that is _always_ looming by any nuclear power, and now the leadership in the right-wing side of our party, who have had a clear connection to the Russians, are kowtowing to the Russians, destroying our government, and ruining the shred of reputation America had in the process.
The threat is always looming. Do you think fighting a war with another nuclear power makes that threat go away, be diminished, etc.? War between nuclear powers is supposedly inconceivable yet it's happening before our eyes.
>the leadership in the right-wing side of our party, who have had a clear connection to the Russians
The only clear connection is through the false allegations manufactured by the left. Why do they want this war so bad?
>destroying our government, and ruining the shred of reputation America had in the process.
The right is presently trying to fix all the damage done over decades by politicians from both parties. We were on an unsustainable path leading to ruin, and now maybe the country can be saved. It won't be painless but it must be done.
Fighting proxy wars against Russia is kind of our bread and butter, we've been doing it for decades and nearly always win.
Russia on the other hand has had far more success with injecting propaganda in Western institutions, recruiting assets, and getting people in the west to parrot their propaganda.
Hollywood makes a movie about every other year about the blacklist under McCarthyism as if this was all in their paranoid imaginations. The truth is that the Soviets DID get numerous people into both high ranking positions within the US government and other influential positions in American life, especially in entertainment and higher education, the effects of which linger to this day.
The major proxy wars against the USSR were Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Korea was a stale mate, Vietnam was a loss, and then there's Afghanistan. It was certainly a victory, but I think that was more about the Afghans than us - the same reason we'd also go on to lose to them. They are one ridiculously hard and hardy people with completely unbreakable spirits. And of course the exact people we trained there would go on to form Al Qaeda, and generally form the backbone of radical Islam, which adds some further asterisks to that 'victory.'
Similarly the Soviets have pretty much always sucked at propaganda. The idea of a worldwide worker revolution attracted no more than fringe contingents. But US 'propaganda' of freedom of speech, capitalism, and so on played a key role in the eventual decline of the USSR. I remember listening to an ostensibly stoic Russian chess grandmaster who lived through the fall of the USSR. Him slightly choking up while talking about how grown men were tearing up over Donald Duck media, which had become a symbol of the end of one era and the beginning of another, was extremely memorable. Similarly this [1] is media from the opening of the first McDonalds in the USSR. They served some 30,000 people on day 1 at exceptionally high (relative) costs, with McDonalds flags working as thinly veiled proxies for flags of capitalism.
