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There’s nothing wrong with anti-fascist propaganda – ever
I can think of a few cases. Like when the prison wall enslaving East Germans was called the “anti-fascist defensive barrier” or when Putin claims he is defending Russia from fascism by invading Ukraine.
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Yeah, Paul Wolfowitz wasn’t it?
The quote I listed came from “Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying”
which was an insightful analysis based largely on secret recordings of
German POWs that surfaced decades after the war. The most depressing
aspect was how these men continued to warp perception to their
indoctrinated worldview. The following was another quote from the book
which, to me, had chilling relevance to our own time:
But it was very rare for the POWs to engage in political debates about
decisions or perspectives. Clear differences in position or opinion
seldom emerge. This is one of the central results of totalitarian rule.
It creates a mental lack of alternatives and makes people fully
dependent on the charismatic leader, to whom they stay true even when
their mutual downfall is inevitable…politics is replaced with faith. And
since faith in the Fuhrer was simultaneously a faith of Germans in
themselves, every threat to positive images of Hitler was also a threat
to the project in which people had invested so much energy and emotion.
The fear was that this project would turn out to be utterly worthless.
Subsequent readings, most notably “The German War” by Nicholas
Stargardt, confirm that – contrary to some popular notions – a
plurality of Germans were in thrall to these same views, both during and
even after the war.
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But that is not anti-fascist propaganda. Don’t let the authoritarians set the terms.
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EVER
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Exactly. Just because someone is framing their actions as part of the fight against fascism doesn’t mean they really are.
Allied propaganda in the fight against the Nazis was legitimately anti-fascist.
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Adding opinion commentary to it does.
Most of the speculation says Karl Rove, but no-one knows for sure. It could very likely be Wolfowitz or Perl or any one of Prince Bush’s minions (not Rumsfeld, though – his quote to that effect would have been a lot weirder and more convoluted).
“They Thought They Were Free” by Milton Mayer is another excellent book that reaches the same conclusion.
We’re talking here about propaganda against actual fascists (e.g. Nazis), not pretend ones.
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The German is, for the most part, faithfully translated. I’ve heard translation fuckery in Russian and English and laugh at their choices.
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Yeah, those Allies were attempting to portray Nazis in the worst possible light: make up your own mind, people!
Trivia:
Liszt’s Les préludes was the music often used by Nazi propaganda newreels.
If you recall seeing Tampopo (1985) recently, that’s why it might sound jarringly familiar.
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Yes but who won? Never very good at history
My father was born in 1934. He described watching these films when he was growing up in Connecticut, and his older brothers’ (2 were aircraft gunners stationed in the Pacific) disbelief that any such movie would be shown during the war. All of them have died, but I wonder what conversation they might have after seeing this?
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We can agree to disagree, then, that the video shown here can be counted as the “American version” of propaganda about this battle.
The video shows an assessment and dissection (like one would get in a film studies class) of the German propaganda.
To me, calling this propaganda is like when Fox News aired footage of a T rally with shots of full bleachers behind the then-President, calling it propaganda when other news stations showed that the rest of the arena was sparsely populated. 
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I guess I missed the part where other European countries asked Germany to protect them from something. Now that would be an interesting propaganda reel to see.
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“Protection” in the sense of, “That’s a real nice continent you got there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it”.
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