thatsbunkers
Banned
It did spread to some european countries. I guess it just got replaced by the internet after a while because of American cultural dominance. But with a big cultural gap between the US and France it will continue to develop
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
thatsbunkers
Banned
Well that really depends. Minitel was originally completely owned by the french government but collaborated with private companies until the EU got the French to privatize it. We could see a more nationalized or privatized internet depending on politics
I like the panel discussion on PBS. It seems like This Week in History would be a show I would like to watch.
American Cultural Shifts in WW2 - by Crunch Buttsteak
American Cultural Shifts in the Second World War
The Second World War had brought about an enormous sea change in American culture. Prior to the war, the dynamics of the average American family were already in flux due to the changes brought about by the revolution, but the strain of wartime had been the final breaking point for the ancien regime that had separated the oikos and polis.
To explain the Second Cultural Revolution, it’s necessary to look at the differing cultural factors that had led to it.
Shifting Populations
It is a common misconception within the capitalist sphere that the revolution forced American families out of the countryside and into the cities. The truth was that even before the revolution, America was becoming increasingly urbanized, with the country becoming majority-urban in the 1920’s [1]. The trends that had been ongoing beforehand had been pushed over a tipping point, and by 1960, more than two thirds of the UASR lived within an urban center.
As the War went on, more and more Americans had enlisted or had been called into national service. This had forced the agricultural collectives to invest heavily in mechanization in order to continue to feed the population with less people needed to work.
The demands of the war industries had also driven changes in urban centers. The manufacturing collectives had been running in shifts to keep the production lines moving and guns, tanks, and planes rolling off the assembly lines. At the same time, the number of people called up for national service had created an opportunity for women to contribute to the global struggle against fascism.
Women working on the assembly lines quickly became the norm. Communes set up socialized childcare to free up women from the full-time demands of child-rearing.
As the population became more urbanized during the war, people started having more free time and were surrounded with new experiences to take in. Movie attendance boomed, with people having more free time. Eastman’s rules about female inclusion in movies had created a greater interest in them from young girls who could more easily see themselves represented on screen.
Historiography in the UASR
A subtle shift that occurred in the first cultural revolution was that People’s Secretary for Education John Dewey ordered a review of all school history textbooks for reactionary messages. While observers in the AFS or in Cuba might be inclined to view this as censorship, the pre-revolutionary texts in many parts of the country prominently featured history narratives that ran counter to established facts.
The new history taught to students emphasized the revolutionary nature of the 19th century workers movements, played up the connection between the Union Army and Marx’s contemporaries, as well as emphasizing Lincoln’s communications with Karl Marx in the Slave Liberation War.
The Pill
Today, most capitalist historiography of the UASR acknowledges the role that the development of the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP) had in causing the Second Cultural Revolution, while historiography from ComIntern going back to contemporary sources acknowledges the role that the pill played.
The COCP, otherwise known as “The Pill” was the pet project of Margaret Sanger. First introduced in 1943 and funded by the Red Army, who had been seeking a way to prevent pregnancies within the field, the pill was a fundamental shift that allowed women to take control of their own bodies in a way that had been previously unavailable to them.
When the pill was made available to civilians in the UASR, it was nothing short of a runaway success. Women felt confident that they could contribute to the struggle against fascism and could delay starting a family.
For those who did start families, the adoption of communal childcare within communes had greatly eased the burden on them and allowed them to contribute to the war effort.
Hollywood Goes to War
In 1940, as the UASR prepared to go to war to defend her allies from fascist predation, The People’s Secretariat for Culture (PubSecCul) enlisted some of Hollywood’s top directors and collectives in order to tell the American public why the UASR was fighting this war and to keep up morale on the home front.
Enlisted within PubSecCul’s top army of directors included Walt Disney, Frank Capra, who had managed to get a camera and film crew to the front lines at Stalingrad, Howard Hawks, who’s biopic about Lyudmila Pavlichenko had inspired thousands of women to enlist in the Red Army, Edward Dmytryk, Michael Curtiz, and Emelio Fernández.
These filmmakers were often on the front lines of the war with their cameras to document the struggle against fascism.
The Western: A Case Study of the Cultural Revolution
Nowhere is the shift in American culture and historiography more apparent than in the western. Westerns made before the revolution would feature lily-white casts and frequently would demonize Native Americans, often portraying them as bloodthirsty savages. Westerns of the time went out of their way to inaccurately portray the west to suit a reactionary agenda.
Post-revolution westerns by contrast made sincere efforts to portray a more nuanced and accurate view of the west, with the Vaquero replacing the iconic cowboy, and the portrayals of Native Americans being shown with much more nuance. The villians in the post-revolution westerns weren’t the savage indians anymore but the more mundane villains like land speculators, rent-seekers or monopolists.
A frequent villain of the post-revolution western became the native imposter, a white enforcer of bourgeois land claims who would frequently dress as an Indian and attacks settlers as a reverse-Robin Hood who steals from the poor and gives to the rich or someone who is trying to incite a war between the natives and the settlers.
The Collectives of Hollywood
After the Revolution and the upheaval of the First Cultural Revolution, Hollywood’s studio systems were had been collectivized and taken over by the writers, actors, and directors. As a final insult to the studio bosses who had controlled every aspect of film production, the studio founders had their names stripped from their former studio lots, leading to many of the collectives simply adopting the name of the street that they were located on.
The New Collectives of Hollywood:
Beginning in 1939, the Termite Terrace Animated Picture Collective began releasing a series of animated films written by Samantha Waver about a new post-revolutionary superheroine, “Commander Columbia.” Commander Columbia was a runaway success in the UASR, spawning comic books, live action serials, and numerous animated short-subject films.
Following the revolution, cotton had been in short supply due to the vengeful sabotage of cotton fields by the bourgeois landowners, who had chosen to destroy their crops rather than allow the Red army to benefit from them. As a result, cotton, hemp, and other natural fibers for clothing had been in short supply after the revolution. The UASR had only just begun to begin producing cotton again when the demands of the war effort had led to further shortages of fibers.
The fashions followed the necessity, and clothing began to be designed to minimize fabric whenever possible. Hem lines moved up to above the knee, shirts and blouses favored shorter sleeves, dresses became sleeveless, suits became single-breasted and the waistcoat was removed. New fabrics like Spandex had been invented as a byproduct of the war effort, and when combined with the then-recent material Rayon, had led to radical new possibilities for UASR fashion collectives.
Undergarments became simplified to minimize the use of fabric. UASR fashion collectives separated women’s undergarments into two separate pieces, with one garment covering the lower regions and the other supporting the chest. For men, the jockey strap and the boxer shorts became commonplace. The Red Army developed the simplified “Combat Bra”[2] for their female soldiers that soon became popular within the civilians.
Spandex - The Fiber That Changed Fashion
When it was first synthesized at the Waynesboro Chemical Laboratory in 1944, nobody in the world could have predicted the sea change that Spandex would bring to American fashion. Created as a replacement for ballistic nylon, it’s elastic properties were quickly discovered, and the new material was considered as an alternative to the scarce rubber that had been difficult to procure since the revolution. However, it wasn’t until the United Textile Collective successfully managed to blend spandex with cotton that it’s true value became known.
With a blend of 95% cotton and 5% spandex, fabric became much harder to tear, and garmets would last far longer , and the spandex blends allowed for tighter, more comfortable fits for undergarments. Spandex’s distinctive sheen became an image of postwar UASR fashion.
Postwar fashion began to integrate the new material whenever they could. Skintight leggings in a variety of colors and patterns became a common fashion trend for women in the ComIntern.
The Body Liberation Movement
The shortages of fabric and clothing following the revolution and during the war created the body liberation movement out of material necessity. In order to preserve clothing for longer, people began to go without when at home.
Swimming costumes became rare and beaches often became nude beaches out of necessity. Free from the days of censorship under the Breen Code, Hollywood began showing women in the nude at home as an attempt to titillate audiences, but had the unintentional side effect of normalizing it.
The commonly accepted starting point for the Body Liberation Movement was the 1937 trial of Elizabeth Bradley in San Bernardino.
On June 16th, 1937, Ms. Bradley had stepped out of her house while topless to buy a bottle of milk for her daughter. She had been in a hurry that day because her daughter was at home sick and she was tending to her. Ms. Bradley’s daughter had thrown up on her last clean blouse and she was in the process of cleaning it when she ran out of milk for her daughter.
Elizabeth left the house and walked towards the local food commissary to get some more milk. She entered the commissary, picked up her bottle of milk, and left without incident. Because it was a hot day, she walked past a young man who had been walking around shirtless as well on her way back. As she walked past a neighbors house, she was accosted by Militia member Joseph Friday, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department, who cited her for public indecency.
Ms. Bradley challenged her citation before the Revolutionary Tribunals. The initial trial thoroughly established the facts of the case. But the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, who used it as an opportunity to establish a sweeping precedent that indecent exposure was against the Basic Law of the UASR.
The Central Executive Council followed this decision with an act clarifying the legality of public exposure, except in cases where it would constitute a safety hazard.
The public bath-houses on the east coast, having become a social gathering spot, soon exploded across the country, with cities in every Republic soon building them.
–––
1: OTL Statistic from the US Census Bureau
2: Think something like a modern day sports bra.
“For all the oppressed people of the world, this award is for you.” – John Howard Lawson, Writer/Director for Cry, The Beloved Country (1951), General Secretary of the WFPL, 1952-1960.
“One needs only to look at the films and television shows in the postwar era to see the diverging ideals between the ComIntern and the FBU. In the cinema and on television, everyone in Britain or France lived in a country house with a working father, a stay-at-home mother who looked after the kids, while every American lived in a tower block apartment with both parents working and a bevy of characters who proved the adage of it taking a village to raise a child” – Sir David Lean, CBE.
“One needs only to look at the films and television shows in the postwar era to see the diverging ideals between the ComIntern and the FBU. In the cinema and on television, everyone in Britain or France lived in a country house with a working father, a stay-at-home mother who looked after the kids, while every American lived in a tower block apartment with both parents working and a bevy of characters who proved the adage of it taking a village to raise a child” – Sir David Lean, CBE.
The Second World War had brought about an enormous sea change in American culture. Prior to the war, the dynamics of the average American family were already in flux due to the changes brought about by the revolution, but the strain of wartime had been the final breaking point for the ancien regime that had separated the oikos and polis.
To explain the Second Cultural Revolution, it’s necessary to look at the differing cultural factors that had led to it.
Shifting Populations
“The American Republic had been created as a government for an agrarian society, and the government at the time had reflected that. When the society shifted from agrarian to industrial, the government of America shifted with it.” - Nepolnoye Sredneye Obrazavaniye level history textbook from the USSR.
It is a common misconception within the capitalist sphere that the revolution forced American families out of the countryside and into the cities. The truth was that even before the revolution, America was becoming increasingly urbanized, with the country becoming majority-urban in the 1920’s [1]. The trends that had been ongoing beforehand had been pushed over a tipping point, and by 1960, more than two thirds of the UASR lived within an urban center.
As the War went on, more and more Americans had enlisted or had been called into national service. This had forced the agricultural collectives to invest heavily in mechanization in order to continue to feed the population with less people needed to work.
The demands of the war industries had also driven changes in urban centers. The manufacturing collectives had been running in shifts to keep the production lines moving and guns, tanks, and planes rolling off the assembly lines. At the same time, the number of people called up for national service had created an opportunity for women to contribute to the global struggle against fascism.
Women working on the assembly lines quickly became the norm. Communes set up socialized childcare to free up women from the full-time demands of child-rearing.
As the population became more urbanized during the war, people started having more free time and were surrounded with new experiences to take in. Movie attendance boomed, with people having more free time. Eastman’s rules about female inclusion in movies had created a greater interest in them from young girls who could more easily see themselves represented on screen.
Historiography in the UASR
“The Revolution fundamentally transformed not just present and future of America, but even reshaped its past.” - James Lowen, How Our History Shapes Us, and How We Shape Our History (1998)
A subtle shift that occurred in the first cultural revolution was that People’s Secretary for Education John Dewey ordered a review of all school history textbooks for reactionary messages. While observers in the AFS or in Cuba might be inclined to view this as censorship, the pre-revolutionary texts in many parts of the country prominently featured history narratives that ran counter to established facts.
The new history taught to students emphasized the revolutionary nature of the 19th century workers movements, played up the connection between the Union Army and Marx’s contemporaries, as well as emphasizing Lincoln’s communications with Karl Marx in the Slave Liberation War.
The Pill
“The church has ever opposed the progress of woman on the ground that her freedom would lead to immorality. We ask the church to have more confidence in women. We ask the opponents of this movement to reverse the methods of the church, which aims to keep women moral by keeping them in fear and in ignorance, and to inculcate into them a higher and truer morality based upon knowledge. And ours is the morality of knowledge. If we cannot trust woman with the knowledge of her own body, then I claim that two thousand years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure.” - Margaret Sanger.
Today, most capitalist historiography of the UASR acknowledges the role that the development of the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP) had in causing the Second Cultural Revolution, while historiography from ComIntern going back to contemporary sources acknowledges the role that the pill played.
The COCP, otherwise known as “The Pill” was the pet project of Margaret Sanger. First introduced in 1943 and funded by the Red Army, who had been seeking a way to prevent pregnancies within the field, the pill was a fundamental shift that allowed women to take control of their own bodies in a way that had been previously unavailable to them.
When the pill was made available to civilians in the UASR, it was nothing short of a runaway success. Women felt confident that they could contribute to the struggle against fascism and could delay starting a family.
For those who did start families, the adoption of communal childcare within communes had greatly eased the burden on them and allowed them to contribute to the war effort.
Hollywood Goes to War
“Fighting side by side, the American and the Russian soldiers are working together to liberate the people of the world against the tyranny of fascism.” — Closing Narration from Why We Fight: The Battle of Stalingrad (1943), Directed by Frank Capra.
In 1940, as the UASR prepared to go to war to defend her allies from fascist predation, The People’s Secretariat for Culture (PubSecCul) enlisted some of Hollywood’s top directors and collectives in order to tell the American public why the UASR was fighting this war and to keep up morale on the home front.
Enlisted within PubSecCul’s top army of directors included Walt Disney, Frank Capra, who had managed to get a camera and film crew to the front lines at Stalingrad, Howard Hawks, who’s biopic about Lyudmila Pavlichenko had inspired thousands of women to enlist in the Red Army, Edward Dmytryk, Michael Curtiz, and Emelio Fernández.
These filmmakers were often on the front lines of the war with their cameras to document the struggle against fascism.
The Western: A Case Study of the Cultural Revolution
Nowhere is the shift in American culture and historiography more apparent than in the western. Westerns made before the revolution would feature lily-white casts and frequently would demonize Native Americans, often portraying them as bloodthirsty savages. Westerns of the time went out of their way to inaccurately portray the west to suit a reactionary agenda.
Post-revolution westerns by contrast made sincere efforts to portray a more nuanced and accurate view of the west, with the Vaquero replacing the iconic cowboy, and the portrayals of Native Americans being shown with much more nuance. The villians in the post-revolution westerns weren’t the savage indians anymore but the more mundane villains like land speculators, rent-seekers or monopolists.
A frequent villain of the post-revolution western became the native imposter, a white enforcer of bourgeois land claims who would frequently dress as an Indian and attacks settlers as a reverse-Robin Hood who steals from the poor and gives to the rich or someone who is trying to incite a war between the natives and the settlers.
The Collectives of Hollywood
After the Revolution and the upheaval of the First Cultural Revolution, Hollywood’s studio systems were had been collectivized and taken over by the writers, actors, and directors. As a final insult to the studio bosses who had controlled every aspect of film production, the studio founders had their names stripped from their former studio lots, leading to many of the collectives simply adopting the name of the street that they were located on.
The New Collectives of Hollywood:
- Workers Film and Photo League: Former prior to the Revolution, this group of filmmakers and writers produced documentaries and newsreels for distribution to theaters to educate and inform the public.
- Olive Avenue Motion Picture Collective: Located on the former Warner Brothers lot, this collective had focused on crime and gangster films before the Revolution, and after the revolution began producing propaganda films.
- Termite Terrace Animated Pictures Collective: Located on the same lot as the Olive Avenue Collective, this animated collective produces animated comedies, ranging from the slapstick socialist Bugs Bunny to the Commander Columbia short films.
- United Artists Collective: One of the oldest of the collectives, this collective was originally founded as an independent production company by the then-biggest stars in Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. Unlike the other collectives, they have only a single small lot in West Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Formosa, and instead will share space with other collectives when needed.
- Radford Avenue Collective: This collective, formed out of the former Mack Sennett studios mainly produced live-action comedy shorts before the revolution, afterwards they transitioned into producing serials that would be played in theaters for younger audiences on saturday mornings.
- The Gower Street Collective: Created by the workers of a bunch of the different “poverty row” studios, this collective tended to focus on lower budget films, but had some success with Frank Capra’s “The Greatest Gift”
- Lankershim Motion Picture Collective: Formerly Universal, they mainly produced horror and monster films. Notably they were one of the first movie collectives to start offering the public guided tours so that visitors could see the sets, props and costumes used in making their films, something that the other studios would also follow.
- Pico Boulevard Motion Picture Collective: Formerly known as Fox Films, this collective became known for their racy subject matter and willingness to push the cultural and social boundaries in their films.
- Melrose Avenue Collective: Formerly Paramount Pictures, this collective was known for their personality-based promotion of films, emphasizing their members as stars. After the revolution, they became known for their historical epics such as Spartacus (1952).
- Culver City Collective: Formerly MGM and RKO, they focused on large and expansive musicals. Most notably a continuous early adopter of new filmmaking technology, they expanded after the war into producing spy movies about glamorous CSS agents.
- Hearst (1940) - Directed by: Orson Welles - A biographical movie about newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst prior to the revolution, about his rise to fame, his hubris, and his downfall.
- Fantasia (1940) - Produced by: Walt Disney - Animated anthology of segments set to classical music
- Dragon’s Seed (1940) - Produced by: Oscar Michauex - Adaptation of Pearl Buck’s novel tale of Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion. Starring Anna May Wong, Keye Luke, and Sessue Hayakawa in the lead roles.
- A Wild Hare (1940) - Directed by Tex Avery - A short-subject cartoon by the Termite Terrace Animated Picture Collective, centering on a hunter and his battles with an abnormally clever rabbit.
- Deadly Encounter (1942) - The story of a CSS infiltrator within the German American Bund during the 1930’s.
- Hangmen Also Die! (1943) - Directed by Fritz Lang - A drama set in occupied Czechoslovakia about the assassination of the brutal “Hangman of Europe,” Reinhard Heydrich.
- The North Star (1943) - Directed by Lewis Milestone - A Soviet-American war film centering on a village of Ukrainian partisans resisting Operation Teutonic. Starring Anne Baxter as an American journalist, and Ukrainian actors Dmitri Milyutenko and Viktor Dobrovolsky as partisans.
- The Gila River War (1943) - Directed by: John Ford. Considered by many film critics to be one of the ur-examples of the post-revolutionary western, the film follows the Quechan Indians in 1850 as they fought back against the predatations of the white scalp-hunters, led by John J. Glanton. The film was notable for using the American west as an allegory for resisting an occupying force.
- Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943)- directed by Jack Kinney- Donald Duck is another overworked worker in Nazi Germany, continually beaten down by the war machinery that envelops his life.
- The Battle of Stalingrad (1944) - Directed by Frank Capra- A documentary exploring the Battle of Stalingrad in real time.
- The Greatest Gift (1946) - Directed by Frank Capra - The story of one man learning his worth and value to world
- The Best Years of Our Lives (1947) - Directed by William Wyler - Four WW2 veterans find life post-war difficult
- Heart of Darkness (1949) - Directed by Orson Welles - Adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s story about the horrors of colonialism as the narrator, Charles Marlow, travelled through the Congo Free State during the late 19th century.
Beginning in 1939, the Termite Terrace Animated Picture Collective began releasing a series of animated films written by Samantha Waver about a new post-revolutionary superheroine, “Commander Columbia.” Commander Columbia was a runaway success in the UASR, spawning comic books, live action serials, and numerous animated short-subject films.
- Commander Columbia (1939): Amanda Aaron is a young girl left orphaned by the White Army during the revolution, she leaves her home to join the Red army, but on her way, she meets up with Vladimir Volkov, Xian Jia, and Hector Morales. It’s revealed that the four of them were chosen as the avatars of the world socialist revolution, as each of them best embodies their country’s revolutionary spirit. Unique for a superhero story at the time, Amanda was only thirteen years old but became fifteen years old as Commander Columbia. In the film, she struggles to learn her new abilities and ends up face to face with “Heinrich,” an amoral capitalist who will sell to anybody no matter what they use his products for, and has created a process to pull the life force out of his workers to keep himself young and strong forever. The ending of the film showed Heinrich, a weakened shell of who he once was leaving for Germany and reporting to the series’s main villain “Seigfreid,” who tosses him aside now that he’s outlived his usefulness.
- Mission to China (1939): Released as a double billing with Commander Columbia and worked on at the same time, this film is significantly longer than its chronological predecessor but introduces the four "principle wartime villains" of Siegfried, Romulus, Explorador, and the goddess of darkness Idaina Kage; as well as her soon to be life long friends Valiente and Hua to expand the roster of heroes from Columbia and her boyfriend Molotok.
- Zeras the Hammer (1940): Features some cameos from Columbia but also introduces what is often called "Team 2", Zeras (local John Henry expy), Zaibas (electric Lithuanian-Russian in her first outing), Draguv (somewhat hulk like embodiment of industry from the USSR), and Heart Guard (Native American girl with psychic powers). The last pre-war film made, introduces the British villain the White Duke; but this film ends up falling into obscurity in 1942 when the UASR forbids screenings of it for the remainder of the war due to being allies with the FBU. Used to get double billing with Blood and Iron.
- Blood and Iron (1940): A full length film, featuring a peril in the Amazon and the introduction of the Mekmenschen. Considered sort of a "love letter" to Latin America, the film is generally considered more basic in plot and premise than the first one.
- Death on the Volga (1941): Back to Amanda and company, when in production it was already assumed that there would be a war in the Soviet Union, so in editing all they actually did was change any French flags to Italian ones and call it a day. This film introduces the villain Koschei and his sinister plot to render all of Russia a dead land for his undead warriors to rule hand in hand with Hitler to avenge his defeat by Prince Ivan long ago. Ends up being awkward in the SecCulRev era due to its uncritical depiction of Stalin's USSR and the man himself who's portrayed rather glowingly as basically "Lafayette for the new age."
- Peril in Chonqing (1942): Commander Columbia returns to China. This one brings together Zeras and Columbia; who are met with the perils of what is later often considered a deeply unfair depiction of Japanese religious practises in the form of Idaina Kage and her father Amatsu Mikabosh as they seek to cover the world in an endless night save for Japan itself. Also notable for having what is often interpreted as pretty flirty dialogue between Columbia and Hua.
- A Light In The Night (1943): This one is set in America itself, the first for the feature length movies. Here it's a spy-buster piece. Largely considered unremarkable save for having some...strange moments that become memes much later in the timeline. A lot born of Draguv's...strange expressions. Also low key throws shade on the TDP with a highly John Nance Garner coded would be quisling on the phone with Ford later felt unwarranted.
- Red Star, Black Sun (1944): Generally considered the strangest of the war time films due to its decision to double down on the mystic stuff. What is ostensibly a journey of self discovery for Amanda also is kind of low-key a diatribe on gnosticism mixed in among the importance of rejecting fascism and defending the collective freedom of the gentle labourer from the exploiter. The actual story about a more personal confrontation between Amanda and Siegfried is also rather dark, especially his later famous rant inspired by things Erich Koch has actually said on why eastern Europe deserves to be conquered followed by what is outright stated to be him having a whole town burnt to death on Himmler's orders.
- Battle for the Ages (1945): Features a time travel storyline that manages to be less weird than the prior film. Often also considered to be a dialogue on the merits of socialism and the achievements of the working class throughout history from Lenin and Reed to the brothers Gracchi and Spartacus. Creates the meme image of Amanda riding on a T.rex clad in all American armour to charge at Fafnir the Dragon deemed so ridiculously over the top it lives on forever in memedom.
- A Long Way to Go (1946): The last wartime animated feature film, this one's a more personalised one about the cost of war and who's ultimately to blame for it all. The axis villains are portrayed as both deeply evil and maladjusted people and also kind of pathetic fanatics fighting for an already lost cause. Features a version of the "I'm escaping to the one place not yet corrupted by communism, SPACE!" line from the main villain; Lady Death Blossom; a high ranking Japanese official.
- A Spark In the Heart (1947): The first post-war film, A spark in the heart sees the return of Koschei. The Deathless has a new scheme, one built around trying to marry the science of axis researchers including Doktor Vandal to his magic. Some editing was done to account for the end of the war, reframing it as one last struggle by the remains of the fascists to seize the world. The film is notable for also featuring an appearance by Captain America and Doctor Fate.
- A Dance in Starlight (1948): The last of the films to be considered part of the "wartime" lineup (being made during the latter part of the second world war), A Dance in Starlight was edited somewhat to cut down the references to the Axis powers and features an expedition to the moon of Ganymede to stop a pact from being made and to help the people of the largest moon liberate themselves from the tyranny of Kozorna the Grim. Notable for being the first fully space based Rubyverse film.
Following the revolution, cotton had been in short supply due to the vengeful sabotage of cotton fields by the bourgeois landowners, who had chosen to destroy their crops rather than allow the Red army to benefit from them. As a result, cotton, hemp, and other natural fibers for clothing had been in short supply after the revolution. The UASR had only just begun to begin producing cotton again when the demands of the war effort had led to further shortages of fibers.
The fashions followed the necessity, and clothing began to be designed to minimize fabric whenever possible. Hem lines moved up to above the knee, shirts and blouses favored shorter sleeves, dresses became sleeveless, suits became single-breasted and the waistcoat was removed. New fabrics like Spandex had been invented as a byproduct of the war effort, and when combined with the then-recent material Rayon, had led to radical new possibilities for UASR fashion collectives.
Undergarments became simplified to minimize the use of fabric. UASR fashion collectives separated women’s undergarments into two separate pieces, with one garment covering the lower regions and the other supporting the chest. For men, the jockey strap and the boxer shorts became commonplace. The Red Army developed the simplified “Combat Bra”[2] for their female soldiers that soon became popular within the civilians.
Spandex - The Fiber That Changed Fashion
When it was first synthesized at the Waynesboro Chemical Laboratory in 1944, nobody in the world could have predicted the sea change that Spandex would bring to American fashion. Created as a replacement for ballistic nylon, it’s elastic properties were quickly discovered, and the new material was considered as an alternative to the scarce rubber that had been difficult to procure since the revolution. However, it wasn’t until the United Textile Collective successfully managed to blend spandex with cotton that it’s true value became known.
With a blend of 95% cotton and 5% spandex, fabric became much harder to tear, and garmets would last far longer , and the spandex blends allowed for tighter, more comfortable fits for undergarments. Spandex’s distinctive sheen became an image of postwar UASR fashion.
Postwar fashion began to integrate the new material whenever they could. Skintight leggings in a variety of colors and patterns became a common fashion trend for women in the ComIntern.
The Body Liberation Movement
The shortages of fabric and clothing following the revolution and during the war created the body liberation movement out of material necessity. In order to preserve clothing for longer, people began to go without when at home.
Swimming costumes became rare and beaches often became nude beaches out of necessity. Free from the days of censorship under the Breen Code, Hollywood began showing women in the nude at home as an attempt to titillate audiences, but had the unintentional side effect of normalizing it.
The commonly accepted starting point for the Body Liberation Movement was the 1937 trial of Elizabeth Bradley in San Bernardino.
On June 16th, 1937, Ms. Bradley had stepped out of her house while topless to buy a bottle of milk for her daughter. She had been in a hurry that day because her daughter was at home sick and she was tending to her. Ms. Bradley’s daughter had thrown up on her last clean blouse and she was in the process of cleaning it when she ran out of milk for her daughter.
Elizabeth left the house and walked towards the local food commissary to get some more milk. She entered the commissary, picked up her bottle of milk, and left without incident. Because it was a hot day, she walked past a young man who had been walking around shirtless as well on her way back. As she walked past a neighbors house, she was accosted by Militia member Joseph Friday, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department, who cited her for public indecency.
Ms. Bradley challenged her citation before the Revolutionary Tribunals. The initial trial thoroughly established the facts of the case. But the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, who used it as an opportunity to establish a sweeping precedent that indecent exposure was against the Basic Law of the UASR.
The Central Executive Council followed this decision with an act clarifying the legality of public exposure, except in cases where it would constitute a safety hazard.
The public bath-houses on the east coast, having become a social gathering spot, soon exploded across the country, with cities in every Republic soon building them.
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1: OTL Statistic from the US Census Bureau
2: Think something like a modern day sports bra.
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I'm surprised Kubrick or Welles weren't shooting something with the Cominterm Armies.
And how many takes were required to get that line without the actor laughing on screen?
EDIT: Fixed embed.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
It is surprising how OTL, the Second World War arguably didn't lead to any real permanent changes in the social landscape (women remained in domesticity, black Americans continued to languish under second class citizenship). ITTL, those changes were accelerated by a generation or so because of the Second World War.
I wonder how they'll view the American Revolution: will they focus on the people at the bottom, like Ethan Allen? Will they portray the Founding Fathers as slaveowning bourgeois who were a step in the road of Marxist Revolution.
Will they puff up figures like William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe?
Slight caveat. Lincoln, OTL, was a corporate lawyer (and a damned good one at that). How does the Marxist view of history tie into his connections with private business?
Will the UASR devote entire scientific divisions toward the enjoyment of sex.
I wonder if any of them were captured, and put to work making propaganda films for the Nazis. That would be one hell of a POW story.
I'm guessing that is a subtle dig at whitewashing and Hollywood stereotypes.
Does Heart of Darkness mark the unofficial beginning of the post-war era?
So people in the ITTL 1950s dress up like they are in an OTL 1980s exercise film. It would be hilarious to see office workers dressed up like that!
This story has a Rose Parks-esque vibe to it. Someone triggers social change by simply doing something incredibly human.
Parks was a woman trying to sit down. This Bradley woman triggered social change, not on purpose, but because she was trying to do something simple: get a bottle of milk for her little girl. She deserves a more in-depth look at her history.
On the theme of spandex, I will quote Kurtz " The Horror! The Horror!" 
As an amusing side note my last name is Kurtz and I often tell gullible people that the Apocalypse Now Kurtz was my great uncle. And for all the good that came out of what Rosa Parks did, it was a planned action of resistance. Im sure she was tired but it wasnt a spontaneous decision to not give up her seat.
As an amusing side note my last name is Kurtz and I often tell gullible people that the Apocalypse Now Kurtz was my great uncle. And for all the good that came out of what Rosa Parks did, it was a planned action of resistance. Im sure she was tired but it wasnt a spontaneous decision to not give up her seat.Bookmark1995
Banned
On the theme of spandex, I will quote Kurtz " The Horror! The Horror!"
I'm well aware of that fact that Parks was an activist who did that on purpose.
But my point is that such heroism can be attributed to a basic human instinct is a sign of how freedom is so precious. In America, it was an act of defiance that black people be allowed to keep their seats.
In Red America ITTL, someone decided that clothing shouldn't get in the way of getting the things you need for your daughter.
@RandomWriterGuy @ANARCHY_4_ALL @fernerdave @randomperson
Would you care for invites to the Reds! discord?
Would you care for invites to the Reds! discord?
Yeah I went to it when you sent one to someone else but didn't have the time to download the app.
This seems like it cuts out halfway through the description.
Also, please tell me that Bugs is still a trickster deity archetype. As a lifelong fan of mythology and how it shapes culture I've always been tickled pink at how Bugs Bunny is the perfect personification of the most interesting kind of god, the Trickster. Losing the ability to introduce trickster gods as "Bugs Bunny except X" would be a crying shame.