Oh, Lord, where should I begin?
We’re entering into a new era of propaganda in 2020, and I blame 4chan.
A border conflict began between India and China in May of this year. I use the passive voice here because while I assume China was the aggressor, I don’t actually know – and I doubt anyone does. And while Indo-Chinese conflicts have happened before, I don’t think they’ve featured animated videos of the Indian PM doing battle with Chinese apps before.
Or lampooning the Chinese President, Xi Jinping.
Now, these Indian animations aren’t necessarily new – the first one I was aware of featured PM Modi and President Trump, from 2017 – but they’ve turned into explicitly anti-Chinese propaganda this year. One even featured President Jinping turning into Winnie the Pooh (for those who aren’t familiar, Jinping has been likened to Pooh, and is not fond of the comparison; reportedly some people have been jailed for lampooning him this way).
Now, propaganda produced by one side of a conflict to mock the other side is hardly new – one jaunty tune British soldiers were fond of singing during WW2 was a neat little song entitled “Hitler’s Only Got One Ball” (c 1939, referencing the apocryphal claim that Hitler’s military medical records list him as missing a testicle). As might be expected, the song quickly became popular amongst all Allied troops.
Domestically, the campaign website for President Trump has this amusing image on its error page.
But in the era of memes and social media, they’ve really taken on a new dimension of hilarity – even for people entirely outside the conflict itself.
Case in point, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
When the new era of conflict between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan started, the latter country’s military apparently had this ready to go.
Now, I don’t speak Azeri (which is apparently a dialect of Turkish), so I have no idea what any of the lyrics mean. The name of the song – “Atles” – means “Fire”.
Whether that refers to the noun or the verb, I couldn’t say.
The video features what are apparently Azerbaijani military personnel putting on a weapons demonstration whilst a heavy metal band performs around them. While the song is actually pretty good (I strongly suspect the Swedish power metal band Sabaton was used as inspiration), I had some issues with the visuals. Namely the fact that a lot of the equipment is quite clearly “out of the box” new, which leads me to suspect that some of what’s shown are probably mockups rather than actual military equipment.
That said, I have no idea, and I have no desire to search Azeri-language websites for the information. So… enjoy?
For further reading, give this story a glance. I found the song itself and the article later, but it’s moderately informative.
As to why I suspect Sabaton inspired this effort by the Azeri army… well, you can judge for yourself. This is from Sabaton’s _Great Tour_ album, featuring songs about World War One, which released in 2019 – this particular track is about the famed battle at Verdun.