Tag: secretagent

1960 06-124 Pen imagines he is searching the secret archive with Chava
1961 06-124 Pen brings his master a stolen book
1962 06-124 The Choking Torture of Anzola Ipato
1963 06-124 Channah warns Pen to RUN if he can

PREVIOUSLY:  By trickery and deadly threat, eight-year-old Pen has agreed to help the succubae until dawn, as they raid the Venetian capitol late on a storm-torn night of floods, seeking to destroy what the Venetian spy service has learned about the succubae and to release an imprisoned grandfather and a young girl accused of witchraft.  Pen has now been geased to compel him and spelled to trust Channah and believe she is by his side.  NOW: 

Pen, bound as a safety net by a leash attached to a harness, and following Chava’s reasonable suggestions and whispers, crossed the hallowed space, picked the lock (under a minor delusion that he was simply unlocking a difficult lock using several keys at once), opened the door of the archive, and crept inside to access the secret files of Europe’s, and perhaps the world’s, most-extensive and most-advanced spy agency:  The Council of Ten of the Serenissima. 

Within the windowless archive, with Chava’s guidance and encouragement, Pen found and raided the Venetians’ magic books, written in Latin, the language of religion and science in Western Europe, which Pen read and spoke fluently, along with his aristocratic caste’s language of Norman-influenced French, and his local language of English.  He read all their titles for Chava, setting aside for Chava’s review the very, very few Chava didn’t already possess or hadn’t already known of, or that were so rare they would be difficult or impossible for the Venetians to replace.  Although the books, collectively, contained many grains of truth, they also contained falsehoods and honest misapprehensions which the Succubae valued, not to keep their own magical primacy over humans, but to help them predict the actions of the humans who hunted them and the other creatures of hell.

Turning to the written records of the Council of Ten, even though they were written in Venetian (rather than Latin), a language Pen had only first been exposed to when his Aunt brought him to Venice earlier in the year, his Latin and French allowed him to read the spines, introductions, and section titles in the books well enough to locate what the succubae wanted most:  The records of the interrogation, conviction, and execution of Anzola Ipato, by one Gasparo Orseolo of the Council of Ten, who had been burned at the stake on Wednesday, the 3rd of October, 1515.  Morally, exposing an eight-year-old with even partial literacy of Venetian to such material was one of several testaments given during the course of the evening, to Chava’s limitations as a surrogate mother-figure. Technically, the very existence of the record was a testament to the efficacy of the Venetian secret service, which had accomplished something very few humans, human governments, or even human civilizations were ever able to achieve:  identifying, capturing, and questioning an actual demon of hell:  Tirtzah the succubus.  After weeks of agonizing tortures, including especially vile and inhuman tortures methods devised by the Inquisition that were not normally performed by the Venetians (who relied heavily on the strappado), her mortal form, and thus her ability to visit Earth, was destroyed by fire, possibly the most agonizing form of banishment from the Earthly plane. 

Chava had persuaded Pen to push, pull, and drag the heavy folio volume back across the church to her position in the Venetian Senate Hall.  There, with Pen nestled on her lap, she read and carefully edited the record, using her magical powers and her great manual skills, to alter—as subtly as possible to try and evade any Venetians re-reading it from suspecting it had been changed—the text.  As much as she estimated she could get away with, she replaced information learned about the succubae with inaccurate information that would be less helpful, or even self-defeating, the next time the Court of Lust tangled with the Serene Republic.  Chava’s focus was on things Tirtzah had said that might hint at or reveal anything the succubae perceived as a potential weakness or exploit.  Then she had made Pen reverse the difficult process of moving the volume back into the library.  And because Pen lacked the strength to lift the folio-sized hardbound volume over his head back up to the high shelf he had pulled it from, she had him pull down all the nearby volumes and pile them up with the altered volume somewhere in the middle.

Pen also found and recovered for Chava, Tirtzah’s magical ring, which the Venetians had taken from Tirtzah.  Ultimately, they had not been able to make much out of it since capturing it.  By recovering it, the succubae ensured they never would.

Finally, Chava had tried various ways to help Pen make sense of a section of books written—and even labeled on their spines—with lines and geometric combinations of lines that Chava suspected was a Venetian code.  This, neither she, nor any of the succubae, had anticipated:  volumes so secret, they were encoded when written and kept within their very fortress and capitol?

In the end, she decided against doing anything with them, at least not tonight.  Even if the boy started with the last volume and worked his way backward, dragging every single volume out to her, it might take him hours to bring her the volumes covering 1515.  If, indeed, she could even identify which ones those were.  And then to repeat her work on the Venetian-language records, she would have to decipher the code well enough not only to make sense of the text, but to try and replace existing words with credible substitutes.  The only other option would be to burn the lot; but in addition to being a terrible and unnecessary loss of knowledge—a possibility she loathed on principle—it would be pretty clear to the Venetians someone had been in their secret archive and was trying to destroy at least something the Venetians had learned and hidden there.  Chava couldn’t even be sure what the coded—or cuneiform, for that matter—books were, let alone whether they actually recorded anything about Tirtzah, which seemed unlikely.  If they did, keeping a copy in Latin would rather tend to defeat the purpose of keeping a copy in code.  And because Anzola Ipato’s trial was only two years’ past, thus alerted to an effort to tamper with their institutional memory, they could and probably even would reconstruct much or all of it—accurately—from living memories, which would completely reverse Chava’s efforts to destroy the Venetians’ Latin record of their recently-acquired knowledge of succubae.  Destroying a vast knowledge without helping the succubae, and thereby making it unlikely she would destroy the limited knowledge actually harmful to the succubae?  That would be the worst of both worlds, and she decided against it.

In the end, Chava—with Pen’s semi-witting help—completed her mission before Channah and Rivqah finished theirs.  Instead of risking Pen coming out from under her influence while he was in the secret archive, and thus beyond her physical control, she brought him back to her and, inspired, decided to make the most of the opportunity by influencing Penny to do whatever he could, to save himself.  Chava warned him he literally could not escape the succubae until dawn, and must avoid crossing Channah, or if possible even attracting her attention again, in the meantime.  But once he saw any part of the sun, he should immediately, or as soon thereafter as possible, slip away when neither Channah, nor Rivqah, nor Miryam was watching him, and run for his very life.  When Pen protested that Chava should come with him, or that he wanted to see her again, she promised that if he obeyed her like a good boy, she would visit him again in a week.  Finally, still concerned that she had not impressed the danger upon him sufficiently, or persuaded him that a 5,000-year-old succubus didn’t need an eight-year-old boy to protect her, and having already used him to cross the sanctified church and plunder the secret archive, she added the force of compulsion to ensure his commitment.

Literature Section “06-124 Grimm Transformations VIII:  Child Laborer or Child Soldier?”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 124 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1264 words—Accompanying Images:  1960-1963—Published 2025-06-24—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1956 06-123 Chava tries to shield Pen from Channah
1957 06-123 Raining Death from Above
1958 06-123 Kill ’em all.  Let Channah sort ’em out
1959 06-123 Follow my lead, boy

PREVIOUSLY:  n/a.  When I was kicked off DeviantArt in early March, I was advancing two story lines:  The first, adult Penny’s and adult Chastity’s introduction to hard-core succubus sexual and moral domination; and the second, child Pentecost’s very first introduction to the succubae.  As best I could tell, images generated in relation to the second story line (not the first one) were what DA’s algorithms decided were unacceptable and caused me to be kicked off DA without any opportunity to defend my work or make it conform to DA’s standards or even be told what DA claimed I was doing wrong.  I therefore backed off this second story line until I felt like I had enough distance and perspective to avoid DA’s matrix-agent-like algorithm. 

Mind you, I don’t think I have any worry about failing to comply with DA’s policies—I don’t think I actually ever violated them before—but rather, to avoid being summarily and arbitrarily dumped from the platform and having all my work and comments and followers wiped out.  The arbitrariness with which this gruesome artistic death sentence is applied is a significant deterrent, and even an overbearing threat, to creativity, artistic integrity, and intellectual honesty.  I can’t really say this thread of the story is what it would have been before my previous avatar’s execution; but rather, it’s a similar story I care about enough to tell, even though it is limited and redirected enough to give me some hope I might—might—be able to do the story-line and the subject matter justice without the figurative death penalty from DA.  I guess we’ll see.

Here, then, is a summary of the second plotline to date.  NOW:

On All Souls’ Eve in 1517 AD, Channah, with three members of her Court (Miryam, Rivqah, and Chava) and a human child swept up with them (Pentecost Argent), are mounting a surreptitious assault on the Doge’s Palace, capitol of the Serenissima—the Serene Republic of Venice. 

Venice is drowning:  Storms dominating the Adriatic and Central Mediterranean have brought acqua alta (“high water”) to the lagoon city, flooding its streets and basements even as rain and lightning lash its domes and towers and canals.  

Queen Channah and her Duchesses, Miryam and Rivqah, all three of them trained and experienced assassins and infiltrators, are spearheading the assault.  By contrast, Chava, her Queen of Arms, is a strong, skilled metalsmith and stonecutter with a meticulous personality and a bookish mind, brought along with them for her very specialized knowledge and skills—not her prowess in battle.  Chava had come to Venice the night before, on All Hallows’ Eve, an auspicious night of power and disruption, to raid the empty, unconsecrated church of San Zaccaria for precious metals and holy water to use in service of her Queen.

There, she had been surprised by Pen, a neglected English child in the inadequate care of an indifferent Aunt.  Like many human children, Pen had some capacity for sensing and perceiving the supernatural.  Like a much smaller number of such children, he was ignored and reckless enough to pursue his curiosity about the things he sensed, rather than sensibly ignoring or cowering from them.  At San Zaccaria, Chava and Pen had been immediately drawn to one another by their compatible personalities and—much more powerfully—their respective needs to take advantage of their chance encounter to fill the awful, aching holes in their own lives and persons.  Pen’s innocence, and Chava’s capacity for empathy, conspired to protect Pen, an altar boy at the church, and allow Chava to complete her mission.  She had rocked him to sleep in her warm, dry cloak and then stolen away with her prizes, the most supernaturally-charged relics and ritual items in the church, leaving only the crucifix on the altar as a concession to comfort the boy and assuage his conscience.

Tonight, All Souls’ Eve, he had surprised Chava (again) and Channah as they prepared to assault the Palace.  Driven again by feelings deeper than and separate from common sense and conscious reason, desperate for Chava’s attention and care, he had come to return her cloak.  By doing so, he had inadvertently brought himself to the attention of probably the wiliest, most-passionate, and most-evil creature to still walk the surface of the Earth.  His arrival, discovering them in the storm-filled Piazza San Marco minutes before their secret raid on the Venetian capitol began, had complicated the Queen’s evil plans, to say the least.  Too young and innocent to be of proper interest to the succubae in his own right, he was simply a nuisance.  Leaving him alive risked his reporting their presence to Venice’s nocturnal guards, the Lords of the Night.  But leaving the body of an eight-year-old child on the metaphorical steps of the palace risked raising a general alarm.  And by revealing Chava’s tender tendencies to Channah, Pen had unknowingly put Chava at risk of punishment by her Queen, because he was not the first human toward whom Chava had shown what Channah considered an inappropriately undemonic attitude.  Indeed, this was not even the first time Channah’s own plans had been inconvenienced by one of Chava’s little pets. 

Fortunately for Pen’s life—if not exactly his soul—Channah, always practical, egotistical, and purposeful above all, had seen a way to turn the unexpected complication to her advantage.  Because the Venetians had protected their secret archives on the second floor of the palace behind a church that had been properly consecrated, neither the Succubae nor any of their familiars could easily sneak into the archives.  At least, not without either risking teleporting into a space they had never seen (possibly to be bisected by a wooden panel, or have their guts or legs or arms scrambled by a pile of books) or undertaking a loud and destructive aerial assault on the archive by flying demons blasting holes in the stone walls of the Venetian capital in the middle of a crowded city.  Neither option was really acceptable.  And thus, the succubae required a human who would be able to enter hallowed ground:  A human neither under their compulsion, nor already marked as the property of hell. 

They needed a human either detached enough from humanity or reality, or vulnerable enough to influence and trickery, to do their bidding.  And to keep their purposes secret from humanity, they preferred not to hire or recruit humans ahead-of-time.  Instead, they had planned to free a teenage girl already known to them, tempted but not yet owned by them, from Venetian custody in exchange for her help, and then use her to raid the archives for them.  Having already been labeled a witch by the Venetians, tortured, and thrown in the semi-submerged cells of the Palace known as the Wells because they weren’t quite ready to execute a minor girl, the succubae counted her as well reliable to do what they wanted in exchanged for being spirited away.  But if Chava could use the boy to raid the archives while they accomplished their other dark purposes, it would shorten their time in the Palace and thus improve their chances of escaping without the Venetians ever figuring out for certain whether they had raided the secret archives. 

With a combination of artful deceit and deadly threats, Channah had tricked and cowed Pen into agreeing to comply with a geas:  not a compulsion, which might keep him from entering the church; and not a contract, which he was too immature to make; but a deadly magical consequence that he understood would befall him if he failed to do what he had said he would do:  To do everything he could to help the succubae until dawn, and to obey Chava’s instructions until dawn, insofar as he could do those things without committing any deadly sins.  In exchange, Channah had ungenerously promised not to murder him that very night.

With Channah’s plan thus secured, Rivqah scaled St. Mark’s Basilica and from her vantage point atop it, slew the Venetian guards outside the Doge’s Palace.  Channah and Chava rushed Pen to the Palace and past the guards too quickly for him to examine them or even properly see them, while Channah lied to him that the guards had simply been knocked unconscious; while Miryam dragged their bodies out of sight and, disguised as a Venetian soldier, took their place guarding the half-finished stairway leading to the planned, “new” entrance to the Palace.

Chava and Pen made their way to the Senate Room, just outside the church, where Chava shrewdly used a trust spell, building on Pen’s natural gullibility as a child and the rapport they had developed the previous night, not to control his actions or decisions, but to persuade him she was by his side rather than talking and appearing to him inside his head.  Then she simply guided him, as an adult might guide and influence a good boy like Pentecost Argent, to break into and rob the Venetians’ secret archive, by convincing him they were simply recovering an article stolen from the succubus and taking a peek at the Venetian’s books. 

Literature Section “06-123 Grimm Transformations VII:  The Red Beast and the Little Boy”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 123 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1237 words—Accompanying Images:  1956-1959—Published 2025-06-23—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1688 07-04 Look for the deadly women:  Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis (ABRIDGED version)
1689 07-04 Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases
1690 07-04 Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons (ABRIDGED version)
1691 07-04 PARTY MEMBERS BEWARE!  Loose talk to loose women can cost lives
1692 07-04 TELL THEM NOTHING!  They might be agents
1932 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Center
1934 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Center
1946 07-04 Here are the “Liberators”! (ABRIDGED version)

These images arose out of a desire to show adult Penny and Chas acting in roles similar to their roles as operatives of Channah in ARP, namely, spies and saboteurs.  Since I wanted them to be acting for the Western Allies, they would have to be portrayed as a risk warned against in Axis propaganda.

As the project expanded, the posters became a way to comment on the narrow roles Axis ideologies prescribed for women—and the hypocrisy shown, especially as the war wore on, in their treatment and use of women.  Even the Nazis, from the very start, when faced with defiance by some strong women, celebrated them for their achievements in areas outside the home.  Notable examples (listed not to apologize for them, but to criticize fascist ideology) include one of the most-important propagandists on behalf of the Nazi regime, Leni Riefenstahl; women who used their celebrity in nontraditional roles to support the Nazis such as Hanna Reitsch; and Yoshiko Kawashima (identified in images 1932 and 1934 by her Chinese name, Jin Bihui), a tragic figure victimized from a young age and deeply conflicted about her own sexual and ethnic identity who burned a fiercely unconventional arc through the Japanese occupation of China ending in her execution for treason. 

By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of German women had been trained in military schools and were serving for all intents and purposes as soldiers of the regime, in dangerous battlefield jobs, most of them performing air-defense and fire-fighting missions during air raids while Allied bombs were falling all around them and Allied fighters, virtually unchallenged in the air, could focus on suppressing air defense.  Yet I found only one example of a recruitment poster showing a woman wearing a helmet, and only a couple with women in uniform, at a time when uniforms were ubiquitous in German society, worn by civil servants and military personnel alike in a fully-mobilized economy.

Their own country refused to call them soldiers, asserting that they were merely civilian “helpers,” despite the fact that by the end of the war, their formations and positions appeared on Wehrmacht organizational charts and their uniforms displayed military, or more-sinister (i.e., SS), insignia.  Which points to a complication in understanding their position in Nazi society:  After the war, German men and women alike, especially those “helping” the SS, had every incentive to, and in fact fell all over themselves to, deny women had been in the SS (which was declared a criminal organization) or the military (which was deeply implicated in crimes of the regime). 

Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Nazis were unwilling to admit they needed women’s help outside the home as well as inside it, to fight their war; or even that women were capable of doing the jobs they were actively recruited, and eventually drafted, to perform (and that they did, in fact, perform), because to do so would have meant admitting shortcomings in their own ideologies and propaganda.  There is much less information available, at least in English, or that can be found using English-language searches, about Nazi Germany than Fascist Italy, or even more, Imperial Japan.  Accessible portrayals of women in Japanese wartime propaganda were few and far between, and those I did find weren’t accompanied by text I could cut and paste into Google Translate, or retype on my keyboard.  But totalitarian regimes and newly-emergent industrial economies tend to be socially conservative, and what I was able to find suggested very conservative and limited roles were prescribed for women.

Axis ideology did not allow women to be heroic figures.  It did not even allow them to be dangerous, nefarious, or even sexualized ones.  Thus, even in propaganda reminding people not to discuss or reveal sensitive military information, which were ubiquitous across all combatants, Axis posters rarely identified nefarious or seductive women as the threat.

Posters of the Western Allies (Soviet patterns sometimes allowed or required women to be heroic but didn’t offer them much agency or sexuality) were another matter.  If anything, as suggested already in relation to Allied Recruitment posters (subsection 07-04-F), women were often portrayed as conniving, traitorous, diseased sluts constituting a threat to the war effort and to decent servicemen.  Women featured prominently as antagonists in Western Allied campaigns warning against loose talk; and almost inevitably, were the primary villains in campaigns warning against venereal disease.  These campaigns were prominent and widespread, with some reason; venereal disease had become a significant source of manpower shortages in World War One, and the US in particular from the very start went to war with a vengeance against VD.  The results, helped by medical improvements, were notable:  infections among US servicemen in World War Two were possibly as low as 3% of those a generation before when the total number of mobilized men had been lower.  But to a significant extent, the campaigns focused not on the logic and mathematics of infection, or on the diseases themselves, but on the (mainly female) agents of transmission.

For purposes of these images, I used propaganda posters produced by the Western Allies as the starting points for made-up Axis ones that the Axis powers would have been unlikely to produce.

Literature Section “07-04-G Axis Portrayals of Women”—Accompanying Images:  1688-1692, 1932, 1934, 1946A; 1688U, 1690U, 1933, 1946B&U—Published 2025-06-17 to 06-23—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1688 07-04 Look for the deadly women:  Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED VERSION INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-17; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster; compare numerous examples at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/.  Translation (German to English):  Suchen Sie nach den tödlichen Frauen: Partisanen, Gonorrhoe und Syphilis  Look for the deadly women:  Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis.  The linkage between “good-time girls,” “loose women,” “prostitutes,” “pick-ups,” “bags of trouble,” etc., and diseases in numerous posters was thoroughly spelled out for slower servicemembers.  The broadest categorization, and the closest to bluntly suggesting all women are whores, that I saw, which also offered some spurious pseudo-scientific statistics, was the poster cautioning “98% of procurable women have venereal disease.”  Alternatively, that could be interpreted as insulting servicemen, e.g.:  “98% of the women available to losers like you are diseased….”  An implication more narrowly targeted against women suggested “Amateurs” are just as dangerous as prostitutes.  I included partisans because actual German posters addressed them as menaces, including at least one instance where as I recall, they portrayed a female as a partisan.  I originally made the unabridged version thinking nothing of it, then realized it could create a risk of being removed and had nothing really to replace it.

1689 07-04 Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases—2025-06-18; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster; compare https://artpictures.club/autumn-2023.html specifically, and other posters generally, at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/.  Translation (German to English):  Leicht zu bekommen:  Degenerierte Schlampen und ihre Krankheiten  Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases.  There were at least two versions of this poster during World War Two.  The comparison of prostitutes to their diseases was made visually by the original images in both versions.  I just spelled out the comparison between human beings, viruses, and bacteria more explicitly here.

1690 07-04 Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED VERSION INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-19; Chastity & Penance; advertisement; Translation (German to English):  Vermeiden Sie Umweltverschmutzung – nutzen Sie die Schutzstaffel der Salons  Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons.  There is no specific historical example behind this poster; the anti-VD advertising campaign was Allied, and the Allies (to my knowledge) didn’t operate any brothels like the SS, Wehrmacht, and Imperial Japanese Army (although the Japanese administration under American occupation after the war did operate official brothels for a time).  The address is the actual address of Salon Kitty, a high-end brothel that was taken over by the Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security Service) for spying on Germans and foreigners of interest (and is actually not representative of the official, overt forced-labor brothels run for German military, SS, and kapo personnel since it was a clandestine operation).  The phone number in the abridged version is that of the Reichsführer-SS’s (Himmler’s) office according to the 1941 Berlin phone book (only a limited number of entries from it were available and legible online).

1691 07-04 PARTY MEMBERS BEWARE!  Loose talk to loose women can cost lives—2025-06-20; Chastity, Penance; motivational poster; compare https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/original-john-falter-wwii-poster-458626456, for the Allied anti-loose-talk poster that was the departure point design- and slogan-wise.  More broadly, see the Allied posters warning about loose women at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/ and https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/25/health/wwii-vd-posters-penis-propaganda/index.html, further discussed above.  Translation (German to English):  Parteimitglieder Aufgepasst (vorsicht)!  Party members, pay attention (beware)!; Unanständige(s) Gerede (Gespräche) mit unanständigen Frauen kann (können) Leben kosten  Indecent (loose) talk with indecent (loose) women can cost lives.  The original is targeted at sailors but because of challenges with the AI (discussed elsewhere), this one is targeted at a category of people who theoretically could be in civilian clothes since I could not generate any suitable images for this with uniformed Germans.  Google changed translations on me when I double-checked before publication from German back to English; the translations shown are based on the final re-check with variations to illustrate how words varied based on the original English and English translations of the later German.

1692 07-04 TELL THEM NOTHING!  They might be agents—2025-06-21; Chastity, Penance; motivational poster; compare https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-propaganda-posters-world-war-two/.  Translation (German to English):  Sag ihnen nichts!  Tell them nothing!; Sie könnten Agenten sein  They might be agents.  I counted it as a win that I was able to get the girls on their stomachs.  The AI really does not like being told how to position people, especially women.  I really like the faces and expressions here, which seem at once girlish and sinister.  Unlike 1945, which I was able to double-check with an Italian pronoun guide online, I didn’t find a way online to double-check whether the German would be different for a female vs a male or mixed “them”; any input on this point would be appreciated.

1932 & 1934 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre—UNABRIDGED GERMAN COUNTERPART INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-22; Fang; recruiting poster; compare: https://www.alamy.com/vintage-ww2-recruitment-poster-with-female-ats-member-in-uniform-union-jack-flag-flies-behind-women-with-a-will-to-win!-join-the-ats-apply-at-any-army-recruiting-centre-1939-1945-image342804140.html?imageid=16439DED-FF10-4602-991A-74F85C0BBF85&p=66052&pn=1&searchId=eecbd4edf63c33347e7f7b028a6f8218&searchtype=0; Translation (Mandarin to English) 有必勝意志的女性！  Women with a will to Win!; 般的  General Jin Bihui; 加入  Join the; 反叛亂騎兵部隊  counterinsurgency cavalry force; 向任何陸軍招募中心提出申請  Apply at any Army Recruiting Center.  Any feedback on the technical aspects of this poster would be much appreciated.  The poster is in Chinese but I’m not even sure, if there had been such a recruiting poster, whether the proper language would have been Chinese, Manchu, or even Japanese.  The “counterinsurgency cavalry force” is the irregular formation raised by the Qing dynasty princess who was adopted (abused) and raised in Japan and later became associated with the Manchukuo puppet regime (it is her photograph above her name, Jin Bihui, in a Manchukuo army uniform).  I am not sure if the force had an official name; or if it did, whether it was actually that, or if “counterinsurgency cavalry force” is a descriptive reference.  Being that it was a cavalry force and she was a Manchu, perhaps the most obvious pool for her to recruit from would have been Manchus.  By the time of World War II, however, I understand Manchuria had been heavily Sinicized.  Because the poster is in Chinese I used her Chinese name, Jin Bihui.  I’m pretty sure, but not entirely, that I have the correct Chinese-character transliteration of that name; but in addition to having formatting issues with it, and the lingering uncertainty, I did hope by including one bit of Latinized text with the only specific name I included in the poster (it doesn’t even use the word “Manchukuo” in the text) that people who didn’t notice this description could find relevant historical information about the poster online.  I made two versions, one for the year the puppet regime was created and the other for the year it was renamed Manchukuo and made nominally imperial, because what can I say:  I like Fang in black leather.  These posters came about because, having seen Channah in leather and thinking of poster 1933, it seemed only right that the leather-armor-clad Fang should have a poster of her own on the evil side of the fence.

1946 07-04 Here are the “Liberators”! (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED AND BONUS VERSIONS INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-23; Miryam, Rivqah, Lancelot; propaganda poster; compare https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-italian-world-war-ii-poster-here-are-the-liberators%60-shows-the-statue-57365951.html.  Translation (Italian to English):  Ecco I “Liberatori”!  Here are the “Liberators”!  The original poster chilled me, partly because it reminded me of the Norwegian fascist poster (widely used by the Germans) “Liberators,” and partly on its own account, and its description by one source online as an “angel of death” version of the Statue of Liberty.  As an American, it creeps me out to see American icons toppled and reversed that way, especially in this day and age; and especially when—by alluding to Allied bombing campaigns in the Italian example, and half-a-dozen ways in the “Liberators” poster, they manage to capture a kernel of truth about America’s own moral challenges.  In some ways, I imagine this to be the worst nightmare within the ideology of Axis propaganda because it depicts women from fascist countries not just as victims (as in poster 1945), but as collaborating or cooperating with the Allied conquerors, perhaps even with a bold spirit of determination to survive in difficult circumstances where the roles assigned to them by Axis ideologies are no longer enforced, and the men they were supposed to rely on for protection have been defeated in a war of their own making.  Of course, there were German and Italian prostitutes during the WW2 era; but the German and Japanese policy of forced-labor brothels very much reinforced and followed their racist ideologies by making women from occupied countries service their troops.  Racially-ambiguous Lancelot allows but does not require the viewer to add a racial dimension to the poster, although as noted with respect to 1945, doing so would be entirely consistent with Italian wartime propaganda.

For any who are interested in the process of making AI-generated art in 2025,this seemed like a place worth pausing to discuss the process, because: (1)  The material is immediate and covered by a lot of other sources online, unlike my fictional world.  My thought processes tend to be idiosyncratic and opaque and feel difficult to explain; hopefully the process will be less inaccessible in the context of close nonfiction antecedents for fictional depictions.  (2) I usually illustrate with images that are only retouched to try to minimize or eliminate logical incongruities (e.g., extra limbs or heads), or extremely jarring anachronisms (e.g., someone crop dusting a field in what is supposed to be the Sixteenth Century) that cropped up in images I otherwise liked so much I felt compelled to use them.  These are different; while all AI images require more effort than you might expect (although much less—at least for a slow worker like me—than illustrating by hand), a *lot* more work than average for AI went into some of these images because of factual research questions, trying to achieve ideas too complex for a single prompt at a time, and very specific images (mimicking styles, composition, and even wording and imagery of original posters).  While the easiest only took a couple of or a few hours apiece, the most-complex or -problematic (including, e.g., 1946, 1925, and 2025) took days.  (3) Because I was dealing with real-world issues, particularly in connection with 20th-Century and contemporary figures (e.g., Trump, Stalin), and partisan political expressions in specific geographies, the works faced very different (political not maturity) restrictions, and in some senses, many more obstacles that were deliberately raised by the AI provider to prevent self-expression than even those I face in most of my work.

Since there is no “narrative” being illustrated, to keep examples and comments together, I tried to push most of the image-specific or subset-specific comments down to the individual entries and subsections.  Please see the “Description” field in DeviantArt for what are sometimes fairly detailed background and observations, as well as for links to the historical source material I was emulating, critiquing, or otherwise commenting on.

Given the rapid improvements in online translation, I felt inspired to follow my urge to make a number of posters in languages other than English.  In all cases of foreign-language posters, the titles of the files are the English translations of the posters.  On platforms like DeviantArt that limit the length of file titles, the full title (and thus, the full text in English) is available in the description field even when it doesn’t all fit in the title field.  My confidence in the translations varies a great deal with language.  For languages using the Latin alphabet and related to English (e.g., Germanic and Romance languages) I had a lot more tools available to cross-check and evaluate translations than in languages that used different alphabets (Cyrillic and Chinese traditional characters, for example) and that are only distantly related to English (Chinese, for example, is not even part of the broadest Indo-European group of languages that includes English).  Please let me know if you see any problems or issues with the translations; I would like to be as accurate as reasonably possible!

Several problems with AI (as presently implemented by well-funded projects backed by significant computing power and training allowing more-or-less “natural language” prompting) came to the forefront in this project in a way or to an extent greater than usual.  And some of them were *frustrating* *as* *hell*—not because they’re limitations on AI per se, which I’d say for purposes of image-generation is pretty darn amazing—but because they’re deliberate hobblings superimposed on the AI to avoid the slightest risk of offending anybody.  Partly that’s just outright business selfishness, limiting the value of their own product to promote their own sales; different from but in the same category as planned obsolescence, software limitations on native vehicle range, and the like.  But partly it’s also the fault of people for being too sensitive and into one another’s business in an intolerant and critical way, and of the government for leaving it unclear whether certain classes of violations will be blamed on the posters or the providers or both.  I myself can’t fault a private company for playing it safe when they could face criminal or civil liability for things posters and customers used their products for; but of course, it doesn’t excuse the companies for their own pandering and undue focus on profit.  Profit is valid and in fact necessary for most companies to continue operating; and regulations mean in publicly-traded companies, for example, executives could even get in trouble if they maximized anything other than profit within the narrow strictures of the law.  But there’s more than life to it and the best businesses recognize that.  Not so silicon valley in relation to AI.  While directing most of my hostility towards the culture wars and Americans’ departure from our national ideals by indulging their own desire to control others over a respect for differences of opinion, there’s plenty left for the provider’s simple greed in deliberately handicapping a tool of amazing expressive potential.

The length and specificity limitations on AI images, as well as the absence of a strong “gaffer” check (clearly 99.999% of the image-checking and controls are about preventing the AI from accurately portraying anything that Silicon Valley programmers imagine might be offensive to anyone) that  come to the forefront in many of these images because, being political images in the middle of wartime, and (in most cases) dealing with wars so familiar from popular culture that everybody instinctively knows what the uniforms and equipment of each major participant look like, it’s quite jarring if the uniform or the equipment is wrong.  Or, if the uniforms are as little as 30 or 40 years off.  I had to accept much less precision and accuracy in uniforms and equipment than I would have liked, even when I burned up precious prompt real estate spelling out details like “green U.S. Army dress uniform of World War II” or specific equipment designations like “B-17 Flying Fortress of the USAAF” or “M1 Garand rifle.”

As with all projects, the most frustrating aspect was the deliberate stifling of expression that might be deemed to offend anyone, whether progressives/liberals objecting to “politically-incorrect” content or conservatives/populists objecting to “offensive” content.  Trying to keep the examples and issues as short as possible, I was beset on this project with one very familiar problem and one mainly-surprising problem.

The Usual Problem—Portraying strong and/or voluptuous women.  I understand and expect that the AI, being trained on reality, will pick up the biases we actual people model for it.  And some of those prejudices are in the area of body types and social roles, especially for women.  If the AI uses what it knows about the specific time and place in which an image is set, to clothe a woman or depict what she’s doing more specifically, I get that; I expect it; and I even think it’s the obvious outcome.  It doesn’t offend me when the AI supplies missing details by reference to averages and existing portrayals from the web of people and roles from different times.  Indeed, I expect it; and I don’t know how the AI could do its job if it *didn’t* fill in blanks in a manner consistent with actual history or actual facts, including what was fashionable or expected at the time.

I *am* really offended and infuriated when the AI resists efforts to specify traits that I want in a character or scene.  I won’t argue about extreme cases such as sexual or visceral vulgarity; I think there’s a time and place for that, but I understand there are children present (on the Internet) and they’re difficult to exclude if any of their parents are asleep on the job which many of them will be.  But if it’s a part of everyday life that children can see without being harmed, it really pisses me off to conceal it because one segment or another of the population doesn’t like it.  If they don’t like it, they shouldn’t look at it; but they also shouldn’t be protesting companies that allow their customers to exercise their legal right to express themselves.  And we definitely shouldn’t be making vague, unclear laws that make companies even less likely to allow free speech than their greed does.  Some pet peeves:

  • Women who look different than runway models including voluptuous, elderly, and strong women. 
  • Women who act non-traditionally.  I realize some of this will be the product of bias in the underlying human examples the AI is modeling, to an even greater extent than body types; but again, the issue here is where the prompt *specifies* a female.  And I have had examples where I used at least three different gender-specific terms, even the phrase “a female woman,” where the AI would flip the gender and turn a woman into a man if she’s rescuing someone or acting with physical courage.  Words like “bold” and “brave” are surprisingly gender-determinative (again—overriding contrary express gender prompts) in the world of mainstream AI.
  • Voluptuous women displaying confidence in themselves, their bodies, their right to movement, or heaven forbid, their appearance.  Apparently in Silicon Valley, if it’s a crime for a woman to be an endomorph or a mesomorph, and to be bold, or adventurous, or brave, or noble, then it’s inconceivable to allow anyone to portray an endomorphic or mesomorphic woman displaying confidence or assurance of any kind.  When I started this about a year ago, I gave up even trying to show a variety of women because the AI seemed so determined to limit large, gorgeous, fantabulous women from doing anything other than sitting around hugging their sisters on park benches while sensibly dressed in gender-neutral or voluminous clothing.  It was and is infuriating.  Question for my readers:  Can you guess how I first found an escape hatch from these narrow strictures?  YES!  Turn a female character into an orc or an ogre!  That’s why Chava looks that way—because if I describe her as a lizard, she can be fat!  It’s only if she’s a gorgeous, succulent, drool-inducing human woman who has flesh on her bones, that she can’t be depicted.  BONUS TIP:  If you want to show juicy, yummy, sexy women in hoods and masks, you can use the word “humanoid” instead of “person” to refer to them, and the AI will allow you to give them va-va-voom hourglass curves without having to make them into lizards first!
  • Mature people who do anything other than visit the doctor or put on a red suit and climb down a chimney.
  • Old people.  Apparently merely *being* an old person is a problem, it’s so offensive and unthinkably horrible and disgusting.  Unless, again, you’re Santa.  That’s okay.  And *occasionally* you can describe someone as a “grandparent” and the AI will conclude it’s okay to show them with indicia of age.
  • Germans in uniform.  Or, even, soldiers in the world war two era in gray or black uniforms.  And… god forbid, but I’m going to say the word:  Nazis.  This can be a legal problem (especially in Europe) as well as a social-offence/thin-skinned-audience/cowardly-businessperson problem.  But I think the main culprit here is pedantic demands for political incorrectness.  Trying to portray World War Two where—news alert!  Content warning!  Our enemies included the Nazis—I was blown away by how difficult it’s become to even allude to their existence.  But there is a major problem when merely including the word “Wehrmacht” in a prompt triggers a nasty warning suggesting you’re doing something immoral and threatening to cut off access to an important tool like AI if you dare to ever mention it again.  Ironically, the reason I actually *used* the word Wehrmacht was because I was having such difficulty generating *anyone* in uniform in World-War-Two era Germany that I thought “the AI is afraid to show uniforms because it might be people wanting SS troops.  So I’ll specify ‘Wehrmacht’ so it knows I’m not trying to advocate fascism, I’m trying to depict people in uniform in a society where even civil servants wore uniforms and probably 20% of the adult population was in the military.”  Nope:  Verboten.  Like seeing reruns of Hogan’s Heroes playing on TV, trying to generate these images shocked the hell out of me by bringing to my attention just how intolerant of free speech our society has become despite the first amendment.  And I also find it very short-sighted and stupid.  How are we to remember the Holocaust if we can’t talk about Nazis?  I don’t think you can do it.  And why would we want to suppress that history?  There’s no good purpose for it.  Free speech, the enlightenment, reason, learning, democracy, peace, equality, tolerance, and freedom all go together.  It is categorically wrong for both the left and the right to be trying to shut other people up.  If people can’t use words, they’ll use fists.
  • Allied troops liberating occupied Europe—Fuhgeddabowdit!  Showing American, English, or Commonwealth troops or flags or jeeps or tanks on the streets of France or the Netherlands is a big *no-no*!  Even if they were welcomed with delirious joy when they actually arrived, and their actual purpose for being there was in *support* of the local country instead of hostility to it.
  • Nationalist Chinese—Attempts to portray Fang and Hong fighting for America’s ally, the Republic of China, were as problematic as showing Nazis.  The AI by default shows China in World War Two as the People’s Republic of China, which did not exist until four years after the war ended.  Again, it would be one thing if the AI were making a mistake or simply failing to distinguish between an earlier and a later government in a country.  But in this case, the AI deliberately overrode and ignored specific prompts (as well as historical reality) referring to the ROC or “Nationalist” China, and in fact returned a policy-violation-you-will-be-denied-future-access-to-AI-you-immoral-scum when I use the phrase white sun on blue field to specify Nationalist Chinese markings.  Was the WW2 ROC a bastion of democracy and humanitarianism?  No.  But AI showed no problems displaying Soviet insignia or PRC Chinese insignia, *only* identifying a policy violation for a reference to Nationalist Chinese imagery, in the same terms it reacts to requests for Nazis.  But the Nationalist Chinese—in addition to being allies in World War II, just like the Russian and Chinese Communists—and being, you know, the actual, internationally-recognized government of China at the time, the *same* symbols are used by the Nationalist Chinese government which survives to this day in the form of Taiwan, because it’s the same government, albeit exiled and reformed after World War II.  And today, it is a liberal democracy with individual liberties and economic prosperity unmatched by anyone in East Asia other than Japan and South Korea.  Nor could I generate Nationalist Chinese flags or aircraft insignia by telling the AI to produce a scene located in “Taiwan” instead of China.  All of these problems arose in the first place because I was trying to generate an image of a “Flying Tigers” aircraft—one of the aircraft flown by US citizens fighting in alliance with the Chinese against Japan in World War Two; and I couldn’t understand why the computer generated communist or simply generic aircraft in response to prompts for the Flying Tigers.  Even more shocking than suggesting it was fine to portray insignia of mass-murdering polities of the USSR and the PRC, but somehow against Silicon Valley’s policies to portray insignia that were once associated with a mass-murdering polity of the ROC but today represent the strong, proud, and vibrant democracy into which it evolved, was when the AI, rather than showing Nationalist Chinese insignia in China, started putting rising suns on the fuselage of Chinese aircraft!  Those are, in fact, the symbol of America’s and China’s enemy in World War Two, the Empire of Japan.  The extreme hostility of the AI to the democracy in Taiwan cannot easily be explained by traditional American biases, but seems to be either a deliberate effort by Silicon Valley to placate the PRC for business purposes, or the effectiveness of PRC propaganda efforts to affect political discourse in the US.  I can’t think of any other plausible reasons for this result?

I’m actually not an anti-PRC hawk.  I have a realistic view of them and oppose their use of tactics and pursuit of policies that I would oppose in all other governments.  And I think we should work with them, just like other governments, as much as we reasonably and morally can.  My concern here is not with the PRC or any one political entity.  It is with the cumulative effect of political and business and social influences on free speech in the United States, and how that affects the reliability of information provided by AI models that large companies have spent a lot of time and money tweaking to be exactly the way they want them.  My conclusion is that the AI is programmed and trained, in secret without customer access to understand and evaluate, with at least the following three unacceptable traits:

  • Prioritizing profit-maximization goals by consciously allowing and indeed fostering historical and other factual falsehoods, implying the company believes customers respond to something other than the most-correct/most-predictive answers in favor of answers that don’t offend potential customers even if they’re less useful.
  • Heavy to total verification/double-checking/gaffing is focused on avoiding customer displeasure with the messenger for providing unwanted messages, rather than on checking for truth or even minimal compliance with fundamental and verifiable facts.
  • Because the AI and its programmers know they are suppressing the most-accurate, most-complete, most-responsive results in favor of pandering to group prejudices, the AI is programmed to identify and actively resist users with a preference for accurate, complete, responsive results who may be trying to improve result quality in a way that might “unlock” better but potentially-controversial answers.  Although I did not parse through this aspect in detail because I only reached the conclusion as a result of a very high number of queries and attempts to improve results, examples from this project alone included the fact that once I used the word “Wehrmacht” it became almost impossible to generate soldiers until I moved on to different subject matter areas (and then got the shocking images of German soldiers in front of the Eiffel Tower without even trying for anything so radical when I came back days or weeks later and was trying to get American soldiers marching down the Champs Elysée being welcomed), the way the AI resisted letting me have Japanese tanks for Hong to spy on in Shanghai, then resisted letting me have Flying Tigers aircraft (which included Nationalist insignia), but then, when I kept trying out of a combination of intellectual frustration and disbelief, finally replaced PRC insignia on Chinese planes with Japanese insignia (multiple times) *instead of* Nationalist Chinese insignia. 

It seems clear to me that AI is being deliberately steered to suppress truth and responsiveness to the actual question asked, in favor of avoiding responses that might offend third parties. The corollaries of this are that individual customers are being disserved by deliberately being given suboptimal responses to the things they asked the product for, in order to please noncustomers and customers other than the one making the inquiry; and that it goes beyond putting passive blocks and limitations on the system, to active and aggressive resistance of its most serious customers who seem most concerned about receiving the best answers.  And I have to wonder whether other countries are sabotaging the operation of our AI tools in much the same way, and for largely the same reasons, that the US and Israel developed Stuxnet (international competition and politics).  And that is scary.

Literature Section “07-04 DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 4 of Chapter Seven, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—3332 words—Published 2025-06-08—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.