I grew up in post Soviet Ukraine, watching all the movies that were made in the USSR. I cannot recall a single “us vs them” movie with another country or nation

I grew up in post Soviet Ukraine, watching all the movies that were made in the USSR. I cannot recall a single “us vs them” movie with another country or nationality being the them, except movies about WWII. I don’t know why that is, but when we started getting American movies in the early 1990s it was a huge contrast. In Soviet movies the good guys were often the police trying to combat recidivism after WWII (huge socioeconomic shift led to a huge socioeconomic problem that gave rise to a huge amount of crime). In the American movies the bad guys were often foreigners. This isn’t to say there wasn’t propaganda, just that the propaganda was pointed in a different direction: for example a young idealistic police officer working with an veteran of the force to tenaciously investigate an elusive criminal gang for the glory of the Soviet Union. The focus was to make Soviet patriotism an attractive quality, regardless of being young or old. It was a lot more focused internally. In the meantime, a movie like Die Hard has none of that: German thieves that pretend to be terrorists are the bad guys, an all American hero is a good guy. American movies rarely have a true patriotic streak, as in “and this, son, is why we must work to better our union.” In fact, the idea of glorifying labor was so prevalent in the Soviet movies and so absent in American ones that this might be the biggest contrast. It shows a different face of patriotism and could easily explain the divide: some think patriotism is exercising your rights while others see it as holding back on exercising your rights. “It’s my right not to wear a mask” is a clear example of that.