Modern Propaganda
21 2018-01-28 by -covfefe
Modern propaganda works by getting you to believe nothing.
It's like lowering the defenses of your immune system. If they can get you to believe that all the news is propaganda, then all of a sudden propaganda from foreign-controlled state media or sourceless loony toon rants from domestic kooks, are all on an equal playing field with real investigative journalism. If everything is fake, your news consumption is just a dietary choice. And it's different messages for different audiences - carefully tailored. To one audience they say all news is fake, to those who are on their way to conversion they say "Trust only these sources." To those who might be open to skepticism, they just say "Hey isn't it troubling that the media is a business?"
Hannah Arendt, who studied all the different fascist movements (not just the Nazis) noted that:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Does that remind you of any subreddits?
The famous French philosopher Sartre had this to say about the futile task of arguing with a certain group in his time. See if any of this sounds familiar to you
____ have chosen hate because hate is a faith to them; at the outset they have chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease they feel as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions appear to them. If out of courtesy they consent for a moment to defend their point of view, they lend themselves but do not give themselves. They try simply to project their intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse.
Never believe that ______ are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The ____ have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. If then, as we have been able to observe, the ____ is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.
He was talking about arguing with anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators in the 1940s. But of course this style of arguing is only too familiar to anyone who has seen what has happened to Reddit over the past 2 years. Ever see someone post something that is quite completely false, with a second person posting a long reply with sources, only to have the original poster respond "top kek, libcuck tears"? One side is talking about facts but the other is playing what Sartre calls the game of discourse. The other side is liberated from having to mean anything or defend anything.
Just look at the very image meme that started this thread.
"Fake News."
This is a word or phrase that was born about six weeks ago. It lived for about two weeks as a genuine English word, meaning headlines fabricated from nothing to get viral clicks from Facebook; political clickbait engineered by SEO wizards who weren't even American, just taking advantage of the election news wave:
"You Won't Believe Obama's Plan To Declare Martial Law!"
"Hillary Has Lung, Brain, Stomach, And Ass Cancer - SIX WEEKS TO LIVE!"
For a while, it seemed like the real world could agree that a word existed and had meaning, that it referred to a thing. Then the word was promptly murdered. Now, as we can clearly see, anyone who disagrees with a piece of news - even if it is NEWS, not an editorial - feels free to call it "Fake News." In fact there is a two step process. First, one assumes that all news is agenda-driven and editorial (this was already achieved for many heavily propagandized Americans by the mid-2000s). Second, all news that is embarrassing to your side must be editorial and fabricated. The enemy is just making things up constantly, a never ending churn of lies.
So who is the culprit? Who murdered the definition of fake news? A group of people who don't care what words mean. The concept that some news is fake and some news is not was intolerable. It required an objective distinction between positive and negative. A distinction between those who act in good faith and sometimes screw up and those who act in bad faith and never intended to do any good. A distinction between the traditional journalistic practices of off-the-record sourcing and the novel journalistic practice of saying every lie you can think of in the hope one sticks. A distinction between valuing our democracy and our institutions, and seeking to overturn and destroy them. But the group of people I'm talking about cannot tolerate these distinctions. Their worldview is unitary. They are a liberated nothingness and the enemy is everything. They make all words mean "bad" and they make all words mean "the enemy" because their only focus is to discredit and destroy. In the end they will only need one word.
Source : https://np.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/5ntjh2/all_this_fake_news/dceozzo
Ref:
"Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible"
Inside Putin's Information War
31 comments
1 canitbe73 2018-01-28
This really sums up the difference between candidates in 2016 to me. Not defending Clinton, but she could only say and make claims that she thought were realistic, while Trump (and even Bernie, to an extent) were free to say whatever they wanted, knowing that they would never be able to back up their words with actions (eg - "Mexico will pay for the wall", "Lock her up!", etc).
If only one side is working on the assumption that words and promises mean something, obviously they're going to lose.
(I'm not a Hillary fan and think she's still a liar, but you only have to look at a transcript of one of her speeches vs Trumps, or any of the debates, to realize that she was struggling to stay faithful to a message that she felt she could enact most of, while Trump could say and do anything on a whim knowing he would never be held accountable).
Great post.
1 -covfefe 2018-01-28
I agree. Hillary prepared for a traditional debate on policy points. Trump came ready for a WWE match, and it crippled her performance. Regardless of her trustworthyness.
Anyway, I came across this article today. It frames the collusion narrative not as a partisan attack on Trump but rather on a usurpation of his campaign due to the ease with which Russia could manipulate an already corrupt vessel. Full thing worth a read.
https://patribotics.blog/2018/01/02/trump-russia-collusion-why-muellers-not-thinking-small/
I think the Sanders angle is interesting. I'm sure Jill Stein is caught up too.
1 psyderr 2018-01-28
Yes, you've done a very good job of identifying propaganda. Anyone who goes against the official establishment narrative receives "flak," the 4th filter of Chomsky's mass media propaganda model.
In this case, the 5th filter, "the boogeyman," is Russia. The goal of the boogeyman is a type of social control to manufacture consent for otherwise unpopular policies.
In your example, the establishment is even going as far as to malign Bernie and Jill Stein with Russia simply for going against neoliberal establishment policies.
https://youtu.be/34LGPIXvU5M
1 canitbe73 2018-01-28
Well summarized.
Thanks for the link also. It's clear that Trump was not the only/primary target of the meddling - I think you're right that Jill Stein (and Bernie) are caught up too.
1 dcc123 2018-01-28
“It was nothing, just a touch of pneumonia that hours later I chose to spread to a young child.”
You can tell that the truth is very important to Hillary.
1 canitbe73 2018-01-28
Maybe you missed the part where I said Hillary is a liar. Do you feel like replying to any of the actual points in my comments or the initial post or nah?
1 dcc123 2018-01-28
I completely disagree that Hillary is less of a liar than Trump. It’s just that her lies are more choreographed and calculated, which is worse in my opinion.
1 canitbe73 2018-01-28
I wasn't arguing that Hillary was less of a liar than Trump, but I do think her stance on issues were more based on reality and the knowledge that people would hold her to everything she said. Trump knew he could say whatever he wanted and did and people still don't hold him to what he said during his campaign.
I mean, honestly, I don't understand how you can argue that her claims weren't more realistic when you can look back at what her stance on the issues are.... while Trump repeatedly said Mexico would pay for the wall and yet has never even pretended that was an option while in office.
1 dcc123 2018-01-28
A political novice like Trump probably did have a little more leeway than usual in an election where the political establishment was on trial, of which Hillary was inextricably linked.
However I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to make Mexico or Mexican citizens pay for the wall. Would take some creativity, but it’s possible. For example, he and Congress could impose a new border-crossing fee for non-US citizens.
1 canitbe73 2018-01-28
But my point is, they're not even discussing any options of Mexico paying for the wall. Sure, there are some options, as unlikely as they are, but Trump has never pretended to go after those options - and never received flack for not trying. He's asking the government for the money, because of course he is, that's always what he was going to have to do. Everyone knew that even as he was saying he was going to bill Mexico. That's my point - he could make any kind of outrageous claims and even his supporters didn't take him seriously or hold him to account.
1 dcc123 2018-01-28
I agree that some of his supporters will probably be disappointed without an actual wall, but I’m pretty sure most of them treat the wall as a symbol for stronger border security. So in that sense, it’s not surprising that most of his supporters don’t care about an actual wall financed by Mexico.
1 canitbe73 2018-01-28
Don't you see that you are proving my point? Trump can say anything - people decide that although he said X, he meant Y and they're happy with Y. Okay, that's fine, but that still means he's saying X and lying about it.
1 fweFBWEFN163452 2018-01-28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
1 jwlondon98 2018-01-28
If you try and question or debate anything more than half the time you will be called a racist, bigot, fascist, anti-Semite, or even conspiracy theorist. The thing that frustrates me the most is that the term conspiracy theorist has been spun into a derogatory meaning. It literally just means “someone who has a theory about a conspiracy,” and yet people immediate denounce anything you try to say. People don’t want to be open to the possibilities of the truth, as they are fine with being fed bullshit by the corrupt system. It seems more people are waking up, but it might take a revolution to make real, lasting change in America.
“United we stand, divided we fall.”
1 ShillyMadison 2018-01-28
Thats the entire reason the CIA created the term "conspiracy theorist".
1 mastigia 2018-01-28
Project Mockingbird iirc.
1 torkarl 2018-01-28
Ok I really want to lay out the argument you are making (fun of). You won't like it - but this is a discussion, right? I mean you didn't start writing thinking that what you were writing was, somehow, sacrosanct, that nobody could overturn something so clearly ... clear, did you?
So this thing you are wanting to focus on - does it have a name? Do you prefer "Believing Nothing", or "Modern Propaganda"? Not being certain exactly how you want to label it, I'll just call it "Flipping You Off", in a Sartrean gesture.
So Hannah Arendt, bless her existential bones, explained how Ordinary Germans Flipped Off their Nazi Leaders. Then Jean-Paul Sartre, the old existential fox, explained how Nazi Apologists Flipped Off the French Left Wing. Then you, the OP, existential critic supreme, explained how Alt-Right Neckbeards Flipped Off Hillary Clinton.
So I guess this is about existentialist asymmetrical word warfare. You have the big bombers, dropping elegantly phrased Mandarin reason and wisdom from 30,000 ft high on all the unenlightened villagers below. And they just FLIPPED YOU OFF!
Bring in the strong AI. You're going to need it.
1 torkarl 2018-01-28
I'm commenting to my own post just to call out the intellectual cowardice going on. When somebody challenges you, and telegraphs that they are ready to talk your academic dialect, the terms you brought to the discussion, the existential posture, the high-caliber oh-so-reliable authors, the political nuance of how real people dealt with Europe during and following the war, you run from the confrontation and rely on downvotes to make your case.
1 mentionbeinglawyer 2018-01-28
Brilliant post, mate. It's quite alarming to how easily people are swept up into groupthink that devalues reason and logic and replaces them with slogans and ambiguous words whose meaning can be altered to fit the current narrative.
Perhaps even more alarming is the distrust of well-documented history. It's a brilliant strategy really. If we believe that historical events didn't happen as told, we have nothing to learn from them.
1 torkarl 2018-01-28
But if we have historical events which, as told, compass a multitude of different reconstructions, we have the option to learn which explanation fits best. And more often than not, it's not the one on nightly news.
But... If we believe
1 mentionbeinglawyer 2018-01-28
Of all posts, this post should be stickied.
1 Otto-von-Bolschitt 2018-01-28
propaganda does not work in only one way
when did this "modern era" supposedly begin?
1 wrines 2018-01-28
the term "fake news", as appropriated by Trump supporters after being initially attempted as an attack on right-leaning sites like Breitbart from the leftstream media, is just shorthand to make a larger point:
the entire entertainment mediaplex (primarily "news programs but bleeding into general programming) is NOT what they pretend to be - which is unbiased and honest journalism -it is actually a 24/7 psy op intended to push a leftist agenda.
in doing so, they distort, twist, fabricate, sound bite, impute motives and meanings, on and on
We shorthand this by using the term "fake news".
This article attempts to combat that very simple reality. Sorry, Charlie. The general public realizes more every day that they have been asleep in a matrix that the media has constructed, a fantasyworld.
1 coolio-o-doolio 2018-01-28
Fake news as a term that appeared moments after podesta emails and pizzagate became a thing, it was spread by MSM, I think that is the source.
It was repurposed by Trump and his followers and now is a general term used by all sides.
Personally I don't think it's the "leftist" media but the corporate NWO media that panders and controls most of the MSM which is largely centre but "left" leaning.
1 odd-meter 2018-01-28
I believe that their goal is to get the final remaining free thinking humans to throw their hands up in frustration and disgust and give up trying to connect the dots. It’s like “okay, for you stubborn folk still trying to pay attention... here is the “NEWS”. Good f*kn luck! Try to not go insane trying to connect THESE dots!” They’re counting on everyone “tapping-out”
1 Omega639 2018-01-28
Well said man. Well said.
1 Smiley_Iris 2018-01-28
I've always been on the Cohle Train. Alright, alright, alright.
1 dionthorn 2018-01-28
Look into gobbels principles of propaganda.
1 WhoIs_PepeSilvia 2018-01-28
The same thing can be said of the other side of the political spectrum on Reddit as well.
1 dcc123 2018-01-28
By the way, “fake news” was a term invented by established media in order to discredit new media. The objective was to stamp out an emerging threat. The term was used against every new and growing media organization. It backfired because of all the blatant propaganda coming from “reputable” established news organizations.
1 mastigia 2018-01-28
Project Mockingbird iirc.