It's not always easy to spot a Communist.
Usually they don't like to advertise what they are.
Usually they don't like to advertise what they are.
The Left’s Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
The MSM has a long tradition of falling (or worse) for Communists
By David Harsanyi
February 13, 2018
No, not every Western journalist fell for North Korean propaganda efforts at the Pyeongchang Olympics, though there were more than plenty. Some of it, no doubt, is driven by animosity for Donald Trump. Many people live a reactive existence that demands they show admiration for anyone perceived as standing in opposition to the president. The number of liberals asking “are we any better?” than North Korea on social media is horrifying, but, at this point, predictable.
But we also shouldn’t act as if embrace of Communism deception is something new or rare. The Left, and really we have no choice but to treat most big media outlets as functionaries of the Left, has a long tradition of falling (or worse) for this kind of propaganda — from Stalin to the Vietcong to Castro to Sandinistas to Hugo Chavez to fetching DPRK henchwomen.
Most famously there was the Pulitzer-Prize winning Walter Duranty, The New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin’s worst abominations during the 1930s. It should be remembered that many on the Left only turned away from the Soviet strongman when he allied himself with Hitler. By that time, the Soviets, who gained widespread popularity on the American left, had perpetrated their own Holocaust. To this day, the Pulitzer board won’t revoke Duranty’s prize, finding that “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”
Many years later, the same newspaper would treat America to a series of cutesy essays diminishing the horrors of Communism called “The Red Century.” Did you know women in the Soviet Union had full voting rights by 1917? Did you know they had no-fault divorce? Guaranteed health care and job? A free education? Women in Eastern bloc countries even had better sex than Americans!
What’s more important than free health care and income equality in a “democracy?” One wonders why millions of people risked their lives to escape such utopias. “Although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy,” noted Kristen Ghodsee in The New York Times, who teaches what I imagine is advanced gibberish at the University of Pennsylvania, “Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.”
Communist women were free to vote for the Communist candidates and then free to go to a job provided by the Communist state and then they were free to stand on long lines for food or shoes at the Communist-run shop. Self-sufficiency, indeed.
Read more....
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
The MSM has a long tradition of falling (or worse) for Communists
By David Harsanyi
February 13, 2018
No, not every Western journalist fell for North Korean propaganda efforts at the Pyeongchang Olympics, though there were more than plenty. Some of it, no doubt, is driven by animosity for Donald Trump. Many people live a reactive existence that demands they show admiration for anyone perceived as standing in opposition to the president. The number of liberals asking “are we any better?” than North Korea on social media is horrifying, but, at this point, predictable.
But we also shouldn’t act as if embrace of Communism deception is something new or rare. The Left, and really we have no choice but to treat most big media outlets as functionaries of the Left, has a long tradition of falling (or worse) for this kind of propaganda — from Stalin to the Vietcong to Castro to Sandinistas to Hugo Chavez to fetching DPRK henchwomen.
Most famously there was the Pulitzer-Prize winning Walter Duranty, The New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin’s worst abominations during the 1930s. It should be remembered that many on the Left only turned away from the Soviet strongman when he allied himself with Hitler. By that time, the Soviets, who gained widespread popularity on the American left, had perpetrated their own Holocaust. To this day, the Pulitzer board won’t revoke Duranty’s prize, finding that “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”
Many years later, the same newspaper would treat America to a series of cutesy essays diminishing the horrors of Communism called “The Red Century.” Did you know women in the Soviet Union had full voting rights by 1917? Did you know they had no-fault divorce? Guaranteed health care and job? A free education? Women in Eastern bloc countries even had better sex than Americans!
What’s more important than free health care and income equality in a “democracy?” One wonders why millions of people risked their lives to escape such utopias. “Although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy,” noted Kristen Ghodsee in The New York Times, who teaches what I imagine is advanced gibberish at the University of Pennsylvania, “Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.”
Communist women were free to vote for the Communist candidates and then free to go to a job provided by the Communist state and then they were free to stand on long lines for food or shoes at the Communist-run shop. Self-sufficiency, indeed.
Read more....
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
Brainwashing in communism
Brainwashing and communism are almost synonymous, because communism would have died long ago without brainwashing; brainwashing developed to its peak under communism.
The two biggest communist countries were the Soviet Union and China (1949-1976). In communism, the euphemism for brainwashing is “propaganda”. For an overview of how it worked in the Soviet Union, click here: Propaganda in the Soviet Union. For a highlight of how it worked in Communist China, click here: Propaganda in Communist China.
I grew up in Communist China. So I know firsthand how brainwashing worked over there. Let me give you my personal perspective with two key points:
(1) There are two departments with highest priority in the CPC (Communist Party of China): Propaganda Department (or PR in the West) and Organization Department (or HR in the West). The former had complete control of the media. Because everything belonged to the public, it then belonged to the CPC, giving these two departments complete control of virtually everything in China.
(2) Because communism was de facto feudalism in mask in China, everything was built on falsehoods, from the notion of leaders “serving the people” (vs. self-serving) to the practice of calling the people at the bottom (i.e. the workers, peasants, and the soldiers) the “masters”.
How was it possible to perpetuate such massive falsehoods necessary for communism to survive? Propaganda! Here is a big example: in 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward campaign. It was a total disaster! As a result, tens of millions of people starved to death from 1960 to 1962. But the communist propaganda machine spun it as a “3-year natural disaster”.
“Tell a lie 1,000 times and it will become the truth.” Unfortunately, you can fool some people all of the time, or all the people some of the time. But fortunately, you can’t fool all the people all of the time. Today, there exist only two communist countries: Cuba and North Korea. They are the worst on earth! All others have painfully failed and changed.
China is no longer a communist country! China embraced capitalism big time after Mao died in 1976 and found her own way of success, such as without blindly embracing democracy as Russia did. As a result, China is now well on her way to becoming the largest economy on earth by 2030, while Russia lags far behind. For more, read: Emerging Economies: An Overview from 30,000 feet.
Brainwashing in democracy
Brainwashing in democracy is not as obvious as in communism. So it’s time to have a serious discussion about it.
“Crystallizing public opinion”
In 1922, Walter Lippmann published his book “Public Opinion”, which offered an incisive psychological and sociological examination of the emotional, irrational, herd-conformity factors that contribute to people’s opinions.
In 1923, Edward Bernays (pictured left) published his book “Crystallizing Public Opinion”, in which he argues that “crystallizing public opinion” is essential to a democratic government of large-scale nations: to “govern” a vastly disparate people, you have to unify their minds. Bernays criticized Lippmann for knowing the public mind so well, but failing to use that knowledge to manipulate the mind. Bernays spent a long career creating the opinion-making machinery, which would provide the “news” that would become the “history” of the 20th century. The engineered perceptions, not reality, provide the carefully crafted contents of people’s “public opinions”.
“Creating a media event,” Bernays counsels his clients, “is something that disrupts the normal flow of public attention. I will show you how to craft that event to direct public opinion along the channels that serve your purposes.”
America’s media reports on a stage-managed theater, which they believe to be “events”. The events are carefully crafted by PR counsels, like Bernays, to generate exactly the media “take” that results. The media buys the illusion, and then does the work of selling it to the public. When interviewed in 1990, Bernays, then nearly 100 years old, told Stuart Ewen (who wrote the introduction to a recent reprinting of “Crystallizing Public Opinion”), “We, PR counsels, have had no direct contact with the mass media for about 50 years. The job of a PR counsel is to instruct a client on how to take actions that just interrupt the continuity of life in some way to bring about the desired media response.”
It is the media whose opinions are manipulated in the first place. They believe they are reporting and editorializing on “news”. But “news” is the creation of media events that induce the desired public opinions, first in the media, then in the masses.
To the delight of the reigning power structure, most people assume the Enlightenment ideal that people form their opinions from evidence and hold those opinions “rationally”, subject to alteration when contrary evidence comes to light. In fact, almost all people are selectively fed their opinions by “authorities”, or the media, and they cling to their “opinions” with blind devotion rather than base them tentatively on rational evidence. Ask them to justify their opinions and you will get a defensive rant, simply regurgitating the “opinion” that has been fed to them; they will often act not unlike an angry monkey jumping around threateningly. You’ll likely not get a cool rational explanation of the evidence and logic that supports belief in one conclusion and weakens belief in alternate conclusions.
Read more.... Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
LinksBrainwashing and communism are almost synonymous, because communism would have died long ago without brainwashing; brainwashing developed to its peak under communism.
The two biggest communist countries were the Soviet Union and China (1949-1976). In communism, the euphemism for brainwashing is “propaganda”. For an overview of how it worked in the Soviet Union, click here: Propaganda in the Soviet Union. For a highlight of how it worked in Communist China, click here: Propaganda in Communist China.
I grew up in Communist China. So I know firsthand how brainwashing worked over there. Let me give you my personal perspective with two key points:
(1) There are two departments with highest priority in the CPC (Communist Party of China): Propaganda Department (or PR in the West) and Organization Department (or HR in the West). The former had complete control of the media. Because everything belonged to the public, it then belonged to the CPC, giving these two departments complete control of virtually everything in China.
(2) Because communism was de facto feudalism in mask in China, everything was built on falsehoods, from the notion of leaders “serving the people” (vs. self-serving) to the practice of calling the people at the bottom (i.e. the workers, peasants, and the soldiers) the “masters”.
How was it possible to perpetuate such massive falsehoods necessary for communism to survive? Propaganda! Here is a big example: in 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward campaign. It was a total disaster! As a result, tens of millions of people starved to death from 1960 to 1962. But the communist propaganda machine spun it as a “3-year natural disaster”.
“Tell a lie 1,000 times and it will become the truth.” Unfortunately, you can fool some people all of the time, or all the people some of the time. But fortunately, you can’t fool all the people all of the time. Today, there exist only two communist countries: Cuba and North Korea. They are the worst on earth! All others have painfully failed and changed.
China is no longer a communist country! China embraced capitalism big time after Mao died in 1976 and found her own way of success, such as without blindly embracing democracy as Russia did. As a result, China is now well on her way to becoming the largest economy on earth by 2030, while Russia lags far behind. For more, read: Emerging Economies: An Overview from 30,000 feet.
Brainwashing in democracy
Brainwashing in democracy is not as obvious as in communism. So it’s time to have a serious discussion about it.
“Crystallizing public opinion”
In 1922, Walter Lippmann published his book “Public Opinion”, which offered an incisive psychological and sociological examination of the emotional, irrational, herd-conformity factors that contribute to people’s opinions.
“Creating a media event,” Bernays counsels his clients, “is something that disrupts the normal flow of public attention. I will show you how to craft that event to direct public opinion along the channels that serve your purposes.”
America’s media reports on a stage-managed theater, which they believe to be “events”. The events are carefully crafted by PR counsels, like Bernays, to generate exactly the media “take” that results. The media buys the illusion, and then does the work of selling it to the public. When interviewed in 1990, Bernays, then nearly 100 years old, told Stuart Ewen (who wrote the introduction to a recent reprinting of “Crystallizing Public Opinion”), “We, PR counsels, have had no direct contact with the mass media for about 50 years. The job of a PR counsel is to instruct a client on how to take actions that just interrupt the continuity of life in some way to bring about the desired media response.”
It is the media whose opinions are manipulated in the first place. They believe they are reporting and editorializing on “news”. But “news” is the creation of media events that induce the desired public opinions, first in the media, then in the masses.
To the delight of the reigning power structure, most people assume the Enlightenment ideal that people form their opinions from evidence and hold those opinions “rationally”, subject to alteration when contrary evidence comes to light. In fact, almost all people are selectively fed their opinions by “authorities”, or the media, and they cling to their “opinions” with blind devotion rather than base them tentatively on rational evidence. Ask them to justify their opinions and you will get a defensive rant, simply regurgitating the “opinion” that has been fed to them; they will often act not unlike an angry monkey jumping around threateningly. You’ll likely not get a cool rational explanation of the evidence and logic that supports belief in one conclusion and weakens belief in alternate conclusions.
Read more.... Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
