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I think right wing propaganda creates enemies of the State and I certainly dont believe trained monkeys are immune to it.No.Aren't you an enemy of the State?And propaganda can be used by enemies of the state to shape public perceptions.It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.
Alex Carey
A recent example is the sound of a crying child and words on the screen asking questions of the viewer...."Do you care about children??"
If you look at my profile you'll know what I am.
Unless you think US military Special Operations training creates enemies of the state.
So you think National Defense is rightwing???I think right wing propaganda creates enemies of the State and I certainly dont believe trained monkeys are immune to it.No.Aren't you an enemy of the State?And propaganda can be used by enemies of the state to shape public perceptions.It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.
Alex Carey
A recent example is the sound of a crying child and words on the screen asking questions of the viewer...."Do you care about children??"
If you look at my profile you'll know what I am.
Unless you think US military Special Operations training creates enemies of the state.
That was not even insinuated.So you think National Defense is rightwing???I think right wing propaganda creates enemies of the State and I certainly dont believe trained monkeys are immune to it.No.Aren't you an enemy of the State?And propaganda can be used by enemies of the state to shape public perceptions.It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.
Alex Carey
A recent example is the sound of a crying child and words on the screen asking questions of the viewer...."Do you care about children??"
If you look at my profile you'll know what I am.
Unless you think US military Special Operations training creates enemies of the state.
Duly noted.
No.Aren't you an enemy of the State?
No.
If you look at my profile you'll know what I am.
Unless you think US military Special Operations training creates enemies of the state.
Democrats keep repeating the lie that ICE is against immigration.
This is Communist propaganda.
Notice how this Communist/Democrat tried to prevent answers.
No.....I reside in the US.No.
If you look at my profile you'll know what I am.
Unless you think US military Special Operations training creates enemies of the state.
Do you reside in the UK? Or from the UK?
The left feels now that they don't have to be civil. Now they feel that you don't have the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
It's not always easy to spot a Communist.
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
Brainwashing in communismLinks
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
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
Are you equating Edward Bernays with communism?
His use of media to shape opinions is pretty much the same.
The left feels now that they don't have to be civil. Now they feel that you don't have the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
This is the kind of right wing propaganda that I'm talking about.
It's not always easy to spot a Communist.
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
Brainwashing in communismLinks
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
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
Are you equating Edward Bernays with communism?
His use of media to shape opinions is pretty much the same.
Propaganda is propaganda, the purpose of its use is the distinguishing characteristic.
Bernays used it at the behest of our capitalist overlords.
This is the type of thing Marx warned about happening generally in a capitalist society. We overthrew a society ruled by heredity and divine right and replaced it with one ruled by economic rulers. A small step for humanity but by no means panacea.
As a liberal and a Marxist I have long been critical of Bernays and his techniques.
I am surprised that you would include Bernays in your little communist witch hunt given his contribution to facilitating the rise of an economic powerhouse that you were willing to put your life on the line for. Greatest country in the world, am I right?
It's not always easy to spot a Communist.
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
Brainwashing in communismLinks
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
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
It's not always easy to spot a Communist.
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
Brainwashing in communismLinks
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
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
I would be more concerned about conservative fascists as they are everywhere. Republicans are the downfall of America.
The left feels now that they don't have to be civil. Now they feel that you don't have the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
This is the kind of right wing propaganda that I'm talking about.
It's not always easy to spot a Communist.
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
Brainwashing in communismLinks
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
Propaganda in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
Propaganda: Brainwashing in Communism and in Democracy
The Left's Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
Are you equating Edward Bernays with communism?
His use of media to shape opinions is pretty much the same.
Propaganda is propaganda, the purpose of its use is the distinguishing characteristic.
Bernays used it at the behest of our capitalist overlords.
This is the type of thing Marx warned about happening generally in a capitalist society. We overthrew a society ruled by heredity and divine right and replaced it with one ruled by economic rulers. A small step for humanity but by no means panacea.
As a liberal and a Marxist I have long been critical of Bernays and his techniques.
I am surprised that you would include Bernays in your little communist witch hunt given his contribution to facilitating the rise of an economic powerhouse that you were willing to put your life on the line for. Greatest country in the world, am I right?
You're showing your commie roots.
You have a problem with profit. You find it problematic.
Nevermind the fact that profit is the engine that drives our economy.
You think a strong economy is an evil thing.
