New Improved Explanation of Propaganda

Hey Retief, you should take a (re)medial course on Propaganda 101. When you finish, you should realize that the best way to make people happy, is force them to expect that their lives will be in the crapper.

Realistically, it is not that the media reports always on the bad, it is that the net result of the media's reporting is an extremely negative, suicidal, and depressive condition in the people that watch it. Most people aren't psychologists and don't know much about how a human being can be manipulated through their minds. But they know what they feel, and what they feel is quite depressing when watching the media.

One of the best media manipulations I've ever seen was the Tet Offensive, the victory that broke the camel's back. Another one was just after Baghdad fell, when the media showed cheering and happy Iraqis, to an extent that even Chris Matthews got on stage and said he was wrong about the war. This didn't last, it never was designed to. The media in proping up American morale artificially based upon just what their cameras showed, set up the public for the fatality strike of the terroists.

The media believed in their own propaganda, that is why it is effective at times and incompetent at others (Dan Rather). There's nothing like zealous belief to empower a propaganda campaign.

The media does a good job making the war into one long slog with no end. Every day you hear that some Americans died, and then they tell you all the days that Americans had not yet, yet this record was broken on this day, 5 days after no attacks had been launched. It's a nice little trick to make things endless. It's like tunnel vision, you can't see out of the corners of your eyes.

The media gives you no hope, their job is to crush it. ANd the best way to crush hope is to give people some false hope and then grab them by the balls. Pretty effective. The best way to increase people's morale is to artificially depress their spirits, hopes, and expectations, then report that things were better than we expected. This happened during Iraq's first elections, that was why people were so happy and relieved. They expected worse. Another example of why good propagandists don't believe in their own propaganda, it tends to have bad consequences. The media inadvertently helped the war effort, because they actually believed the first election would be a disaster, it wasn't.

Highs and lows of morale are to be expected in war. There is nothing like the agony of defeat contrasted with the absolute joy of victory. What the media does is to average it out, by averaging out the highs and lows, the person who sees the propaganda does not realize when there are defeats and when there are victories because the same thing he feels when a victory occurs is the same thing he feels when a defeat occurs. This has the effect of fatiguing a man and a woman's morale, their spirit to fight. Military discipline is designed to counter-act negative morale, but civilians do not have this support line.

With some expert tweaking, you can make the baseline tip slightly towards the negative, rather than the positive. So that the perpetual feeling of the reader is in a state of low level depression. If you maintain that long enough, they will suicide. Sort of like keeping someone from sleeping for a week, they will suicide or act otherwise psychotic.

So in conclusion, the media doesn't tell you the whole story because telling the whole story would make people depressed when there is a defeat, and joyous when there is a victory. THis is the natural state of human psychology, it is healthy. The media doesn't tell all the facts because by manipulating propaganda techniques, they can keep the subject population under constant levels of indirect stress that is unnoticeable until a long time has passed.

The military gives us the real goods. So when people die, we feel the agony, but when we take back the weapon that the killers looted off our people, we also feel vindication and joy. This is the natural psychological mentality of a person, highs and lows, joys and sadness. The media very intelligently reports the bad news in such a way that our spirits are depressed, but not depressed low enough that any good news would increase it. Then they forget to tell you the good news, the "victory" portion. SO in effect, you are poisoned and never given the counter-agent. The acid starts to pool and increase, and eventually you die and stop fighting it.

One of the unique techniques to poison someone is through low level doses applied over time, so that someone doesn't notice it right away, attributing it to something harmless. Psychological and propaganda operations are an art as much as a science. It has a deadly elegance to it. Too bad Bush won't use it on his enemies, I'd love to see Bush twist Chirac around his superpower finger. Democrats too.

A lot of the Left believes Bush (Rove) is a master propagandist. They don't know what a "propagandist" is in the first place.

Posted by: Ymarsakar | Jul 10, 2006 10:07:33 AM