Further Musings on Propaganda, Bullshite, and Colonised Minds

Those of us who do fieldwork know that you can't always trust what people, what informers, tell you. When it comes to religion, including nationalist civil religion, people will tell you what they have been socialised to think and say, they will tell you what they think you want to hear, and they will sometimes lie to you. 

Ethnographers, of course, can verify the rhetoric of informers. When they do, they sometimes find that the rhetoric and reality aren't always consistent. They find that someone who tells you they go to church every Sunday doesn't actually go to church every Sunday. 

Historians too have found that primary source material isn't always factually accurate. The Ancient Egyptians, for instance, routinely claimed in documents to have won battles historians and archaeologists know they didn't. American elites claimed that they were in Vietnam to preserve democracy. That they put minority Christians in charge of a Buddhist dominated South Vietnam didn't seem to phase them because they were either demagogues or they had drunk the propaganda flavoured koolaid. British newspapers claimed that the evil Hun was killing Belgian babies during WWI when they weren't. American newspapers claimed Spain bombed the Maine during the Spanish American war when it didn't. Western media claimed Saddam Hussein was killing babies during his invasion of Kuwait when he wasn't. It turned out to be propagandistic bullshite pedelled by someone in the Kuwait court. 

So, as any social scientist knows, there is a lot of bullshite out there and we have to be aware of the role bullshite plays in society, in culture, and in the minds of those who imbibe bullshite without recognising what it is. 

Speaking of colonised by bullshte minds, one can only marvel at the naivete of the non-critical. One can only marvel at the levels of ignorance, intentional or not, and of ommission or commission, intentional or not, among the naive and among true believers. One can only marvel at the intentional or unintentional regurgitation of a mythistory that makes the obvious not obvious and the fiction fact by the naive and the true believer. Only the intentionally blind and those blinded by the bright lights of demagoguery and propaganda, of course, could miss what is obvious, could miss what academics have noted for years, namely that NATO expansion has been a problem in Western and American relations with Russia since 1990, the year the Ukraine came into existence. That so many elide the obvious points up the empirical fact that most people, even the seemingly intelligent, have been colonised by innocent, melodramatic, and manichean propaganda or misinformation which they confuse and conflate with reality. All of this, of course, is not a surprise to those who are critical, those who are able to see through emotional, melodramatic, and manichean bullshite, those who are able to put things in historial context. They know that, to paraphrase what PT Barnum once said is true, a sucker who is made into a sucker by propaganda is born every minute.