Musings on Propaganda...

Propaganda has long been used by states and nation-states to anesthetise and rev up the population. It has, not surprisingly, been used to do both in times of crises and war. I give you the bullshit about the Maine and Spain abusing Cuban women on the plains and the bullshit about evil Huns (Hitler before Hitler) bayoneting Belgian babies, claims that appeared in the mass media before the Spanish American War and during World War I. Both of these forms of propaganda, by the way, were used to manipulate the US into both of those wars.

 

Everyone, of course, uses propaganda from Innocent, the Blessed Virgin Mother America to the Ukraine. In fact, I recently read a report  about Ukraine's hiring of a PR firm, no doubt with American aid, to spin the war for that country in the mass commercial media so to rev up the West in its favour, something made easier by the almost total absence of spin for Russia on the Western corporate media and the almost total absence of those who rightly note the role the US and the Ukraine have played in the advent of the war on the dominant corporate mass media in the US.

 

Given this, one must be skeptical of claims of atrocities in war UNTIL they have been independently verified. One MUST also be cognisant of the fact that in the era of total war EVERYONE commits what are regarded as atrocities including Innocent, the Blessed Mother America. That is the nature of total war. so if past is prologue.
 

For those who prefer to have their emotional chains pulled by propagandistic bullshite, ignore this post. Bliss, after all, is one of the things that comes from a belief in a manichean faith, nationalist or otherwise, where you can spin or parrot notions that you are good and they are evil.