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As somebody who has lived in both countries, I don't think this argument holds any water. While the U.S. government does indeed engage in propaganda, it's like

• grandalf 17y ago
  All this means is that the US has managed to achieve a propaganda state without the explicit threat of force... Do you recall when GWB took office and long time members of the press core were kicked out if they asked tough questions? This happens all the time which is why you don't find certain stories/angles covered in the mainstream press. Consider that Tim Russert was considered the most hard nosed journalist because he had the gumption to ask a tough question or two... usually all he did was quote a few things the person had said in the past and ask them to explain their current claims (which usually turned their faces quite red). If this is hard nosed journalism we're all in deep trouble. Most news today is full of stories that make Americans feel morally superior... stories about how women are mistreated in all sorts of other countries... how politicians are corrupt, and how the economic opportunity stinks (elsewhere). There is also tremendous deference paid to titles and institutions in the US that should not be -- and would not be paid to titles and institutions of another country. Why, for example, should we take the term "Chairman of the Federal Reserve" seriously, but take some other country's "Minister of Economic Affairs" less seriously? All this is part of a media whose purpose is to help Americans feel that they have the moral high ground so that wars can be waged whenever necessary. The media doesn't have to overtly support a war -- in fact it is expected to question it (but by asking the wrong questions). There are a lot of things you decide not to say/think if you expect to be on a national TV show, quoted in a national paper, be appointed to a cabinet post, etc. Why the voluntary censorship? Because all that stuff is such a downer. Why worry about it when we can just order another burger and get free healthcare and feel good about our google searches because google is taking a stand against horrible china. Why would anyone fight these memes when they make everyone so happy? In the US the entrenched interests have been so successful, in fact, that we see all of this as perfectly normal and reasonable.... and, of course, we amplify differences with another country (like China) out of moral superiority and righteous indignation... Nothing makes us feel better than feeling sorrry for some poor victim of a propagandizing state, after all. This isn't a conspiracy (or a conspiracy theory) it's just what you get when entrenched interests flourish in a stable, prosperous country.
  • cturner 17y ago
    Do you recall when GWB took office and long time members of the press core were kicked out if they asked tough questions? Helen Thomas got the cold shoulder for a while, but GWB started asking her questions again to try and gain credibility. The scale is incomparable, which was the point of the parent. All this is part of a media whose purpose is to help Americans feel that they have the moral high ground so that wars can be waged whenever necessary. If you really meant what you said here, it would indeed be a conspiracy theory, despite your insistence that it's not. You would need a lot more evidence than you're supplying to support the sort of assertions that you're making. What the US government does isn't even particularly relevant to the article.
    • deleted 17y ago
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    • joe_the_user 17y ago
      There are two parts to propaganda. How omni-present it is and how believable it is. In the Soviet Union, propaganda was universal but universally disbelieved since people learned to discount it. A mechanism which gives people strong incentive to support the official version in their own words creates much more believable propaganda. If China has mechanism for creating propaganda that is more omnipresent and as believable, then I suppose it has a leg up. But in ways, omnipresence of propaganda can sometimes work against it's believability. Just much, those states which have a powerful central propaganda mechanism can erode their credibility over time, especially when they use it to attempt to dispel things that are directly visible to ordinary people. The USSR's propaganda naturally became less effective as the country's production system fell apart. China's recent economic growth obviously reinforces the credibility of the state there.
    • grandalf 17y ago
      My post was not meant as proof, it was just intended to trigger a thought process in the reader. We make a lot of arbitrary distinctions about the legitimacy of institutions. When we see the leader of an Afghan city state traveling around in an SUV with a bunch of guys with machine guns, we call him a "warlord", yet we offer utmost deference to the US presidential motorcade. Look at it this way, society has winners and losers. Winners generally want to continue being winners, so they end up in control of coercive force (guns, military, etc.) and they end up with the tools of propaganda at their disposal (newspapers, puppet officials). What differentiates one nation's winners from those of another is far less than we tend to think, since much of our "consent" to the status quo is built upon our belief in certain doctrines and institutions. Surely our democracy is worth something, and many of our institutions are worthy of some deference and respect, but so are China's and Mexico's and Iran's... There are a variety of other fallacies which add to our distorted view of the rest of the world, which I could also go into detail about.