8 ms·

I like how western people label propaganda anything that was made outside of the US

Swizec 9y ago
As someone born during a transition from "democracy where communist party gets all the seats every time because everybody loves their glorious leader Tito" to real democracy, I can tell you from personal experience that there was shitloads of propaganda in everything my parents and grandparents had access to. I've read books and comics from the 50s and 60s in Yugoslavia and I can tell you that the Communist Party can do no wrong, the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes, and Tito himself was a poor lad who rose from nothing to ultimate power just because of how awesome he is. And of course we all are equal in everything, if someone feels unequal or god forbid better then they are stealing and robbing and doing bad things. The history books I was taught from in the 90s and 00s painted a very different picture.
- llukas 9y ago
  C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted. Today's propaganda is hidden as organic voices of different organizations and you need to do some digging to see if org is genuine or someone is pulling the strings.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    > C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted. In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at schools. At least according to my mum, she never even found out about all the mass graves and other attrocities until after Yugoslavia fell apart. Partisans being the absolute good guys was just the accepted default.
    - jerry40 9y ago
      It was a war, wasn't it? Millions and millions have died, we just can't imagine what was happening at that horrible period. Now it is very easy to say "I would never do THAT!", but who knows.
    - llukas 9y ago
      At least in Poland there was "official" truth (taught at shools/media) and one that was a bit closer to reality that was taught at (most) homes. I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.
      - Swizec 9y ago
        Yeah the tricky part of Yugoslavia is that when our king announced alliance with Hitler, we executed a civil coup and forced the king to flee to the UK. Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate. Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis. What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.
        pandaman 9y ago
        "Whites" are loyalists. In Slavic languages "white" stands for "pristine, unsullied" and in the context of a revolutionary civil war refers to the side, which remained loyal to the government being overthrown.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    You vastly underestimate the volume and dimensions of proper totalitarian propaganda, like Soviet one. It is literally everywhere. You think stuff like "hidden as organic voices of different organizations" was invented recently? That's just the basics, Soviets had that in early 1930th when there were letters from workers and peasants demanding that the party would take care of Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors or whoever was the traitor du jour that day. It's something they have done for decades, and they did much more. You think you'd be able to tell truth from lie in such environment - unless you are spectacularly bright genius, you'd probably not able to. You may identify some lies, but definitely not all of them, and would be definitely driven to believe into a lot of things that were either distorted or completely false. In an environment where nearly all information sources were controlled (except for rumors and foreign radio-"voices") it would be very hard to discern and avoid it.
    - Swizec 9y ago
      As an anecdata of just how tight this control was, my high school professor told us stories of how he used to smuggle rock'n'roll CDs into the country in the 60s and 70s. Selling outside music was illegal and he could leave the country regularly without suspicion because he had family in Italy.
      - mb_72 9y ago
        I think it's much more likely he was smuggling vinyl, unless the smuggling was also done via a time machine, but I get your point! My wife (Estonian) had an uncle who was a respected yachtsman during the Soviet occupation, and who invariably came back from his trips with lots of 'subversive' albums. It put a different perspective on music I'd had ready access to growing up in Australia, for example Genesis' 'Invisible Touch' - I remember biking to the record store and buying it with (obvious) great ease and some pleasure. My wife told me this album was one she heard after her uncle smuggled it into Estonia, and it was copied by her Dad onto open-reel tape. The story behind the 'how and when' of hearing the music really brought home the difference between being part of the USSR and not.
  - dsego 9y ago
    Astroturfing.
- lqdc13 9y ago
  And yet these are not good examples of that. I've definitely read books that had propaganda though. Mostly by marshak. In US they had Captain America so it balances out.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Not only Captain America. They had everybody from Horatio Alger to Joseph McCarthy, all the tele-evangelists and their ilk, all their popular movies, books, comics, tv shows etc with overly simplistic morality plays and nationalistic narrative etc. Even the 60s rock n' rollers just added some tamed dissent to an otherwise hook line and sinker adoption of the "american dream", all the way to Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and so on. It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Rambo? Rambo is luridly anti-government.
      - bitwize 9y ago
        First Blood was. The sequels? not so much...
        tptacek 9y ago
        In Rambo II, the government is actively concealing the existence of Vietnam POWs, and the movie ends with Rambo threatening a government official.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        It doesn't have to be pro-government to be pro-US, pro-national interests and pro-national ideology, in other words to promote all the same that those in power promote and evangelize. On the contrary, "anti-government" is the official party line in an era when even the President (Reagan), in his inaugural address says: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.""
- danharaj 9y ago
  The United States teaches a lot of propaganda about so much of its history. The most salient example being the veneration of the Founding Fathers as if they were saints when many of them were brutal slave owners and serial rapists.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- e12e 9y ago
  > the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes Right. And Superman is of course built like, well Superman, and commits no war crimes (at least in early DC universe). Of course there's propaganda on both sides - then and now.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes. Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect. And then we think how could they be so dumb? We're just as dumb now, we just don't know it yet. A rare opportunity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe is that a lot of us have access to both the pre- and post- truth and can see the difference.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes. Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect. I think it's the opposite, at least for the old soviet regimes -- and I've read several accounts that match that. People didn't believe what the party said, and knew perfectly well what was going on, they just pretended to agree (for obvious reasons). They also made jokes (very popular ones) that clearly show a good understanding of the politics and propaganda mechanisms. Propaganda of that kind only worked at the early years (when it wasn't pure propaganda, but people also legitimately thought, some of the leadership included) that things are going forward in the right direction. So, when we ask "how could they be so dumb?" the answer is simple: they weren't.
      - Swizec 9y ago
        As always, it worked much better on the kids than on the parents. My great grandparents didn't believe most of the propaganda. My grandparents are pretty sure Tito gave them a nice cushy life. My parents know for a fact that nice lives were had, but thought that maybe it's not cool that people who speak against the party go to jail and that all the really nice stuff can only be bought in Italy and Austria. They also think that maybe those hippies in the America were onto something. Hence regime fell. Aided greatly by the overarching global political climate of the late 80's. My generation is pretty sure modern capitalism is the savior and the only way to prosperity. The cycle continues. What will our kids believe? Who knows. But it's definitely going to involve the idea that overpriced organic artisanal foods are the only thing worth putting in your body.
- bhauer 9y ago
  Thanks. There is a lot of whataboutism in the replies to your message.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    God forbid we consider both sides of a situation. We must only condemn one unilaterally, and never put both (or more) in perspective. Lest we fell pray to the modern day thought crime of whataboutism, of course.
- dsego 9y ago
  And you are sure there wasn't even a tiny bit of revisionism in those books from the 90s.
kpxxx3 9y ago
Or maybe because this just is actual propaganda. No where here is anyone saying the Western world did not produce propaganda. That's a straw man all in your puny brain.
mc32 9y ago
Uhhm, Russia is part of the "west" unless you think they are not --but even Japan is considered "western" in economic contexts, but regardless, most Russians consider themselves western (as would most Europeans consider them). In addition, the word "propaganda" didn't have much negative connotation in Russia. In many contexts it has similar connotation to the word "advertising" in English --which depending on context can seem negative, or positive, but many times just descriptive.
alsetmusic 9y ago
> I like how western people label propaganda anything that was made outside of the US I grew up during the days of GI Joe cartoons. A while back, we watched the GI Joe tv movie for a laugh. My gf and I couldn't finish it because it was essentially Cold War propaganda for kids. A lot of the primary villains were foreign, the heroes were as stereotypical American as they could get, and the plot revolved around an energy crisis or something along those lines. It was offensive, considering that it was targeting children. It was political indoctrination. Also, I remember an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks that was anchored around the Berlin Wall. Again, the cartoon was instructing young viewers about the dangers of a foreign government. Not what I would consider appropriate for a seven year old kid's entertainment.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  There are still many, many propaganda films being made in the US, and not just for kids but for adults as well. There are so many movies and shows glorifying the US military and spies, and making evil caricatures of foreign enemies. Some films are essentially recruitment films for the US military, and they even play overt military recruitment ads before feature films in theaters. Political campaigns are also essentially propaganda, as are what's put out by the PR departments of the military, Department of State, White House, think tanks, and even corporations. I almost never see any of this pointed out, much less questioned in the US media. It's like they're either not even aware of it or don't care. They freak out over Russian, Chinese, or North Korean propaganda, though.
  - sanbor 9y ago
    > I almost never see any of this pointed out, much less questioned in the US media. It's like they're either not even aware of it or don't care. It should be pointed out by people first. I'm from Argentina but I was in US earlier this year. Someone was complaining about how the Russians influenced the election. I asked if he considered that in the last 50 years USA is well known for interfering in other countries politics. That his complaint was like a bully crying of having been bullied. He told me that it was a good point and didn't considered before. He is an smart and informed person but for some reason didn't saw earlier how his country affects other countries. Just the other way around.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Propaganda in the Soviet Union didn't have negative connotation, just like it doesn't have a negative connotation in china today. It is like blaming the west for calling the "Chinese communist party" communists even though communist is in their name. Many accusations of western media bias follow that pattern.
- xor1 9y ago
  Propaganda never has a negative connotation within the country that produces it so long as it's centered around ideologies supported by the majority of the population, that's the entire point. The tone of your post makes me think that you probably don't even recognize propaganda in the context of your own nation.
  - dilemma 9y ago
    The parent talks about the term "propaganda". In the West, the word has bad connotations and we use terms like public relations instead. In China, "propaganda" is used in the same way as we use "public relations", both by government and private enterprise.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    They actually "call" it propaganda, while in the west they call it media (since the government doesn't control it, when it is government PR, they call it propaganda as well). This is not about recognizing something or not, but if the producer of X says it is X, why the f*ck would you not believe them?
mooseburger 9y ago
The difference is that these books were produced by the Soviet government. Meanwhile, stuff like G.I. Joe and Captain America were made through free enterprise. Any government trying so hard to influence the public's opinion of it is suspect in my eyes.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Any movie that makes use of military helicopters and other heavy military equipment is going to have at least some US propaganda in it. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/07/201271142016284778.html http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/07/20... http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-military-movies-20110821 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-... http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-complex-hollywood-pentagon-relationship-battleship-zero-dark-thirty/ http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-compl...
- tnzn 9y ago
  What the hell is that? Are there people in HN who believe a propaganda from the state is any different from a propaganda from big corporations ?
  - mooseburger 9y ago
    I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but yes, there is something different about the Soviet government producing children's books, and Hasbro deciding to produce G.I. Joe action figures because it identified a sales opportunity. I think the main thing is, that in the Soviet example, I'm not clear that there was a choice to not give the books to your children (maybe there was, I'm not sure). Whereas with G.I. Joe, Captain America, et. al. actually buying the toys/comics is voluntary, notwithstanding the powerful effect of advertising. There's also the fact the creators of G.I. Joe were not later executed for nonsense reasons.
taneq 9y ago
Most things made outside of the US are propaganda. Most things made inside the US are propaganda too. Basically it's all propaganda.
int_19h 9y ago
As a Soviet kid, I can assure you that there was tons of propaganda in the books that I've read as a child. Some was pretty blatant, like the various short stories about Lenin (all adding up to how awesome he was in various respects). Some was more subtle, like the Neznaika books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno) - the second one in the series was basically a communist utopia for kids, and the third one was a capitalist dystopia (that ends up with a communist revolution). For another example, the Russian adaptation of the Wizard of Oz, which basically diverged entirely after the first book, ended the series with an invasion and occupation of Oz by mind-controlling slavery-practicing aliens (yep, the kind that come on spaceships), which ends up in a slave uprising with strong socialist overtones in the messaging.
- kirillkh 9y ago
  To be fair, I don't recall any propaganda in the first 5 of books in the Wizard of Oz series (which, admittedly, could be explained by its subtlety), and the later ones were much less popular than the first. Personally, I didn't read the 6th (and the last) one.
jimmies 9y ago
I was born in late 1980 in North Vietnam, at that time the society and education system was still under the heavy influence of the Soviet-era propaganda. Other than the USSR, Vietnam at the time was also under some influence from the communist China as well. For fictional novels, we had Russian books such as Nought the Seafarer, Dr. Aibolit, The Copper Jar of Old Khottabych, The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends, and many other books translated to Vietnamese. They were printed in the USSR in beautiful, high-quality paper hardcovers, and were a joy to read and was the inspiration for my destitute childhood. Even Vietnamese children literature were also quite enjoyable. For instance, De Men Phieu Luu Ky (Diary of a cricket) were about adventures of a cricket that found the traditional life boring, broke through and went exploring new places. I mostly find them inspiring and non-offensive even now (I am currently living in the US and had a liberal college and post-graduate education in the US). Adult literature was much more blatantly brainwashing. I don't know about what happened in China and Russia, but I don't feel that western children literature books were under scrutiny in Vietnam, I still remember vividly my dad has a stash full of children's books such as Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, 1001 Arabian nights,... they were all available in Vietnamese under the mainstream publication, although the books looked awful cosmetically, because they were printed and bound domestically. For non-fictional books, I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young. In the Russian side, Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman was the one book that I would read and read again. On the Chinese side, One Hundred Thousand Whys is another series of books that were surprisingly well written. They have many of those on different topics such as Maths, Physics, Literature, Biology, Medicine, Astrology,... each book has several hundreds of answers to basic and advanced topics written in an accessible manner. It was kinda my childhood Wikipedia. That was my anecdotal experience. Maybe it wasn't offensive, maybe I was used to it, or maybe I was romanticizing my uneventful, brainwashed childhood.
- kirillkh 9y ago
  > I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young This made me curious - am I understanding correctly that you read those books in Russian? How did you pick up enough Russian to reach that level?
Bakary 9y ago
"Western" is too big of a category to be meaningful here. In several large European countries US material is viewed with mistrust.
deleted 9y ago
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empressplay 9y ago
As a Canadian who grew up watching American cartoons, I can say with complete certainty Soviet Union wasn't alone in using media to indoctrinate their children.
- viraptor 9y ago
  Doesn't almost every popular character from American cartoons end up in the army in at least one episode? I mean, from Johnny Bravo to Bugs Bunny to Daffy Duck to Tom and Jerry... Go as far in the past as you want. I've never seen this in cartoons from other countries.

As someone born during a transition from "democracy where communist party gets all the seats every time because everybody loves their glorious leader Tito" to real democracy, I can tell you from personal experience that there was shitloads of propaganda in everything my parents and grandparents had access to. I've read books and comics from the 50s and 60s in Yugoslavia and I can tell you that the Communist Party can do no wrong, the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes, and Tito himself was a poor lad who rose from nothing to ultimate power just because of how awesome he is. And of course we all are equal in everything, if someone feels unequal or god forbid better then they are stealing and robbing and doing bad things. The history books I was taught from in the 90s and 00s painted a very different picture.

llukas 9y ago
C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted. Today's propaganda is hidden as organic voices of different organizations and you need to do some digging to see if org is genuine or someone is pulling the strings.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted. In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at schools. At least according to my mum, she never even found out about all the mass graves and other attrocities until after Yugoslavia fell apart. Partisans being the absolute good guys was just the accepted default.
  - jerry40 9y ago
    It was a war, wasn't it? Millions and millions have died, we just can't imagine what was happening at that horrible period. Now it is very easy to say "I would never do THAT!", but who knows.
  - llukas 9y ago
    At least in Poland there was "official" truth (taught at shools/media) and one that was a bit closer to reality that was taught at (most) homes. I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.
    - Swizec 9y ago
      Yeah the tricky part of Yugoslavia is that when our king announced alliance with Hitler, we executed a civil coup and forced the king to flee to the UK. Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate. Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis. What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.
      - pandaman 9y ago
        "Whites" are loyalists. In Slavic languages "white" stands for "pristine, unsullied" and in the context of a revolutionary civil war refers to the side, which remained loyal to the government being overthrown.
- smsm42 9y ago
  You vastly underestimate the volume and dimensions of proper totalitarian propaganda, like Soviet one. It is literally everywhere. You think stuff like "hidden as organic voices of different organizations" was invented recently? That's just the basics, Soviets had that in early 1930th when there were letters from workers and peasants demanding that the party would take care of Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors or whoever was the traitor du jour that day. It's something they have done for decades, and they did much more. You think you'd be able to tell truth from lie in such environment - unless you are spectacularly bright genius, you'd probably not able to. You may identify some lies, but definitely not all of them, and would be definitely driven to believe into a lot of things that were either distorted or completely false. In an environment where nearly all information sources were controlled (except for rumors and foreign radio-"voices") it would be very hard to discern and avoid it.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    As an anecdata of just how tight this control was, my high school professor told us stories of how he used to smuggle rock'n'roll CDs into the country in the 60s and 70s. Selling outside music was illegal and he could leave the country regularly without suspicion because he had family in Italy.
    - mb_72 9y ago
      I think it's much more likely he was smuggling vinyl, unless the smuggling was also done via a time machine, but I get your point! My wife (Estonian) had an uncle who was a respected yachtsman during the Soviet occupation, and who invariably came back from his trips with lots of 'subversive' albums. It put a different perspective on music I'd had ready access to growing up in Australia, for example Genesis' 'Invisible Touch' - I remember biking to the record store and buying it with (obvious) great ease and some pleasure. My wife told me this album was one she heard after her uncle smuggled it into Estonia, and it was copied by her Dad onto open-reel tape. The story behind the 'how and when' of hearing the music really brought home the difference between being part of the USSR and not.
- dsego 9y ago
  Astroturfing.
lqdc13 9y ago
And yet these are not good examples of that. I've definitely read books that had propaganda though. Mostly by marshak. In US they had Captain America so it balances out.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Not only Captain America. They had everybody from Horatio Alger to Joseph McCarthy, all the tele-evangelists and their ilk, all their popular movies, books, comics, tv shows etc with overly simplistic morality plays and nationalistic narrative etc. Even the 60s rock n' rollers just added some tamed dissent to an otherwise hook line and sinker adoption of the "american dream", all the way to Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and so on. It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Rambo? Rambo is luridly anti-government.
    - bitwize 9y ago
      First Blood was. The sequels? not so much...
      - tptacek 9y ago
        In Rambo II, the government is actively concealing the existence of Vietnam POWs, and the movie ends with Rambo threatening a government official.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      It doesn't have to be pro-government to be pro-US, pro-national interests and pro-national ideology, in other words to promote all the same that those in power promote and evangelize. On the contrary, "anti-government" is the official party line in an era when even the President (Reagan), in his inaugural address says: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.""
danharaj 9y ago
The United States teaches a lot of propaganda about so much of its history. The most salient example being the veneration of the Founding Fathers as if they were saints when many of them were brutal slave owners and serial rapists.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
e12e 9y ago
> the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes Right. And Superman is of course built like, well Superman, and commits no war crimes (at least in early DC universe). Of course there's propaganda on both sides - then and now.
- Swizec 9y ago
  Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes. Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect. And then we think how could they be so dumb? We're just as dumb now, we just don't know it yet. A rare opportunity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe is that a lot of us have access to both the pre- and post- truth and can see the difference.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes. Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect. I think it's the opposite, at least for the old soviet regimes -- and I've read several accounts that match that. People didn't believe what the party said, and knew perfectly well what was going on, they just pretended to agree (for obvious reasons). They also made jokes (very popular ones) that clearly show a good understanding of the politics and propaganda mechanisms. Propaganda of that kind only worked at the early years (when it wasn't pure propaganda, but people also legitimately thought, some of the leadership included) that things are going forward in the right direction. So, when we ask "how could they be so dumb?" the answer is simple: they weren't.
    - Swizec 9y ago
      As always, it worked much better on the kids than on the parents. My great grandparents didn't believe most of the propaganda. My grandparents are pretty sure Tito gave them a nice cushy life. My parents know for a fact that nice lives were had, but thought that maybe it's not cool that people who speak against the party go to jail and that all the really nice stuff can only be bought in Italy and Austria. They also think that maybe those hippies in the America were onto something. Hence regime fell. Aided greatly by the overarching global political climate of the late 80's. My generation is pretty sure modern capitalism is the savior and the only way to prosperity. The cycle continues. What will our kids believe? Who knows. But it's definitely going to involve the idea that overpriced organic artisanal foods are the only thing worth putting in your body.
bhauer 9y ago
Thanks. There is a lot of whataboutism in the replies to your message.
- coldtea 9y ago
  God forbid we consider both sides of a situation. We must only condemn one unilaterally, and never put both (or more) in perspective. Lest we fell pray to the modern day thought crime of whataboutism, of course.
dsego 9y ago
And you are sure there wasn't even a tiny bit of revisionism in those books from the 90s.

kpxxx3 9y ago

Or maybe because this just is actual propaganda. No where here is anyone saying the Western world did not produce propaganda. That's a straw man all in your puny brain.

mc32 9y ago

Uhhm, Russia is part of the "west" unless you think they are not --but even Japan is considered "western" in economic contexts, but regardless, most Russians consider themselves western (as would most Europeans consider them). In addition, the word "propaganda" didn't have much negative connotation in Russia. In many contexts it has similar connotation to the word "advertising" in English --which depending on context can seem negative, or positive, but many times just descriptive.

alsetmusic 9y ago

> I like how western people label propaganda anything that was made outside of the US I grew up during the days of GI Joe cartoons. A while back, we watched the GI Joe tv movie for a laugh. My gf and I couldn't finish it because it was essentially Cold War propaganda for kids. A lot of the primary villains were foreign, the heroes were as stereotypical American as they could get, and the plot revolved around an energy crisis or something along those lines. It was offensive, considering that it was targeting children. It was political indoctrination. Also, I remember an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks that was anchored around the Berlin Wall. Again, the cartoon was instructing young viewers about the dangers of a foreign government. Not what I would consider appropriate for a seven year old kid's entertainment.

pmoriarty 9y ago
There are still many, many propaganda films being made in the US, and not just for kids but for adults as well. There are so many movies and shows glorifying the US military and spies, and making evil caricatures of foreign enemies. Some films are essentially recruitment films for the US military, and they even play overt military recruitment ads before feature films in theaters. Political campaigns are also essentially propaganda, as are what's put out by the PR departments of the military, Department of State, White House, think tanks, and even corporations. I almost never see any of this pointed out, much less questioned in the US media. It's like they're either not even aware of it or don't care. They freak out over Russian, Chinese, or North Korean propaganda, though.
- sanbor 9y ago
  > I almost never see any of this pointed out, much less questioned in the US media. It's like they're either not even aware of it or don't care. It should be pointed out by people first. I'm from Argentina but I was in US earlier this year. Someone was complaining about how the Russians influenced the election. I asked if he considered that in the last 50 years USA is well known for interfering in other countries politics. That his complaint was like a bully crying of having been bullied. He told me that it was a good point and didn't considered before. He is an smart and informed person but for some reason didn't saw earlier how his country affects other countries. Just the other way around.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Propaganda in the Soviet Union didn't have negative connotation, just like it doesn't have a negative connotation in china today. It is like blaming the west for calling the "Chinese communist party" communists even though communist is in their name. Many accusations of western media bias follow that pattern.

xor1 9y ago
Propaganda never has a negative connotation within the country that produces it so long as it's centered around ideologies supported by the majority of the population, that's the entire point. The tone of your post makes me think that you probably don't even recognize propaganda in the context of your own nation.
- dilemma 9y ago
  The parent talks about the term "propaganda". In the West, the word has bad connotations and we use terms like public relations instead. In China, "propaganda" is used in the same way as we use "public relations", both by government and private enterprise.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  They actually "call" it propaganda, while in the west they call it media (since the government doesn't control it, when it is government PR, they call it propaganda as well). This is not about recognizing something or not, but if the producer of X says it is X, why the f*ck would you not believe them?

mooseburger 9y ago

The difference is that these books were produced by the Soviet government. Meanwhile, stuff like G.I. Joe and Captain America were made through free enterprise. Any government trying so hard to influence the public's opinion of it is suspect in my eyes.

mtgx 9y ago
Any movie that makes use of military helicopters and other heavy military equipment is going to have at least some US propaganda in it. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/07/201271142016284778.html http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/07/20... http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-military-movies-20110821 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-... http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-complex-hollywood-pentagon-relationship-battleship-zero-dark-thirty/ http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-compl...
tnzn 9y ago
What the hell is that? Are there people in HN who believe a propaganda from the state is any different from a propaganda from big corporations ?
- mooseburger 9y ago
  I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but yes, there is something different about the Soviet government producing children's books, and Hasbro deciding to produce G.I. Joe action figures because it identified a sales opportunity. I think the main thing is, that in the Soviet example, I'm not clear that there was a choice to not give the books to your children (maybe there was, I'm not sure). Whereas with G.I. Joe, Captain America, et. al. actually buying the toys/comics is voluntary, notwithstanding the powerful effect of advertising. There's also the fact the creators of G.I. Joe were not later executed for nonsense reasons.

taneq 9y ago

Most things made outside of the US are propaganda. Most things made inside the US are propaganda too. Basically it's all propaganda.

int_19h 9y ago

As a Soviet kid, I can assure you that there was tons of propaganda in the books that I've read as a child. Some was pretty blatant, like the various short stories about Lenin (all adding up to how awesome he was in various respects). Some was more subtle, like the Neznaika books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno) - the second one in the series was basically a communist utopia for kids, and the third one was a capitalist dystopia (that ends up with a communist revolution). For another example, the Russian adaptation of the Wizard of Oz, which basically diverged entirely after the first book, ended the series with an invasion and occupation of Oz by mind-controlling slavery-practicing aliens (yep, the kind that come on spaceships), which ends up in a slave uprising with strong socialist overtones in the messaging.

kirillkh 9y ago
To be fair, I don't recall any propaganda in the first 5 of books in the Wizard of Oz series (which, admittedly, could be explained by its subtlety), and the later ones were much less popular than the first. Personally, I didn't read the 6th (and the last) one.

jimmies 9y ago

I was born in late 1980 in North Vietnam, at that time the society and education system was still under the heavy influence of the Soviet-era propaganda. Other than the USSR, Vietnam at the time was also under some influence from the communist China as well. For fictional novels, we had Russian books such as Nought the Seafarer, Dr. Aibolit, The Copper Jar of Old Khottabych, The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends, and many other books translated to Vietnamese. They were printed in the USSR in beautiful, high-quality paper hardcovers, and were a joy to read and was the inspiration for my destitute childhood. Even Vietnamese children literature were also quite enjoyable. For instance, De Men Phieu Luu Ky (Diary of a cricket) were about adventures of a cricket that found the traditional life boring, broke through and went exploring new places. I mostly find them inspiring and non-offensive even now (I am currently living in the US and had a liberal college and post-graduate education in the US). Adult literature was much more blatantly brainwashing. I don't know about what happened in China and Russia, but I don't feel that western children literature books were under scrutiny in Vietnam, I still remember vividly my dad has a stash full of children's books such as Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, 1001 Arabian nights,... they were all available in Vietnamese under the mainstream publication, although the books looked awful cosmetically, because they were printed and bound domestically. For non-fictional books, I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young. In the Russian side, Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman was the one book that I would read and read again. On the Chinese side, One Hundred Thousand Whys is another series of books that were surprisingly well written. They have many of those on different topics such as Maths, Physics, Literature, Biology, Medicine, Astrology,... each book has several hundreds of answers to basic and advanced topics written in an accessible manner. It was kinda my childhood Wikipedia. That was my anecdotal experience. Maybe it wasn't offensive, maybe I was used to it, or maybe I was romanticizing my uneventful, brainwashed childhood.

kirillkh 9y ago
> I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young This made me curious - am I understanding correctly that you read those books in Russian? How did you pick up enough Russian to reach that level?

Bakary 9y ago

"Western" is too big of a category to be meaningful here. In several large European countries US material is viewed with mistrust.

deleted 9y ago

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empressplay 9y ago

As a Canadian who grew up watching American cartoons, I can say with complete certainty Soviet Union wasn't alone in using media to indoctrinate their children.

viraptor 9y ago
Doesn't almost every popular character from American cartoons end up in the army in at least one episode? I mean, from Johnny Bravo to Bugs Bunny to Daffy Duck to Tom and Jerry... Go as far in the past as you want. I've never seen this in cartoons from other countries.