7 ms·

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 r

by 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.

by Swizec 9y ago

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.