4 ms·

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 org

by 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.

by llukas 9y ago

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.