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The "Limitations of Propaganda" section is, I think, a bit weak. I want to zero in on this particular point: > To give an illustration, the American attitude t

by roenxi 3y ago

The "Limitations of Propaganda" section is, I think, a bit weak. I want to zero in on this particular point: > To give an illustration, the American attitude toward Germany was not bitterly hostile in the early months of World War I. But when the Lusitania was torpedoed in May 1915, with loss of 128 American lives, anger against the Central Powers mush roomed overnight. This is claimed to be an example of events overruling propaganda. That isn't the right way to think when critically evaluating propaganda: 1) The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. 2) The US is perfectly capable of absorbing ~100 odd deaths and then just moving on. The idea that they aren't is propaganda. 3) The US population has demonstrated relatively little ability to control the military's adventurism. It may have been different pre-WWI, but we should at least suspect someone important thought that they would profit from the US being involved and was trying to fire people up. The US, as in all democracies, have some wickedly effective propagandists who work ceaselessly to shape public opinion. We know for a fact that the media can't cover most events. Historians don't know about most events. Choosing the events that will be admissible in the public conversation is one of the key tools of propaganda.

AnonCoward42 3y ago
> The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. That is the kind of relativism that doesn't hold water. To make it very simple: I value my life higher than yours or mostly anyone else's life. Or with different words I care for my life more than I care for yours. No offence! You can expand that to my family vs some other family, then going on to "tribe" and to country/race, whatever. The further away you get the less I care and doing otherwise involves propaganda. That is also obvious since you need to focus your care. It is en vogue to pretend otherwise and to care for some people you know the least which involves the inversion of care. You care for people you don't know more than you care for people close(r) to you. In a certain environment this is actually easier, but it involves this kind of propaganda, since people are acting against their own good. > We know for a fact that the media can't cover most events. Historians don't know about most events. Choosing the events that will be admissible in the public conversation is one of the key tools of propaganda. This is what I mean with "care more/less". You can't cover all events and therefore you're concentrating on matters closer to you, but with media this comes with a twist of course since they are the carrier of propaganda (intentional or not and true for any).
- notahacker 3y ago
  > The further away you get the less I care and doing otherwise involves propaganda. That is also obvious since you need to focus your care. We're not talking about people caring more about their family and neighbours than someone in Central Africa (or England, since we're talking about WWI) though. We're talking about people being extremely angry about people born hundred or even thousands of miles away that they would never have met dying even further away in circumstances they'd never find themselves in, because the news points out that unlike the much larger number of fellow white English-speaking Christians that might be very distant relatives dying in the same faraway conflict (and on the same boat) they're American...
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Yes, a nation is a thing that unites people via culture, geography, and (more historically) genetics. I'm not sure why that's controversial?
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      Historically speaking, where are you making the cut off point for genetics and in which countries? Only countries that are on the map in 2023?
      - keiferski 3y ago
        I don't understand your question. I'm not making any cut-off point, I just said that it was more common in the past for a citizens of a nation to be genetically linked to each other. Certainly that still applies to many countries today.
        oa335 3y ago
        I’m sorry , I don’t believe that is true. Do you have any sources for your claim? Historically empires had been multi ethnic and multi lingual; with rise of nationalism in mid 1800s onwards we start seeing large population transfers and ethnic cleansing, and forced acculturation, leading to a world today where many modern nation states have only one “ethnic group”. E.g. 150 years ago there used to be many German speaking villages in what is now Poland. There used to be many Turkish speaking locales in Greece, etc etc.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
This presupposes some 'higher power' that is directing everything. The sinking of a passenger liner with 128 lives lost is going to be news with or without higher direction, and we are always tuned to the unusual and particularly gruesome even if the actual harm is minimal in the grand scheme of things. See an airplane crash vs the daily deaths on our roads.
- roenxi 3y ago
  You're counter-supposing that the US goes to war more or less randomly based on how it feels about interesting newspaper articles. Seems unlikely - being outraged is quite easy, I can manage it at least once a week if I go looking for bad news. However, it is quite difficult to sustain an overseas army for extended periods of time and requires reasons, intent and a certain ruthless self interest. It is possible to kill people and see effectively no response [0, 1]. The US public on mass are regularly revealed to be completely horrible. They've looked past countless tragedies because it would be inconvenient to acknowledge them. It happens almost weekly; there is a lot going wrong in the world that the US kinda shrugs off. Much of it their fault to a first or second order approximation. They are totally capable of overlooking 100 murders if they don't also think that there is something to be gained by sending the army out. Consider the situation vs. Iraq as an example. Powerful people wanted the war. As soon as there was a half-plausible narrative they sent troops in. It wasn't the narrative that led to the going in, the narrative removed a blocker to stopping the political forces that were trying to trigger the war. That is very much the layer of the world where propaganda happens. EDIT And just to try and articulate myself a bit more clearly, because I distracted myself with the interesting story in [1] - the US has well developed propaganda systems for building these events up into a justification for war that may, or may not, spin up depending on the assessed need of whoever organises the media. The fact that the German propaganda system was inferior to the Anglosphere propaganda system on its home turf doesn't tell us much about the limits of propaganda. The Germans were dealing with an aggressive society [2] that was extremely good at finding a cause for war and then broadcasting it. But nevertheless the underlying cynicism of the English speaking world is very clear if you look for it - the official "why we are doing this" is almost always propaganda over the top of "this will be a profitable venture for the people making the decision to go to war". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 "shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor" -> "All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Larry McDonald, a United States representative" -> "Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on September 15, 1983, to revoke the license of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines to operate flights to and from the United States". No war broke out. via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc... [2] I mean, seriously, the British had the empire that the sun never sets on, the US has the Not An Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets They Are Just Random Military Bases and if you ask they got it by a continuous series of defensive moves. One shudders to think what it would be called if the same thing was done by people with the wrong passport.
keiferski 3y ago
> 1) The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. The exact opposite is true. Every organism on this planet instinctively cares about itself and its family/close relations more than the abstract concept of its species – if it even has such an abstract concept to begin with. Universalism is a viewpoint that has spread, or propagated, however.
- roenxi 3y ago
  The concept of Citizen is the abstract concept, it has only existed for about 2,500 years and even in the modern form for less time than that. A US citizen could literally have been born anywhere. If you want 128 US citizens who in fact are from Central Africa; they exist [0]. Their genes could not have detected they were supposed to get angry about those 128 people as opposed to 128 random Europeans. A lot of US people probably had more in common with the Germans than the ship's passengers, given the US's large contingent of ex-Germans at the time. The idea that some people have a magic label that makes them important is, 100%, due to propaganda. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying it is unreasonable, but it takes a lot of social effort expended to maintain the label. [0] Although I will acknowledge a lot of hand-waving given the state of US citizenship law around WWI, but I think the point about propaganda is solid even if that is accounted for properly. The US is not defined by people with a long shared history, or close family ties. And if it is, at the time we're talking the roots of those things led back to Europe.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make. The people in the US are linked to each other by history, culture, language, and a million other things that they don’t have to a random group of people halfway around the globe. I don’t know what is so complicated or difficult to understand about this.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. You'll find that you haven't actually addressed that point. Unless you are suggesting that the US was so inbred that all of them were close family members and relations of the people onboard the ship [0]. There isn't any way to know that you're in the same group as those randoms without some serious social legwork explaining that the group exists to everyone, slowly, multiple times, over an extended period. The technical term for that explaining is propaganda. It isn't a truth of natural law, it is very much a social construct. [0] And, even if they were, there'd still be a lot of connection to other European countries like Germany by similar logic.
marcusverus 3y ago
Not to mention that the Lusitania was carrying American munitions, in violation of America’s declared neutrality. Munitions which were destined for British troops, to be aimed at German boys. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/01/lusitania-salvage-warning-munitions-1982 https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/01/lusitania-salv...

by roenxi 3y ago

AnonCoward42 3y ago

> The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. That is the kind of relativism that doesn't hold water. To make it very simple: I value my life higher than yours or mostly anyone else's life. Or with different words I care for my life more than I care for yours. No offence! You can expand that to my family vs some other family, then going on to "tribe" and to country/race, whatever. The further away you get the less I care and doing otherwise involves propaganda. That is also obvious since you need to focus your care. It is en vogue to pretend otherwise and to care for some people you know the least which involves the inversion of care. You care for people you don't know more than you care for people close(r) to you. In a certain environment this is actually easier, but it involves this kind of propaganda, since people are acting against their own good. > We know for a fact that the media can't cover most events. Historians don't know about most events. Choosing the events that will be admissible in the public conversation is one of the key tools of propaganda. This is what I mean with "care more/less". You can't cover all events and therefore you're concentrating on matters closer to you, but with media this comes with a twist of course since they are the carrier of propaganda (intentional or not and true for any).

notahacker 3y ago
> The further away you get the less I care and doing otherwise involves propaganda. That is also obvious since you need to focus your care. We're not talking about people caring more about their family and neighbours than someone in Central Africa (or England, since we're talking about WWI) though. We're talking about people being extremely angry about people born hundred or even thousands of miles away that they would never have met dying even further away in circumstances they'd never find themselves in, because the news points out that unlike the much larger number of fellow white English-speaking Christians that might be very distant relatives dying in the same faraway conflict (and on the same boat) they're American...
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yes, a nation is a thing that unites people via culture, geography, and (more historically) genetics. I'm not sure why that's controversial?
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    Historically speaking, where are you making the cut off point for genetics and in which countries? Only countries that are on the map in 2023?
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I don't understand your question. I'm not making any cut-off point, I just said that it was more common in the past for a citizens of a nation to be genetically linked to each other. Certainly that still applies to many countries today.
      - oa335 3y ago
        I’m sorry , I don’t believe that is true. Do you have any sources for your claim? Historically empires had been multi ethnic and multi lingual; with rise of nationalism in mid 1800s onwards we start seeing large population transfers and ethnic cleansing, and forced acculturation, leading to a world today where many modern nation states have only one “ethnic group”. E.g. 150 years ago there used to be many German speaking villages in what is now Poland. There used to be many Turkish speaking locales in Greece, etc etc.

somewhereoutth 3y ago

This presupposes some 'higher power' that is directing everything. The sinking of a passenger liner with 128 lives lost is going to be news with or without higher direction, and we are always tuned to the unusual and particularly gruesome even if the actual harm is minimal in the grand scheme of things. See an airplane crash vs the daily deaths on our roads.

roenxi 3y ago
You're counter-supposing that the US goes to war more or less randomly based on how it feels about interesting newspaper articles. Seems unlikely - being outraged is quite easy, I can manage it at least once a week if I go looking for bad news. However, it is quite difficult to sustain an overseas army for extended periods of time and requires reasons, intent and a certain ruthless self interest. It is possible to kill people and see effectively no response [0, 1]. The US public on mass are regularly revealed to be completely horrible. They've looked past countless tragedies because it would be inconvenient to acknowledge them. It happens almost weekly; there is a lot going wrong in the world that the US kinda shrugs off. Much of it their fault to a first or second order approximation. They are totally capable of overlooking 100 murders if they don't also think that there is something to be gained by sending the army out. Consider the situation vs. Iraq as an example. Powerful people wanted the war. As soon as there was a half-plausible narrative they sent troops in. It wasn't the narrative that led to the going in, the narrative removed a blocker to stopping the political forces that were trying to trigger the war. That is very much the layer of the world where propaganda happens. EDIT And just to try and articulate myself a bit more clearly, because I distracted myself with the interesting story in [1] - the US has well developed propaganda systems for building these events up into a justification for war that may, or may not, spin up depending on the assessed need of whoever organises the media. The fact that the German propaganda system was inferior to the Anglosphere propaganda system on its home turf doesn't tell us much about the limits of propaganda. The Germans were dealing with an aggressive society [2] that was extremely good at finding a cause for war and then broadcasting it. But nevertheless the underlying cynicism of the English speaking world is very clear if you look for it - the official "why we are doing this" is almost always propaganda over the top of "this will be a profitable venture for the people making the decision to go to war". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 "shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor" -> "All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Larry McDonald, a United States representative" -> "Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on September 15, 1983, to revoke the license of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines to operate flights to and from the United States". No war broke out. via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc... [2] I mean, seriously, the British had the empire that the sun never sets on, the US has the Not An Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets They Are Just Random Military Bases and if you ask they got it by a continuous series of defensive moves. One shudders to think what it would be called if the same thing was done by people with the wrong passport.

keiferski 3y ago

> 1) The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. The exact opposite is true. Every organism on this planet instinctively cares about itself and its family/close relations more than the abstract concept of its species – if it even has such an abstract concept to begin with. Universalism is a viewpoint that has spread, or propagated, however.

roenxi 3y ago
The concept of Citizen is the abstract concept, it has only existed for about 2,500 years and even in the modern form for less time than that. A US citizen could literally have been born anywhere. If you want 128 US citizens who in fact are from Central Africa; they exist [0]. Their genes could not have detected they were supposed to get angry about those 128 people as opposed to 128 random Europeans. A lot of US people probably had more in common with the Germans than the ship's passengers, given the US's large contingent of ex-Germans at the time. The idea that some people have a magic label that makes them important is, 100%, due to propaganda. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying it is unreasonable, but it takes a lot of social effort expended to maintain the label. [0] Although I will acknowledge a lot of hand-waving given the state of US citizenship law around WWI, but I think the point about propaganda is solid even if that is accounted for properly. The US is not defined by people with a long shared history, or close family ties. And if it is, at the time we're talking the roots of those things led back to Europe.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make. The people in the US are linked to each other by history, culture, language, and a million other things that they don’t have to a random group of people halfway around the globe. I don’t know what is so complicated or difficult to understand about this.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind. You'll find that you haven't actually addressed that point. Unless you are suggesting that the US was so inbred that all of them were close family members and relations of the people onboard the ship [0]. There isn't any way to know that you're in the same group as those randoms without some serious social legwork explaining that the group exists to everyone, slowly, multiple times, over an extended period. The technical term for that explaining is propaganda. It isn't a truth of natural law, it is very much a social construct. [0] And, even if they were, there'd still be a lot of connection to other European countries like Germany by similar logic.

marcusverus 3y ago

Not to mention that the Lusitania was carrying American munitions, in violation of America’s declared neutrality. Munitions which were destined for British troops, to be aimed at German boys. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/01/lusitania-salvage-warning-munitions-1982 https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/01/lusitania-salv...