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> 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
by 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 agoYes, 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 agoHistorically 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 agoI 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 agoI’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.
- keiferski 3y agoIt obviously depends on where and when, but I think you’d have a difficult time finding any past empires that are as genetically diverse as contemporary Canada, USA, etc. Even as wide spread as say, Rome or the Ottoman Empire were, they had little-to-no representation of Chinese, Japanese, South American, Indian, and so on. Germans and Poles are more similar to each other than Indians and Colombians.