2 ms·

I wonder why that word, propaganda, is only used against foreign influences and not ones within the country. Both sides use propaganda everyday - in political s

I wonder why that word, propaganda, is only used against foreign influences and not ones within the country. Both sides use propaganda everyday - in political speeches or social media or whatever.

persnickety 2y ago
It's not. I've personally heard it used to mean political speech in general, and separately to mean dishonest political speech internally. The definition seems to vary based on cultural background.
xg15 2y ago
It's such an ugly word, we prefer the term "public relations"...
082349872349872 2y ago
In Psychological Warfare (1948), Linebarger apologises that he (having been subject to army approval for publication) only gives examples of enemy propaganda, but reassures the reader that the Allied departments in which he worked churned out exactly the same kinds of thing in the opposite direction, and even relates an anecdote of reverse engineering a captured Japanese PsyWar HQ to discover that their org charts looked very familiar, very much like his own.
cess11 2y ago
Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive mass communication as a good thing. It's related to a progressivist and modern view of societies being at different points of the same trajectory between primitive and advanced, or later, developing and developed. Forcing mass communication on people brought their primitive minds to a better state, they thought. During the postwar period mass communication was honed by academics and married private capital, producing somewhat scientific marketing disciplines optimising for efficiency in changing people's minds at scale. Puppet theaters as mass communication wouldn't have survived that if they were still around. Seeing similarities with advertising is rather easy even without this historic connection.
bravetraveler 2y ago
It has become the very thing it describes, defensively
golergka 2y ago
Given the negative meaning that the word "propaganda" has today, I think we should only apply it to deceits or outright lies. If a government disseminates information that serves it's interests, but this information is also a decently subjective representation of reality, we should use some other word for it. For example, Radio Liberty was used as "propaganda" tool by the US. However, it was also a fairly good source of information — certainly closer to the truth than soviet mass media at the time. Should we really call it propaganda, putting it into the same category as aforementioned soviet media? I don't think so.
GauntletWizard 2y ago
It's merely a euphamism treadmill. Propaganda wasn't always a bad word - The US was proud of it's propaganda departments in WWII. The Office of War Information was quite explicit that it was propaganda, and used the term neutrally; It had both good and bad connotations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In... https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/walt-disney-classified-what-is-propaganda/ https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/walt-disney-classified...

I wonder why that word, propaganda, is only used against foreign influences and not ones within the country. Both sides use propaganda everyday - in political speeches or social media or whatever.

persnickety 2y ago

It's not. I've personally heard it used to mean political speech in general, and separately to mean dishonest political speech internally. The definition seems to vary based on cultural background.

xg15 2y ago

It's such an ugly word, we prefer the term "public relations"...

082349872349872 2y ago

In Psychological Warfare (1948), Linebarger apologises that he (having been subject to army approval for publication) only gives examples of enemy propaganda, but reassures the reader that the Allied departments in which he worked churned out exactly the same kinds of thing in the opposite direction, and even relates an anecdote of reverse engineering a captured Japanese PsyWar HQ to discover that their org charts looked very familiar, very much like his own.

cess11 2y ago

Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive mass communication as a good thing. It's related to a progressivist and modern view of societies being at different points of the same trajectory between primitive and advanced, or later, developing and developed. Forcing mass communication on people brought their primitive minds to a better state, they thought. During the postwar period mass communication was honed by academics and married private capital, producing somewhat scientific marketing disciplines optimising for efficiency in changing people's minds at scale. Puppet theaters as mass communication wouldn't have survived that if they were still around. Seeing similarities with advertising is rather easy even without this historic connection.

bravetraveler 2y ago

It has become the very thing it describes, defensively

golergka 2y ago

Given the negative meaning that the word "propaganda" has today, I think we should only apply it to deceits or outright lies. If a government disseminates information that serves it's interests, but this information is also a decently subjective representation of reality, we should use some other word for it. For example, Radio Liberty was used as "propaganda" tool by the US. However, it was also a fairly good source of information — certainly closer to the truth than soviet mass media at the time. Should we really call it propaganda, putting it into the same category as aforementioned soviet media? I don't think so.

GauntletWizard 2y ago

It's merely a euphamism treadmill. Propaganda wasn't always a bad word - The US was proud of it's propaganda departments in WWII. The Office of War Information was quite explicit that it was propaganda, and used the term neutrally; It had both good and bad connotations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In... https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/walt-disney-classified-what-is-propaganda/ https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/walt-disney-classified...