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Comment by reenfranchised | Hacker News Reader

Put it this way— as Americans, we’re all pretty confident that our government doesn’t pay any substantial number of people to go online and propagandize our human rights abuses under the guise of just being reasonable world citizens.

(Maybe that’s just because we know that right now our government can’t scratch its ass and elbow at the same time, that we won’t face any penalty for our human rights abuses anyway, and there’s no point in paying bureaucrats to do something that ignorant yokels will go out and do for free... but that’s beside the point :)

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As a non-american, I am reading this in awe. You obviously believe this is true. I would suggest there is a counterfactual quality here: Maybe you just do it better

I'm not by nature a conspiracy theorist. I don't think the grassy knoll is here. But, I do think that the US government propagandizes inside, and outside all the time and has done so continuously, since the birth of the modern communication era.

You write as if the Vietnam war just didn't happen. That routine abuses by US armed forces in the middle east just didn't happen. As if Snowden just didn't happen.

Maybe I missed the /s in this. Btw, if I got a whack from the site I wouldn't deny this may not be a useful discussion, but I really do mean it: I think this cannot be read, except as a counterfactual non-reality.

You seem to have missed the second paragraph, which tempered the one-sidedness of the first one.

But even then, I think gp is referring to a difference in kind, both in behavior and communication. China's record (present included) on human rights is truly abysmal and incomparable to any nation with individual legal rights.

Propaganda comes in soft forms, which its easy to claim everyone does (I'd agree with that). But there's also propaganda along the lines of "our 'education centers' in Xinjiang are teaching the 'pupils' valuable new job skills!"

Many schools in the USA are indistinguishable from minimum security prisons and detention centers. The only major physical feature that separates them is that schools tend to have larger parking lots and lack guard towers.

Whether you are talking about Xinjiang education centers or compulsory government schools in the USA the excuse for them is going to be along the lines of 'We need to ensure that these people become productive members of society'.

All in all they are compulsory miserable dehumanizing places that are designed to condition and manipulate people into what 'society' demands from them; as defined by the ruling authorities. In both cases anybody attempting to avoid conditioning and years in "detention" is guilty of a criminal act.

My point being that these things are not differences of types, but of degrees. And while it's easy to point fingers and laugh and pride yourself on the superiority of your own country, the take home lesson shouldn't be how much better America is then China, but to use them as a mirror to examine how and why things are better here and how to improve on them.

Reductio ad absurdum. Why don't we say society itself is a miserable dehumanizing construct, the very first layer of expectation foisted upon our free natural selves? A country has borders... what are those but abstract prison walls?

If you are saying elementary schools are reasonably comparable to concentration camps, you have lost the thread of the conversation.

Hand-waving and semantic games don't change the original discussions: who would you rather hold power over you?

1. A democratic government that enshrines human and political rights

2. An authoritarian ethnonationalist oligarchy that enshrines the primacy of the Party

Whoever powers your chips will at least potentially have that power over you. We're in an era where we can decide, but anything can change. Our choices and the values we act on now will set the stage for what is available to us in the future.

Very few Americans demonstrate the level of ignorance displayed by previous poster. In fact the level of paranoia and distrust can be almost palpable.

Things like Vietnam and Snowden are why so many people in our country treat things like gun rigts as a quasi-religion. Fear of the citizenry is one of the few remaining serious checks on government power they believe we have.

However, based on personal experience, only 20-30% of people really realize the level of propaganda we have been subjected to our entire lives. One of the big reasons for this is because USA was the pioneer in government and corporate propaganda. They have been doing it so long and spent so much money on it that it's practically a art form.

In fact I doubt 1 in 10 people every really thought about the fact that the entire economy of the WWW is almost exclusively based on propaganda in the form of advertisements. Public Relations Departments used to be called Propaganda departments before the Nazis came along and turned it into a bad word.

But even then it's not lost on a great deal of Americans that the only people in the past 40 years who have ever gone to jail for war crimes, torturing, and other forms of criminal malfeasance on the Federal level are the ones that exposed it to the public.

> I do think that the US government propagandizes inside, and outside all the time and has done so continuously, since the birth of the modern communication era.

This is a valid point, and one that deserves focused thought. Because it's both very right and very wrong.

The US does generate constant propaganda on most issues of consequence. BUT. The US also generates constant propaganda on multiple sides of every issue.

The propaganda ecosystem is far more robust and distributed in the US. Whether it's straight journalism or spambots, or individuals expressing their heartfelt beliefs.

Maybe that's doing it better? Maybe it's just one mess after another?

One thing I know - it's quite a different from the sort of propaganda you get from a country where the national government maintains a list of forbidden words, events, and attitudes.

Why would we be pretty confident about that? Edward Snowden himself revealed to what depths the US would stoop, and it's got to be a thousand times worse now than what he reported. There are, in my opinion, definitely Americans out there spreading propaganda about the US on taxpayers money. You yourself could very well be one of those people.

Voice of America.

The idea that the US doesn’t covertly spend money on propaganda, when it overtly does and has for decades, is hilarious.

I mean, VoA is actually a pretty good, so this isn’t intended to be criticism of it. However, it is intended as propaganda, although a fairly light version of it.

> Put it this way— as Americans, we’re all pretty confident that our government doesn’t pay any substantial number of people to go online and propagandize our human rights abuses under the guise of just being reasonable world citizens.

You would be desperately wrong in that assumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

I think the astonishing thing is how incompetent our foreign service is today; even in 1979 the U.S. Embassy had hardly anyone who speaks Persian and got completely blindsided.

In 1954 the US was capable of kneecapping Iran and other countries, but today it is too blinded by an ideology that refuses to accept it is an ideology to do the same.

Surely you're aware that the 1953 coup d'etat overthrowing the democratically elected government in Iran, and installing the Shah in its place, and hence setting the stage for Khomeini later, was orchestrated by a certain country that you mention?

Yes. It may be an evil thing to do but it takes a kind of competence which the us lacks today.

I posit that if the service in question had been _really_ competent, they'd have let sleeping dogs lie and _not_ meddled with other governments. Pretty much the entire world is paying for their incompetence today.

Then again, incompetence is not absolute, and I guess you're lamenting the slide in competence (or the lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) of the service in question.

Because the UK did the heavy lifting and we went along for the ride.

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