The Enemy as Sociologist
cabinetmagazine.org
cabinetmagazine.org
. That 'Signal' existed. It's pretty interesting really, I've got a few hardbound volumes in one of my history book hoards. Worth looking at.
. Propaganda is everywhere. The hard part is seeing it in your own world, not others'.
. History is complicated. Historian's fallacy is real. Watch out.
. Nazis will fascinate people for a long time. I honestly think that a big part of it is their use of symbols, imagery, snappy uniforms, bigger-than-life super villains. An absolutely ridiculous belief system, but that never stopped groups of people from buying into things.
Of course sociology is largely self-serving BS (see: Stanislav Andreski: Social Sciences as Sorcery) but then so are a lot of other soft disciplines. You can't blame these people for riding a wave. To tie it back into the article, much of sociology is an attempt to program people with your own belief system, not to understand and predict. Perhaps it's just the advertising business with a figleaf of science.
> If this extreme myopia does in fact define us as a people, an artifact such as Signal asks us to consider: What if our enemies know us better than we know ourselves?
Well, yes, most of what students have learned in schools in the last decade would have been considered enemy propaganda even only a decade or two prior. The object of most theory taught in schools is intended to "destabilize," hegemonic ideas, which is literally a propaganda tactic. Educating young people to adopt an identity of being victims who are not held to the standards of their ostensible oppressors is an old recipe, and one the Germans used to great effect after Weimar, which produced the necessary shame to enable the cruely and zeal of the national socialist movement. It was borrowed from Russians who had recently deposed their Czar less than two decades earlier. The narrative and aesthetic promise of renewal was borrowed from Italy's fascists, who were a just tin pot nationalist movement compared to the totalitarianisms of Russia and Germany. Just like Stalin, Hitler used communist movements with populist fascist narratives and aesthetics as a vehicle for a totalitarian movement, which is defined by its total war on truth itself.
If destabilizing propaganda from that era bears some resemblance to the current day, it is because most of the cognitive frameworks we were taught to understand the world through come from the same sources.
In politics, narratives are not true or false in the scientific sense. They're created purely for persuasive purposes, as expedient air cover used to justify social actions.
Factually the narratives may be completely true but selectively chosen, partially true and distorted, or even completely untrue.
The social actions - which can be horrific and impossible to justify on their own terms - are sold via narratives to disguise them and make them palatable, with the aim of increasing the power of the ruling group.
Signal is a superb example of creating a selective narrative by copying the style and tone of a successful publication to make it more credible and persuasive to its middle-European middlebrow target audience. Of course all the harsh racism was removed because that was the entire point.
Western academic Marxist theory, on the other hand, is a superb example of failing to understand narrative - which is ironic, because Critical Theory is supposed to be the best tool ever created for narrative analysis.
It isn't, because it doesn't understand its own politics, never mind the practically-oriented opinion management machinery of Capitalism, or the condescending cynical dishonesty of Far-Right Nationalism.
In reality it's intensely tribal and exclusive, and this makes it an incredibly soft and easy target for its enemies.
The people ok with this are what the world religions typically define as Evil, which generally reduces not to violence, but to deception. From what I can tell on the interwebs, post-Marxist thinkers, particularly Gramsci and the social constructivists are the architects of this total deception as politics view.
Atheists may not percieve the difference between what they see as the One Big Delusion, vs. Everything is a Delusion and to them there is only power and solidarity, but the crux of this constructivist view of narrative is a belief that decieving others into committing violence is more politically legitimate than committing it onesself. As though deception were somehow a virtue. Deception is certainly powerful, but not virtuous, except to people who can't tell the difference.
The enemy propaganda in Signal was designed to establish the edges of a wedge to destabilize western social order and make it vulnerable to the chaos that totalitarian movements require for their atomizing hall-of-mirrors effect. Helpfully to them, we have all the ingredients of an unmoored society ready for liquidation. Such interesting times.