Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

propaganda can seem innocent enough at first, but its most insidious trait is that it eventually poisons and undermines even the most essential functions of your government not only during a crisis but through even its most mundane operational capabilities. institutions once intended to act and think critically and challenge orthodoxy in the service of advancement of the nation now become an artifice for furthering a dead ideology or deleterious policy. Whatever good you thought US propaganda could do to bolster things like patriotism or civic duty, it does exponentially more damage by crippling the basic ability to challenge paradigms or uncomfortable situations and decisions that if avoided may very well plunge your state into ruin.

View on HN

One of my history teachers in high school had a large stack of 'Soviet Life' magazines that he said we could read if we wanted whenever we were done with our work but he warned they were propaganda. I was surprised by what I read because I was expecting it to be stories about the evils of capitalism and the mighty strength of communism but instead it was mostly 'slice of life' stories about average people in the various Soviet republics. Took me a while to figure out that was the propaganda. Part of that was due to my preconceived notions of what propaganda would look like because I had been primed by popular media in the US to expect it to be "you capitalist pigs" rants instead of one that pushed the narrative that the Soviets were peacefully trying to go about their lives without bothering anyone. I often wonder if that's why our teach made them available to us so we'd figure that out on our own.

I remember those. RT US was largely coverage of domestic policy/events and very little about Russia. You could watch the same topic coverage from the BBC, CBC, DW, Al Jazeera English or even Democracy Now and not see much, if any, difference.

But of course everyone who had never actually watched an episode would screech propaganda while embracing other state-funded channels. The Beeb saying “America border policy bad” is ok, but Russia… totally different.

> pushed the narrative that the Soviets were peacefully trying to go about their lives without bothering anyone

To be fair, most Soviet citizens were just trying to go about their lives. Surely you don’t imagine your average Joe Blowkomarov is scheming nasty plans for crushing the evil capitalists. Poor dude was probably stuck in a bread line, wishing his toes were warm.

If there was propaganda involved, it’s probably that the magazines weren’t showing the deprivations. Sunny outlook & all that, hardly unusual for a “Life” type of magazine.

Indeed. Propaganda, just as disinformation, in the long run results in mistrust and cynicism. I guess, this may hamper critical thinking and eventually can polarize the society by overweighting the groups on the extremes of the spectrum and padding the middle with the cynics.

> Propaganda, just as disinformation, in the long run results in mistrust and cynicism.

The notion that facts which are unapproved by the government are disinformation, is the propaganda.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com