• Cowbee [he/they]
    91·
    6 days ago

    Exactly. Really, it functions similar to a strawman, you build up a “principle” to stand up for, such as “democracy and freedom” in the case of the US, regardless of the validity of how you uphold it. Then, you inverse it, play with it, doctor it up, overemphasize negative elements of your geopolitical enemies and erase any positives, and you license your populace to “go along with it.” Roderic Day makes this quite clear in Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing.”

    Of course, democracy and freedom are good things, but the mechanical functions of propaganda work by obfuscation and distortion, creating a set of glasses that show only convenient narratives to the population you need to support you over their geopolitical adversaries. If we actually analyzed material reality, the United States is of course completely democratically bankrupt and guilty of far worse crimes than its adversaries, but is skilled in twisting the narrative to perpetuate its own percieved legitimacy.

    • Lemmygradwontallowme [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      This western moral licensing is kinda like expropriation and exploitation:

      First, to the unwitting western, the western-hegemonic global ruling capitalist class, through its media’s modus operandis, destroys the images of other counter-hegemonic countries

      {wielding accusations} like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

      What is this social purpose? {They} want {us} to believe that other places are worse off,

      In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere.

      After all

      The enlightened critic can plead that if we all agreed to denounce the status quo in unison we’d be immensely rewarded, but the average worker in the first world cannot be accused of naiveté for preferring to keep a low profile, particularly after being subject — very often by that same critic — to so many grim stories of murder and of punishment and of how any attempt at radical change always goes awry.

      Second, with this in mind, the more complex propaganda goes like this:

      The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent.

      Through this, they make people

      eagerly {seek and spread propaganda} out, like a soothing balm.

      Even if the western material conditions don’t work out to their benefit (and only to the bourgeois), still, people will think this is the best system of their lives so far

      And thus the dialectical process repeats again