• nocages [they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    1 year ago

    I saw this posted on another instance and some liberal commented about it being “propaganda.”

    I was just floored. I learned about all of this stuff in high school. It’s all well-known and regarded as historical fact even in the west. How can you dismiss it as propaganda??

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      How can you dismiss it as propaganda??

      you see, it’s simple. there’s something called the democracy index, which is defined by Freedom House, a Washington DC think tank. 86% of Freedom House’s money comes from the State Department and US Aid and its consistently used by the media. It’s a metric to decide whether a country is a democracy or not. every year Freedom House will release its new “Freedom by the Numbers” and they have a Freedom Index and a Democracy Index. These “indices” routinely get press release write ups in foreign policy and elsewhere. Naturally, US privately-owned media corporations, both out of laziness and out of ideological incentives, parrot state-departmant-funded think tank propaganda regarding which countries are free and which aren’t. But Americans see this information and internalize it as objective scientific fact. Therefore the American media consumer comes out thinking "Well MSNBC and Fox News are like, opposites on the political spectrum (they aren’t, they’re both thoroughly bourgeois, but there are no non-bourgeois options in mainstream media), and they both agree that Cuba is an authoritarian dictatorship, and look at that guy Castro, marching around in a uniform all the time, smoking a cigar. The two sources that never agree somehow agree on this! So it must be true!!! Everyone who says otherwise is just a vulgar contrarian who hates democracy and loves authoritarianism! And then when it comes time for American to coup, sanction, embargo, invade, destabilize, sabotage, privatize, and loot these “authoritarian” nations and roll back labor rights, people get on board, because they have bought into the framing of imperialism simply being a mission to democratize authoritarian regimes. We’re helping them become a REAL country, like US.

    • SnAgCu [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      In my opinion, you could call this “propaganda”. But you definitely can’t just wave it away.

      The problem is when liberals say “propaganda” they use it interchangeably with “untrustworthy.” This semantic trick is very useful to the status quo - if you encounter something that opposes the dominant worldview you can just identify it as propaganda and move on, skipping the whole pesky “reading” thing.