propaganda Archives - Macska Moksha Press

The map is not the territory; the media coverage is not the event

March 2, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Collage by the author

They say “the map is not the territory” and I might add that “the media coverage is not the event.”

Maps are limited by their scale, age, level of detail, intended purpose, and who made them. You wouldn’t take a road atlas on a hike. We can learn useful things from maps but to truly know the territory, we have to go there. I think we all know that.

Media coverage can be judged by similar factors: degree of context, date, level of detail, intended audience, and who paid to produce it. We won’t learn about socialism from the capitalist business press. We can learn useful things from media coverage but to truly know what’s going on, we’d have to be there. I think we forget this.

I’ve seen this movie before and it sucks

February 27, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Uncle Sam bomb mural, Berlin, by Sebastian Spindler, Public Domain

War offers us an intense if perverse spiritual experience with its myth-making drama of life lived at the extremes of human experience. America has always been susceptible to this kind of religious fervor particularly when we need to forget all of our deep internal divisions and our failure to address even the most elementary social problems. We have pushed the uneasy knowledge of our own wars and war crimes deep into the recesses of our souls but we still long for absolution. There is nothing like a really nasty enemy to restore a sense of our own high moral character. Of course, the thrill of this spiritual revival is usually experienced from the comforts of home far from the blood, guts, and gore.
~Richard Moser

I’ve seen this movie before and it sucks.

The first time was 1979. I was ten years old, in Omaha, Nebraska, which was an intolerant, ignorant place, and insolent about it, to boot.

It was called, “Hostage Crisis.” In Iran, some students took over the US embassy and held a bunch of Americans captive for 444 days. The bad guy was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Everybody hated him. Everybody hated “Eye-Ran.” It was popular, this hatred. It was a bandwagon you were supposed to jump on.

I didn’t get it. It felt faked. I mean, people were really into it—very enthusiastic with their stupid jokes and name-calling and all that—but the way it was suddenly everywhere, like flipping a switch, seemed artificial. How could everyone despise someone so much who they’d just heard of for the first time?

The Propaganda Virus: Is Anyone Immune?

March 24, 2020 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Art by author, based on public domain image by Wags05

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
—Carl Sagan

I haven’t eaten fast food chicken since 2001, or a fast food burger since 1995. Giving these things up was part of an ongoing process of cleaning up my diet in terms of both health and ethics, and I haven’t missed either of them. Yet regularly, when I catch a whiff of KFC or McDonalds, I’ll experience a momentary pang of desire, even though I’m sure I’d get sick if I actually consumed any of that crap at this point. The reason for this is simple: many aromas released by fast food restaurants are scientifically developed in laboratories for the purpose of triggering physiological responses.

My craving is not a sign of missing fried chicken (I don’t) or reflective of an inherent bodily need for beef (there’s no such thing) or even an instinctual response to the smell of cooking meat (that claim lacks scientific consensus). Rather, it ironically points out that my senses function normally (as in, within the range of the average or conventional) because they are responding as they are supposed to. Obviously, as with everything else, different people will react more or less strongly to such stimuli, with some percentage instead experiencing the opposite of the intended reaction (distaste). Despite such exceptions, the rule stands. These companies wouldn’t be using these methods if they weren’t more effective than not. A tremendous amount of money and time goes into developing these things, and it’s not wasted.

Propaganda is analogous.

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