I found this comment attached to a discussion of emissions trading schemes: one of the Left’s favored devices for promoting allegiance to the Cult of Global Warming:
All of this of course is aided and abetted by propaganda. We often think of propaganda in this context as simply a semi-hysterical knee-jerk reaction of hasty bare-faced lies.It’s not. It’s a finely crafted science and we would do well to remember it, else be seduced by it.
I found this rather crisp description in Norman Davies ‘Europe – A History’. Page 500, almost exactly halfway through this brick of a book.
“Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:
- The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a single confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
- The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
- The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
- The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star performers, by social pressure, and by ‘psychological contagion’.
- The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.”
All this sounds familiar to you?
It certainly does to me.
I’ve encountered no better summation of the tactical structure of Leftist propaganda. Their propaganda’s efficacy frees them from having to debate their positions on the merits...which, as they have none, is a good thing for them.
3 comments:
That is indeed a nice list. But I think I can demonstrate how two steps are missing. At least they help propound the indoctrinational aim of propaganda by stealing the thunder out of any countermeasures.
Projection. The propagandist takes whatever traits of his regime that he knows the victims will squawk about and projects them onto the targets even before they know they are targets. The propagandist sociopath anticipates the natural reactions. By gaining the first strike with his deliberate slanders, he deadens all accurately labeled counter-charges. The game is thus chess-like in its application.
Theft of all good aesthetics, abstracts, intangibles, conceptualizations -- what's a good word for all of these? -- and perverting them for their own use. For example, look at their success with owning words like progressive, liberal, modern and justice and perverting them to their sophistic use. (Humpty-Dumpty's brazen declaration of his ownership could be inserted here.) While through use of rule 5 they do succeed over the long haul, it requires the deliberate thefts ahead of time to have something to repeat endlessly. Furthermore, to help the thieves seem like they are convinced of their ownership of the abstract terms, it is through their thorough schooling in the use of Newspeak and Doublethink without flinching that helps them deliver the repetitions successfully.
That's just two additional steps I'd add. I don't know if there might be more.
Sadly this may all be a fruitless exercise given I don't see a remedy in that you and I don't own a loud enough microphone or that know how John Galt pulled off his trick. But I do like that you brought this list to my attention because it did enjoy analyzing the ways of the schemers a bit further.
I think an additional rule needs to be inserted between 2 and 3: The rule of jack rabbiting: leaping suddenly and arbitrarily away from the accepted meaning of words.
This leaves the audience in the position of the visitor in in that GEICO commercial. The hostess mistakes her actual living room wall for the virtual "wall" on Facebook and tapes pictures of her friends up on the wall or takes them off to "unfriend" them. The guest stands up and says, "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works."
Obama's dishonest use of the word "justice" in your post just below illustrates this. He doesn't care what justice has been understood to be in the past. He wants to get to where he can banish the symbols of his enemies.
There also needs to be a new rule of media control: control all media. Fox, with all its faults, still manages to make heads explode on the left by presenting an arguably more accurate version of events. And we know what the web means to leftist zealots.
To widen the scope a bit, Garet Garret calls this "revolution within the form". It was brought to a high art by FDR, who converted America to a communist country by changing the meaning of the words in our legal documents. To this day, most people are unaware of the radical change he brought about. https://mises.org/library/revolution-was
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