Links.
They can be such an adventure, sometimes for hours, and often quickly making you forget why in the world you managed to end up in this most peculiar of places. It’s a lot like good conversation with the exception that you can back up and go somewhere else entirely.
It was through such Wonderland wandering that I stumbled on this following quote, and that not easily. I believe I was emerging from some investigative work of Jack Cashill’s, one of my very, very favorite investigative reporters in that he actually has keen insight and a grand sense of humor. . .and the huevos of a champion bull.
The quote’s written by a guy named Michael Rivero and it is one of the most dead-on of all statements I’ve read in recent memory. It says this:
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“Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it.
To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life, [security] and loved ones.
To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice.
Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”—Michael Rivero
Can you stand it?? Choosing words like these is a fine art. I mean, something like that is like driving nails at a hundred yards with a nicely dialled-in .30-.30—which is doable. Bang! Done deal. No discussion.
Wikipedia has a good section on propaganda. “The aim of propaganda is to influence people’s opinions or behaviors actively, rather than merely to communicate the facts about something” is what they say of it.
In some countries the word isn’t nearly as loathsome as it is here. “Propaganda,” on examination, is quite synonymous with advertising. But, for the most part, it is understood to mean underhanded communication intended to mislead by any means necessary, which again can be synonymous with advertising. That’s the meaning I intend to convey whenever I use the word.
It intrigues me how Mr. Rivero’s thinking intertwines with an earlier post I made. While they are linguistically dissimilar, the two merge quite well, I think. In “About ‘A Rational Aversion’” I wrote the following:
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“In every exercise of propaganda there is truth involved to one degree or another. Those tidbits are what make the rest of the trash mentally palatable, you see.
By necessity it is the propagandist himself who is frequently most aware of the real truth, for typically only the aware can twist the truth with such a grand finesse as that of Joseph Goebbels. As Hitler’s propagandist, Goebbels proved the veracity of this thought when he gave us the following (and more often than not misquoted) piece of historical leakage.
Quoting Mr. Goebbels now:
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“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it [this is as far as the quote usually goes]. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, [moral] and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State[emphasis mine].”
And getting the truth out is often the greater of all challenges in dealing with the morally disturbed, who can go to great and distracting lengths to avoid hearing it.
ara
