---
title: Propaganda as Cultural Toxic Waste
subtitle: decomission that shit
syndication:
  twitter: https://twitter.com/0xtentakitty/status/1258802023140667392
date: 2020-05-19
---
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		Rambly VE day thoughts: Propaganda as Cultural Toxic Waste.

		TL;DR: Propaganda works, even on unintended audiences, it needs responsible disposal after use, and leftover propaganda from WW2 and the Cold War has left the UK with a broken understanding of the world.

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		2 examples: I used to know someone who was very British, would become annoyed at my use of US instead of UK English in writing, but was strangely in favor of "our" military.

		If the NHS had shared data with the GRU, alarms would be ringing, but Palantir is our CIA-backed friend.

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		In movies, games, online discourse, and even the news, we are all USian.
		The US president is _the_ president.
		The US military is _the_ military.
		US propaganda intended for US citizens is broadcast at all of us, and some of it sticks.

		---

		War propaganda in particular is a quick and dirty hack, to build motivation and morale against a specific enemy in a short space of time.
		The enemy is not just the enemy, they are evil, and we are pure.
		We fight not for survival or for gains, but for justice.

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		But it sticks around afterward, children growing up steeped in it without the context of lived experience of the war, and so the rousing emotive speech meant to give hope and direct the anger of a city just bombed becomes word-for-word truth.

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		Without the context of the Soviet empire steadily annexing West across Europe, a difference in economic philosophy between us and the competing empire becomes a valid justifiction to end the world in nuclear fire.

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		German Nazis were bad because they were German.

		Russian Communists were bad because they were Communists.

		Both of these framings have consequences.

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		And so now peace in Western Europe is actually a secret WW3 because Germans can't stop being Germans, while Russia is no concern because they have a stock market now, and criticizing our own economic situtation is forbidden because neoliberalism is how we "beat" the Soviets.

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		"But this propaganda benefits the establishment".

		I doubt it. Decades of being told that the West's problem with Russia was its ideology lead us to believe that the Cold War was automatically over when they had a change in government. The propaganda stuck, and it became truth.
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