This picture of a huge crowd congregating on the Bank of England to protest the G20 meeting is worth looking at, but more interesting is this:
For a second straight day, French workers facing steep layoffs at a Caterpillar factory held four of their bosses at the U.S. manufacturer’s plant in the Alps, union officials said.
Short of the Soviet Union I wonder if there has ever been a population as saturated with propaganda and lies as the American one. Wonder how long it’ll be before such things happen in the US. Wonder if it does happen, if the SWAT teams will go in and start killing people.
Bankers lost trillions of dollars over the last 8 years due in large part to outright fraud, paying themselves billions in bonuses. Under both Bush and Obama, the response to their theft has been to give them trillions of dollars worth of money. Trillions have not been spent on helping people destroyed by the bankers greed, corruption, incompetence and theft.
If Americans continue to put up with this, they aren’t just sheep, they’re serfs.
selise
the difference, i was told by someone who ought to know, is that the in the soviet union they KNEW it was propaganda. here, not so much. look at the approval levels for obama – people think he’s trying to help them and not the banksters. and who is telling them differently?
right now would be, imo, the perfect time to be demanding single-payer healthcare reform (and yes, i mean, in the streets as well on blogs). it’s almost as big (maybe bigger over time) a rip off by the financial services industry (which since 1999 includes the insurance industry).
Ed
They new it was propaganda at the end of the Brezhnev era. By all the accounts I read, under Stalin most Russians thought they were building a new and better society that was going to be worth all the sacrifices.
Propaganda works very well for decades which is why its used in the first place. Even skeptical people don’t have the mental discipline to reject it entirely and no longer listen to the source, they tend to assume that it contains some truth, but exaggerated.
selise
Ed – excellent points.
i’m pretty sure the person i worked with who told me about propaganda in the soviet union was referring to the years prior to the end. i wonder how long it will take us and what can we do to help the process along? have to agree with your statement:
“Even skeptical people don’t have the mental discipline to reject it entirely and no longer listen to the source, they tend to assume that it contains some truth, but exaggerated.”
this is certainly true for me. i try to be skeptical, but it’s exhausting to do all the time. and worse i don’t think i can really pull it off – i too find myself being influenced even when i’m trying hard to be skeptical.
Formerly T-Bear
Reply to Selise,
I think you will find that “propaganda” is evident much further back than the old Soviet Union, the country was awash with propaganda preceding the Spanish-American War, propaganda was extensively used during the Civil War (e.g. for recruitment to fill military ranks), much propaganda was used in initiating the Mexican War. William Henry Harrison used propaganda politically to achieve the presidency, Andrew Jackson followed the same path as well. Propaganda served political purposes quite well throughout the run of the Republic.
There is actually very little in American History Text that is not propaganda as its basic source. As history, the well of facts that is American History is well polluted with propaganda to the point that it has become propaganda itself, feeding more current propaganda, itself feeding even more current propaganda. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James W. Loewen illuminates just a bit of the propaganda that is current in the public domain. There is a hall of mirrors effect from reliance upon the current historical narrative, to the point all direction has become lost, one cannot tell cardinal direction from the reflections. Only by leaving or putting distance between oneself and the house of mirrors can some perspective be gotten. Knowing another historical narrative, such as that of Europe, can provide enough unadulterated benchmarks, a more accurate survey of US history can be verified; this cannot be done from within house, and the swamp of historical propaganda does not give up its captives easily.
That said, then the problem becomes one of finding any who remember their history. The outlook for economic knowledge is even more dismal, should that be a solace.