Showing posts with label Propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Propaganda. Show all posts
Thursday, December 30, 2010
The Empire NEEDS It's Entertainment! Hollywood & The War Machine (The Symbiotic Relationship Between Hollywood And The Military-Industrial Complex)
War is hell, but for Hollywood it has been a Godsend, providing the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the movie going public.
The Pentagon recognises the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history to suit its own strategy and as a recruiting tool to provide a steady flow of willing young patriots for its wars.
What does Hollywood get out of this 'deal with the devil'? Access to billions of dollars worth of military kit, from helicopters to aircraft carriers, enabling filmmakers to make bigger and more spectacular battle scenes, which in turn generate more box office revenue. Providing they accept the Pentagon's advice, even toe the party line and show the US military in a positive light.
So is it a case of art imitating life, or a sinister force using art to influence life and death - and the public perception of both?
[This video is 47 minutes long... Pop Out Player?]
[Source, al Jazeera]
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
How-To Guide: Hoodwinking Voters, Part One - The Disinformation Age
This pre-2008 election article reposted by permission of Razer Raygun, Razed By Wolves
"The League of Women Voters is withdrawing sponsorship of the presidential debates...because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.
It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions.
The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public." ~~October 2, 1988, LWV trustees statement, issued by unanimous vote.
The Disinformation Age - Part I
By Carlton Meyer
Sep/12/2008
A common computer adage is “garbage-in, garbage-out”; i.e. putting bad data in a computer produces bad information. This same rule applies to humans. It doesn’t matter if people are educated, intelligent, and logical. They will make bad choices if fed bad information. This happens frequently in American elections because voters are misled by a continual flow of disinformation. Ask any American which country provides the world’s best health care. Very few can provide an informed guess, yet most will exclaim that the United States has the best health care system. This is far from the truth, yet years of corporate advertising, corporate sponsored news programs, and speeches from corporate sponsored politicians have spread this disinformation. Even educated elderly people will parrot the line that socialized medicine doesn’t work, although they eagerly use the government’s Medicare program.
A frequent example occurs when seemingly intelligent Americans state that the media is "left-wing," as though CBS and CNN are run by hippies living in a flophouse.
The American media is owned and controlled by billionaires, who have many other corporate interests. They have little concern for working Americans. This should be obvious, yet these billionaires hire television and radio commentators to complain the media is "left-wing." It is in their interest to keep viewers ignorant and distracted by threats, like terrorists and liberals. American writer H. L. Mencken recognized this decades ago when he wrote: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."[1]
This problem worsened as the American news media no longer attempts to report facts that disturb viewers in order to boost their ratings. Fox News leads the way by hiring young models to deliver happy news or titillating stories about missing children. Walter Cronkite often notes that there are no anchormen anymore, just news readers.
Those attractive faces on television do not write or even edit news stories like he did. They read teleprompter news written by people who are part of network entertainment divisions.
News is designed to entertain Americans, not to inform them...
In Full @ WarandPeace.Ru (Was: Sanders Research, dead link)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
'Problem' 'Reaction', 'Solution' - A Musical Propaganda Primer That Explains Why Americans Blindly Support The 'War On Terror'[tm]
"Of course we aren't trying to overthrow EVERYTHING.... but certain specific things. Business POLITICS Poverty And Oppression" ~~Herbert Marcuse
No matter who you vote for, no matter the "party", they'll NEVER mention that they and their "Friend$" ARE the problem.
There was an average of FOUR MILLION DOLLARS spent for every Senate and House seat up for grabs in this election...
Why SHOULD they care what YOU need?
Boeing (for instance) has facilities in all 50 states.
Produced by: NufffRespect @ YouTube
David Icke's explanation how wars are created.
It explains the concept of Problem reaction solution also known as Thesis, synthesis, antithesis developed by philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (albeit he never used the phrase). This concept has been used in many wars including WWII.
Hitler also used this phenomenon to control the minds of the Germans.
Also see this article, "The Rhetoric of Terrorism" by Paul Wolf:
Simplifying the debate, and using dogmatic exhortation, meant that the administration exaggerated the magnitude of the terrorist threat and the "action" necessary to counter that threat. Contrary to the claims of the Reagan administration, international terrorism was neither new nor unprecedented. [150] It was also, in and of itself, not a severe physical threat to American or international security. [151] Yet, because the administration characterized terrorism as so large a problem, the solution required was of similarly large proportions. Specifically, the zero sum game assumed that America needed to totally win -- "or else."
Such exaggeration distracted public attention from other, more pressing foreign policy problems. In a 1987 Roper poll a majority of Americans indicated that terrorism was the number one foreign policy problem faced by the United States. Yet Laqueur, writing about the same time, was persuasive as he emphatically disagreed.Compared with the truly important problems of our time (the potential dangers of modern technologies, global debt, hunger in the Third World, overpopulation, certain new and incurable diseases -- terrorism [is], after all, a sideshow. [152]Exaggerating the physical threat of terrorism itself also obscured the major threat of terrorism, for example, to the democratic functioning of the system. According to scholars like Paul Wilkinson and Walter Laqueur, the greater threat of terrorism is that a conflict begun by terrorism might escalate, both internally and externally. An internal escalation would threaten civil liberties, while an external escalation could lead to war between established states. [153] In both instances, the threat is from the response to terrorism, not from terrorism itself... [In Full]
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Auntie Imperial Says "Want Revenge On Your 'Teabagging' Boss?" April 15th, PsychWar - We don't even have to take anything. They already believe we do
Courtesy of CrimethInc, the EX-Workers Collective
Labels:
Agit-prop Agitation,
Agitprop,
Anarchism,
Class War,
CrimethInc,
Employment,
Labor,
Propaganda,
Stealing,
Video,
Viral Video
Saturday, March 13, 2010
"Imperial Hubris" - Another Way To View "The Hurt Locker"
"It is imperial hubris turned into an art form in which the Iraqi people appear as numbed bystanders when they are not deranged extras. It is a perverse tribute to the film’s accuracy in portraying the insanity of the U.S. invasion—while ignoring its root causes—that the Iraqis are at no point treated as though they are important.
They never have been, at least in the American view. No Iraqi had anything to do with attacking us on 9/11, and while we are happy to have an excuse to grab their oil and deploy our bloated military arsenal, the people of Iraq are never more than an afterthought.
Whatever motivates Iraqi characters in the movie to throw stones or blow themselves up is unimportant, for they are nothing more than props for a uniquely American-centered show. It is we who matter and they who are graced by our presence no matter how screwed up we may be."
Truthdig
Labels:
Dehumanization,
Disinformation,
Iraq,
Iraq War,
Movies,
Propaganda,
US Military,
War On Iraq
Monday, March 8, 2010
"CakeWalks"...How Disinformation Campaigns Work (Marja Edition) - Fiction of Marjah as City Was US (DIS) Information War
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." ~White House chief of staff Andrew Card explaining why the (Iraq) War hype was postponed until the weeks immediately prior to the November 2002 elections.
"The official admitted that the confusion about Marja's population was facilitated by the fact that the name has been used both for the relatively large agricultural area and for a specific location where farmers have gathered for markets.
However, the name Marja "was most closely associated" with the more specific location, where there are also a mosque and a few shops.
That very limited area was the apparent objective of "Operation Moshtarak", to which 7,500 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops were committed amid the most intense publicity given any battle since the beginning of the war.
So how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 people get started?
The idea was passed on to the news media by the U.S. Marines in southern Helmand. The earliest references in news stories to Marja as a city with a large population have a common origin in a briefing given Feb. 2 by officials at Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base there.
The Associated Press published an article the same day quoting "Marine commanders" as saying...
Fiction of Marjah as City Was US Information War @ t r u t h o u t
More... See this backgrounder... Wayyyyy Back to the 1950s, at Firedoglake:
“Little America” in Afghanistan: Is the US Repeating a Failed 1950’s Experiment in Social Engineering?
For more recent history: Yup… They LUV us out there: “Afghan flag-raising in NATO offensive draws gunfire”
Also: Marja Afghanistan - Just Noting That We've Been Lied To About That "Cakewalk" Thing Again
Labels:
Afghanistan,
Dirty War,
Disinformation,
Lies,
Marketing,
Pentagon,
Propaganda,
Taliban
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Any questions? Your tax dollars support the murder of KNOWN civilians so your own government can propagandize you.
Marjah Offensive Aimed to Shape US Opinion on War
Tuesday 23 February 2010
by: Gareth Porter
Inter Press ServiceWashington - Senior military officials decided to launch the current U.S.-British military campaign to seize Marja in large part to influence domestic U.S. opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported Monday.
The Post report, by Greg Jaffe and Craig Whitlock, both of whom cover military affairs, said the town of Marja would not have been chosen as a target for a U.S. military operation had the criterion been military significance instead of impact on domestic public opinion.
The primary goal of the offensive, they write, is to "convince Americans that a new era has arrived in the eight-year long war…." U.S. military officials in Afghanistan "hope a large and loud victory in Marja will convince the American public that they deserve more time to demonstrate that extra troops and new tactics can yield better results on the battlefield," according to Jaffe and Whitlock.
Labels:
Afghanistan,
Civilian Casualties,
Collateral Damage,
Dirty War,
Imperial War,
Marja,
Marjah,
Murder,
Pentagon,
Propaganda
Monday, February 22, 2010
Marja Afghanistan - Just Noting That We've Been Lied To About That "Cakewalk" Thing Again
Just noting that we've been lied to (again, and again, and again)
Firedoglake » Marja Battle Just a Confidence Booster – But Not for Afghan Civilians
Firedoglake » Marja Battle Just a Confidence Booster – But Not for Afghan CiviliansA week or so ago, we were hearing a lot about how decisive the current surge over Marja in Afghanistan would be. Of course, we were hearing all sorts of things – including a lot of happy talk about how well things were going. This week we learn that the fight is not so easy with US forces still facing “strong resistance” even though the US/NATO/Afghan force is 15,000+ while the reported “taliban” presence before the attack was estimated at 400. US officers are now saying that the military component of the campaign will take at least a month. They have also told the Guardian that Marja is just a “confidence building” action leading to the new “decisive” battle which they are beginning to plan for Kandahar.
Labels:
Afghanistan,
Civilian Casualties,
Collateral Damage,
Disinformation,
ISAF,
Lies,
Marja,
Marjah,
NATO,
Pentagon,
Propaganda,
Worthless Wars
Monday, February 1, 2010
The ABCs of Anarchy: A great way for kids to learn the non-corrupted meaning of the word Anarchism
.H/t: Roxanne Amico, Spiritmorph Studio
A is for Anarchy, B is for Black Bloc, C is for Critical Mass, D is for...
Labels:
Anarchism,
Anarchy,
Children,
Disinformation,
Education,
Myth Busting,
Political Education,
Politics,
Propaganda
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