How Digital Technology Has Helped Unleash a Devastating New Era of Propaganda
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How Digital Technology Has Helped Unleash a Devastating New Era of Propaganda
http://www.alternet.org/media/how-di...era-propaganda
Outstanding article. The media manipulation with subtle and not so subtle propaganda is in an all time high these days.
Excerpt:
Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. Choice is ubiquitous. Phones are platforms that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne headsdown, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahls submissive void is todays digital slavery.
Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
Todays message of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behaviour, this is extremism. When Hugo Chávez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvards Kennedy School and the human rights organisations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpin its propaganda. The historian Norman Pollack calls this liberal fascism. All is normality on display, he wrote. For [Nazi] goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work [in the White House], planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.
Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the mainstream, today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. Identity is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, austerity has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of consumerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester in England is reported to be living in extreme poverty.
...
Propaganda always wins, said Leni Riefenstahl, if you allow it.
Outstanding article. The media manipulation with subtle and not so subtle propaganda is in an all time high these days.
Excerpt:
Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. Choice is ubiquitous. Phones are platforms that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne headsdown, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahls submissive void is todays digital slavery.
Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
Todays message of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behaviour, this is extremism. When Hugo Chávez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvards Kennedy School and the human rights organisations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpin its propaganda. The historian Norman Pollack calls this liberal fascism. All is normality on display, he wrote. For [Nazi] goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work [in the White House], planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.
Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the mainstream, today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. Identity is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, austerity has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of consumerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester in England is reported to be living in extreme poverty.
...
Propaganda always wins, said Leni Riefenstahl, if you allow it.