On 04/18/2018 09:21 AM, John Newman wrote:
On April 14, 2018 2:47:30 PM CDT, Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> wrote:
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ayn Rand.
The propaganda poster to go with is on my to-do list...
:o)
Lol ;). American and Western propaganda has tended to be more subtle than that of the good ol' Wolf, which is probably a bad thing - hard to say. Zero Dark Thirty has artistic merit but is pure propaganda garage, for instance. I think the fact that it's well made and not an obvious "Triumph of the Will" has to make it more insidious.
I forget who to attribute this quote to: "Aim low, they might be crawling." When Bernays brought Freudian theory into the propaganda biz, the idea was to bypass conscious thought processes by speaking directly to the subconscious mind with primitive, elemental symbolism. This was the beginning of advertising as a science, or at least a technology of psychological manipulation with a sound theoretical basis. When tasked to sell more cigarettes to women, he found that the big barrier to consumption was a social taboo against women smoking in public. Bernays and his consultants decided that the cigarette was a phallic symbol smoking in defiance of social convention could represent women acquiring 'male' social dominance. Bernays' "Torches Of Freedom" campaign linking smoking in public with the Sufferagette image and was kicked off with a publicity stunt featuring young, fashionable females boldly lighting up as an act of public rebellion. Thanks to Bernays' press contacts and stage management skills, it cost nearly nothing to get newspaper coverage, with photos, from coast to coast - and cigarette sales skyrocketed. Edward Bernays: Mass murderer or cultural hero? Why not both! I hesitate to advise people to "live like him," but everyone should know his name and more importantly, the persuasion strategies he introduced to the field of Public Relations (his family-friendly name for Propaganda). I have only seen bits and pieces of 0 Dark 30, but it looked to me like a rather mundane and naive sales pitch: A long dreary argument that /might/ reinforce already favorable opinions, or backfire by disgusting the fence-sitters in the audience; not the kind of short, sharp shock that can create or change attitudes and opinions per client specifications.