If t he aim of propaganda is to close the mind to rational thought, to solutions, to awareness of the situation and to send the recipient of the message along a pre-determined route.

The antidote to propaganda is the thought process

Propaganda works because it is the loudest noise and tends to saturate every area of our lives. It distracts the brain from thinking rationally. It replaces rationality with “what we usually do” It makes it difficult to think outside what it, the propaganda message, is suggesting.

The purveyors of propaganda know well, that when the recipients [the target audience] start thinking – the game is up – they are doomed. This is why propaganda is always at saturation point, all encompassing, attacks all senses full power, covers every surface available, speeds everything up, constantly changes; steals, plagiarises, trivialises and one of its crucial aims – is to defuses every idea that is a danger to its constant proliferation.

The only way to challenge propaganda is to think outside the frame of its reference [what it is trying to tell you] by asking simple questions: What does this mean to me. What do I gain. Do I really need this. Who is paying. Can I, or we, do it better. Why are we traveling so fast, where are we going, who is deciding which route we take and why.

Propaganda’s aim is to gain power over thought, therefore the struggle against the force of propaganda is the struggle to regain the power to think autonomously. It may be difficult at first, but once the power to think freely is acquired it will not be relinquished easily. But of course like everything else, it needs some commitment and sacrifice.

We do not bend easy to our masters, which is why they need such powerful tools of persuasion to try and convince us that tyranny is just, wrong is right.

This is why every attempt at democracy (and becoming more persistent in the home front) is crushed and which makes it all the more important to understand the struggle of the people of Iraq, the examples of the Zapatistas, the 30 years struggle against mass murder of the people of East Timor.

It is these peoples suffering and their slaughter, our state propaganda system tries to protects us from and it is their blood that oils the wheels of our so called democracy – When there are no more Timores, Zapatistas, Iraqis and indigenous peoples around the world in line for western democratising, there will be no more examples of the struggle for real democracy. Then there will be no more need for state propaganda.

After Propaganda

When there is no need for propaganda, we have a police state. It is said that the measure of freedom in a society, is the extent the state will go to burying information, agendas, and unpopular legislation, in order to keep it from the hands of public scrutiny. We are moving towards a society where such odious information is so close to the surface and almost has to be ignored, to be avoided.

How easily we forget even our near history and experiences as each new atrocity and blow to our freedom is meted out by state legislation. How can we fail to notice that each and every barbaric act, no mater who perpetrates it ,sends profits to the rich skyward. That is a fact even the propaganda system finds difficult to hide. I will leave the reader with a recent farce to keep in mind when listening for news, filtered through the state propaganda machine.

Hutton Inquiry: A black day for democracy in Britain

The question is. If members of parliament are forced to, or asked to resign in comparison, for what is trivia, if the head of the BBC is forced to step down and “Gilligan and the BBC are held to an exacting account for a never repeated remark made during a one minute, early morning radio broadcast. In contrast, the government and its spy chiefs are not required to answer for using untrue statements to drag the country into a war that, has killed thousands of innocent people,” [S.E.P.] If Tony Blair is not held to account for his crimes. Do we then start to judge our politicians by these standards. Will there be any need for the art of persuasion. If we do not act to expose and bring the perpetrators of these lies to justice, we in the west will start to experience the same kind of nightmare the Iraqis, and victims of all the other imperialist conflict around the world are still going through. When the psychopathic purveyors of imperialism have murdered and plundered the rest of the world into conformity. They will not stop at the domestic population – we will be next – only this time they will not be trying to persuade us with words.

Some History of propaganda
Understanding propaganda (books/ Links)
Tools of propaganda
Symbols of propaganda
When there is no need for propaganda

 

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