Puncturing the Propaganda Balloon
Propaganda is amazing stuff. Done right, you can convince people of almost anything. You can persuade them that reality is the exact opposite of what they see in front of their eyes. Black is white, war is peace, death is life and day is night. The key is consistency and repetition. As Goebbels said, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
You can get away with some pretty wild shit that way. You know how it goes: You pick the pockets of average taxpayers and say you’re helping the middle-class. You pollute the rivers and claim you’re protecting the environment. You fetishize disease and death and call it a “culture of life.” You invade other countries and say you’re bringing them peace.
But the most important lie of all is the one that allows all these other lies to stand: That’s the one about how you’re telling the truth, and anybody who says different is engaging in — you guessed it — propaganda. It’s a neat trick, the ultimate jujitsu. It’s like wrapping your lies in a Teflon coating. Criticism just bounces right off and hits itself in the face. And the very word “propaganda” is no longer a tool for your enemies to use against you, but a weapon in your hands to slash away at anybody who dares speak the truth. The real truth, I mean.
But the price of lying is eternal vigilance. If you’re going to keep your propaganda balloon afloat, anybody who tries to puncture it must be dealt with quickly and ruthlessly.
So when Jay Bennish, a lowly high school social studies teacher, makes the obvious point in class that Bush’s rhetoric bears some resemblance to Hitler’s patriotic speeches, the knives come out. This teacher is spreading leftist propaganda! the wingnuts scream. He’s indoctrinating his student’s minds with communist propaganda! He’s a propagandist for the terrorists and America-haters! We can’t allow this propaganda to stand! They use the word propaganda an awful lot, which tells you what they’re up to. (Google “Bennish propaganda” and you’ll find all the right-wing nutcase looney-tunes links you could possibly want. I’m not going to pollute my blog with the crap. Though for shits and giggles, notice how many wingnuts archly criticize Bennish for not sticking to geography — the subject of the class — and in the process reveal that they don’t know what geography is.)
It all seems a bit over the top, considering that the guy was just remarking on something that most sane, educated people already know. But in a state ruled by propaganda, the worst thing you can do is point out that the propaganda is, indeed, propaganda. That punctures the whole balloon. It’s worse than disagreeing on issues or lodging protests or even criticizing the leader. To call out the lies is to undercut the whole propagandist edifice that allows the charade to continue.
The foot soldiers in this war are the little people who actually believe the lies they’ve been told. They start young. The kid who recorded Jay Bennish’s lecture and sent it to a right-wing radio show is only 16 years old. In another time and place, he would have been a Hitler Youth. He would have been the kind who told the Gestapo there were Jews hiding in the attic — not because he was evil, but because he believed with all his heart that the Jews were the enemy of the Fatherland, just like the Fuhrer said. And if his little vigilante action also earned him some brownie points with the local Gestapo commander or Hitler Youth leader — maybe even a nice write-up in the paper — well, so much the better.
Oops, sorry — was that an inappropriate Nazi comparison?
Okay, forget that — let’s just look at how our own home-grown fascism is taking shape. Jay Bennish is now on administrative leave and may be fired. In the past few days his family has received 12 death threats. Fox News is devoting hours of airtime every night to denouncing this guy. Rush Limbaugh is all over it, of course. The right-wing bloggers are foaming at the mouth. The entire Wingnut Wurlitzer is out in full force — and all because a high school social studies teacher dared to call propaganda by its name.
*****
(By the way, here’s a transcript of the taped lecture. Note that everything Bennish cites is perfectly familiar to all educated adults. There’s nothing crazy there. The facts are facts and the ideas are a common part of political discourse. Frankly, I think this guy sounds like a terrific teacher.)
[tags]Jay Bennish[/tags]
6 Responses to “Puncturing the Propaganda Balloon”
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will says:
I am continually amazed at how the Bush administration seems covered in teflon and can shout down dissenters. Amazing.
March 9th, 2006 at 8:06 am EST -
Txfeminist says:
Wow, that’s really scary. The poor guy.
Hitler youth, fascist culture, indeed.
Your post is well timed. It illuminates exactly something I was trying to explain to someone about truth, lies and perception in an email last night. That basically if you continually ram a negative perspective (read: a lie designed to hurt your opponent) down the throats of the public, the public is eventually going to digest it, to some degree or other, and is going to forget about the Truth in favor of simply going with what people “keep saying”. Regardless of whether it’s true or not.
This post is so well said. I’ll refer my email recipient to it.
Thanks!
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Pastor Al E Pistle says:
For years I have been warning people of the dangers of free speech. Fortunately it has been squelched in this country along with freedom of choice, the right to peaceably assemble, the right to keep and bear arms and freedom of opinion. The voting process has already been usurped, so all that remains is to create gulags in South Dakota.
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Pastor Al E. Pistle says:
In the distant past, before my calling, I had some training and experience with psychology and propaganda at the post-grad level. People ususlly believe anything you tell them because they cannot apply critical reasoning to the statement and compare it against the real world. They have not been taught the logical thought process in college and they have no idea that a world outside their comfort zone even exists.
So while MY calling to JESUS it the pure truth and should be supported with all of the disposable funds you can muster on a continual basis, even if you must take a second or third job, the Muslims believe a completely false religion based upon a nonexistant invisible pal in the sky who, coincidentally, hates them. Thus they should be profiled, identified, and sent to ‘reeducation’ camps before they spread AIDS and H5N1 to the rest of us.
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Reclusive Leftist » Blog Archive » Jay Bennish Reinstated says:
[...] Puncturing the Propaganda Balloon [...]
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appletree » Blog Archive » Why I’m Angry with The Reclusive Leftist, and Why it’s OK to Compare Hitler to Bush–UPDATED says:
[...] And it turned out that Dr. Violent Socks had already published a similar but superior story in The Reclusive Leftist. So instead of talking about the controversy in general, I’ll just focus on one particular complaint of the right: comparing Bush to Hitler. You see this complaint again and again, despite the fact that the wingnuts feel free to invoke Hitler whenever it serves their purposes. (link link link link) [...]
