Anecdote, but everyone I knew in Pontiac in the early 2000s was an antisemite. I didn’t really understand it until I was older and exposed myself to online hate groups, but it ran deep in the black and Latino communities I knew.
EDIT
I should also say the white people I knew were also not a fan of black people or Jewish people.
I have no personal experience with any of this, but would this be comparable to the position of not-deliberately-passing-but-often-passing Black and American Indian people?
The Democratic Party has not put a non-incumbent person over 60 into the White House since before the Civil War.
If they nominate Bernie or Joe or Elizabeth in 2020, they will lose.
Based on recent history, if they nominate Cory Booker he’ll probably win, though of course @Wf’s concerns about voter suppression and other shenanigans are legitimate.
Still, Ashkenazi Jews don’t look like Polish Catholics. At all. This confuses people, even though it shouldn’t.
Youtube Russian history 101:
To understand Cold War Russia, you need to have a grasp of just how badly the Russian people were fucked over for the previous few centuries.
A bit of Iranian history to go with it:
Same goes for China, really.
Starting to dig into interwar German history. Messy.
I think this thread about the predecessors of that NYT piece touches on some of your themes here too.
On the topic of my usual rantings about propaganda and international political interference, a reminder:
Everybody uses propaganda. If you think that one faction doesn’t, that just means that one faction is really good at it.
The British are really good at spycraft. The Russians are really good at military determination and mobilisation.
Americans are really good at propaganda. There is a reason why American music and video culturally dominates the world.
And they know it. One of the US’ demands for TPP was that other countries had to drop any “cultural quotas” (e.g. Canadian Content rules) upon signing. There is only one point for that: to flood all markets with American propaganda and wipe out any cultural heritage and diversity of other countries. It’s hard to dissent when you only hear one message, everywhere.
Hollywood is a tool of the ruling class.
Old school and blatant:
Modern and blatant:
Modern and a bit more subtle:
Even more subtle:
…but the really subtle stuff doesn’t lend itself to examples, because it is so finely distributed. Pervasive militarism etc.
This isn’t just a Republican thing; JAG was different from NCIS, but they both promoted militarism, empire and American Exceptionalism.
Goebbels :: Bannon.
Did I ever tell you about Goebbels? He incurred Hitler’s disapproval after that incident with the movie actress for which he was beaten up. That clubfooted fanatic! He forced women to submit to him sexually because of his powerful position. He influenced Hitler to become anti-Semitic more than Hitler had been before. Hitler used to come to my house once in a while for a cup of coffee, and because I led a normal life, he would leave about nine o’clock. I was in the habit of retiring early. However, Hitler used to spend practically all of his nights, sometimes until four a.m., with Goebbels and his family. God knows what evil influence Goebbels had on him during those long visits.
Goebbels was the strongest representative of anti-Semitism. He saw his big chance to become powerful by using the press for anti-Semitic reasons. Personally, I think Goebbels was using anti-Semitism merely as a means of achieving personal power. Whether he had any deep-seated hatred against the Jews is questionable. I think he was too much of a thief and dishonest opportunist to have any deep-seated feelings for or against anything. But for years Goebbels had been trying in vain to become a big power. At last he saw his chance. He had whipped up anti-Semitic feelings to such a point by his vicious propaganda that he now thought he could do anything. He probably didn’t think about the consequences himself. He was a fanatic of an abnormal caliber. Streicher was a tame man compared to Goebbels, because Streicher is half crazy and stupid, whereas Goebbels was just unscrupulous, clever and dangerous. You couldn’t discuss anything with Goebbels. And for the same reason, you couldn’t discuss anything with Himmler. Goebbels was so dishonest that it didn’t pay to discuss anything with him.
The following is from Wikiquote. I stumbled across it while looking for memes relating to Trump’s new denial of the Access Hollywood tape.
It provides a novel perspective on WWII propaganda:
If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.
That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
There remains the problem of Goebbels’ reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: “Everybody must know what the situation is.” He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) – and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success.
.
Obviously, my quoting Goebbels here is not intended as endorsing Goebbels. Know thy enemy etc.
But do y’all get how this relates to my arguments about “good propagandists minimise obvious dishonesty” and “sophisticated propaganda relies upon framing and selection”?
All 4 are modern.
Skipping 1 and saying the other 3 are modern seems to erase the fact that this isn’t ancient or medieval history. The whole transatlantic slave trade was modern. The whole Confederacy was modern. The ongoing propaganda campaign for the Confederacy is modern.
Yes, but…
I was using modern here in the sense of “movies from before our time” contrasted to “movies that you might have seen in cinemas yourself”.
I agree that these are all current events, though. Haitian “reparations” to the French continued into our parents’ lifetimes. The St Louis PD is still run by the Klan; Puerto Rico is still a brutally exploited victim of indefensible imperialism.
It’s rather why I’ve been banging on about US history so much lately. As the song says:
Who controls the past controls the present
And who controls the present controls the future
The battle for the past is for the future
Must be the winners of the memory war
Smash reach out and then grab the flower
At the end of the day their defeat will be for sure
Have you inside your memory the scene of the crime
If you don’t have a clue then you’re running out a time
Struggle continues while di sun shine
Past and the truth two of them you have to combine
Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded
Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law
Presidents and royalty caught red handed
And you won’t know about it for fifty years or more
Come pay attention to the re-educator
The battle for the past is now the battle for the future
Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia
Soon come judgement day
The history they teach is the voice of the victor
You need to look again you need to have a propaganda!
If truth is your price then come join the bounty hunters
Because truth make you the enemy of all these liars
Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded
Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law
Presidents and royalty caught red handed
And you won’t know about it for fifty years or more
Who controls the past controls the present
And who controls the present controls the future
Soon come judgement day
Must be the winners of the memory war
Come pay attention to the re-educator
The battle for the past is now the battle for the future
Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia
Soon come judgement day
As this is my field (like, literally my historical field - the Cultural Cold War and global youth subcultures), this is entirely true. But there was also demand for American popular culture as well and that’s not something we should entirely dismiss out of hand, as this eventually was turned around in terms of creating localized, even democratic mass cultures that spoke back to Hollywood and the US. Controlling the newly minted teenagers became something of a preoccupation on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and teens both shaped that and were shaped by it. The US governement was certainly clever for employing mass culture in the way that they did, but there was plenty of room for agency and push back by the target audiences.
Here are three great books that show the nitty gritty in how American culture was being deployed, rejected, embraced, etc, by not just American policy makers, but by those playing the music and those consuming it, too:
I’m reading this one right now:
This applies to propaganda too, BTW.
It’s used by transnational capital, it’s used by nation states, it’s used by political parties, it’s used within political parties.
Propaganda technique demonstration:
Obvious propaganda: linking to the Correct the Record wiki page.
Less obvious propaganda, demonstrating framing and selection: stopping my list of fractal examples at “within political parties” rather than continuing all the way down to “and by individual people arguing on the internet”.