#propaganda

As I gazed at Mao’s face wearing what was intended as a benign expression but was in fact a smirk of self-satisfaction, I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate. Pg. 259 ↗

— Nien Cheng

#cultural-revolution #mao #propaganda #death

{President] Kayibanda's government [in Rwanda] continued the persecution against the Tutsis and began to make use of the media it controlled to launch a propaganda campaign against us. In a country where more than half the people cannot read or write and very few have televisions, radio is the dominant media. The fact that some newspapers were still printing the truth didn't matter much to the part of the population that couldn't read. Most of the literate people were already politically aware. While an educated person might question what they read or hear from the media, the uneducated tend to accept it. The uneducated are more easily affected by threats and the emotional trauma that propaganda like this can create. ↗

— John Rucyahana

#genocide #media #propaganda #radio #rwanda

Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism." These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation," "protective reaction," etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not "terror," [...] "security forces" only retaliate and engage in "police action." These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as "reactive" and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of "terrorism." [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#terror #terrorism #united-states #violence #design

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#greet #important #less #official #ordinary

I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them. ↗

— Curtis LeMay

#been #country #efficient #fed #hands

Art is more engaging that propaganda. ↗

— Larry Norman

#engaging #more #propaganda

It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them. ↗

— Godfrey Reggio

#clear #could #create #did #easy

These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable. ↗

— Godfrey Reggio

#ambiguity #anyway #because #built #easy

A coalition of groups is waging a massive propaganda campaign against the president of the United States. an all-out attack. Their aim is total victory for themselves and total defeat for him. ↗

— Gerald R. Ford

#aim #all-out #attack #campaign #coalition

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One. ↗

— Yakov Smirnoff

#channel #channels #consisted #had #kgb