Quotes About Propaganda

Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.67

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists. HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire warned.

If you employ an army, have money, bombard cyberspace with misinformation, innocent people tend to buy it.

It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait.

Not since the days of the Hitler Youth have young people been subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct issues. At one time, educators boasted that their role was not to teach students what to think but how to think. Today, their role is far too often to teach students what to think on everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred trinity of 'race, class and gender.

The fact that physicians commit suicide more frequently than do lay persons ought to unmask their claims about suicide prevention as self-serving propaganda.

Adolf Hitler despised smoking. The Führer was no doubt pleased when German doctors discovered that cigarettes caused cancer. For obvious reasons, though, "hated by Nazis" was no impediment to the popularity of tobacco.

They've never held a job, power, or a girl's hand - The appeal for men to join ISIS, November, 2015.

Governments appreciate terrorists, because they provide a good advertisement for the need for government, for its protection. They love wars, because they give government a reason for existing – to save us from the infidel.

Don't you see? The enemy represents Death to 'em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin', devourin' monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o' death. And 'tis precisely because we hate death so much that we're too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill — and die — in order to try to halt its march.

it's hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham.

Feeling loquacious now, Switters might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between.

triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and 'Americanism'.

since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that 'Nazism was a good idea, badly applied'.

As the progressive Abbé Boulier explained to François Fejtö, when trying to prevent him from writing about the Rajk trial: drawing attention to Communist sins is 'to play the imperialists' game'.11

Since anti-Communists ran the gamut from Trotskyists to neo-Fascists, critics of the USSR frequently found themselves sharing a platform or a petition with someone whose politics in other respects they abhorred. Such unholy alliances were a prime target for Soviet polemic and it was sometimes difficult to persuade liberal critics of Communism to voice their opinions in public for fear of being tarred with the brush of reaction.

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

had brought Stalin credibility and influence, in the counsels of governments and on the streets.

Unassuming comic Frank Shuster reigns supreme as a Canadian propaganda machine. Besides his own influential comedy duo, he is the father-in-law of heir apparent Lorne Michaels and the cousin of Joe Shuster, the creator of Superman (see Superman, the Greatest Canadian Hero)!

The best enemies are fabricated enemies for two reasons: one, we have nothing to worry about, and two, the populace falls in line.

Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too.

Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too. Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click, making it easier to eliminate a falsehood than to post a falsehood in the first place.