Watch this…
Radio Free Asia: “did you know in North Korea they eat babies?”
Me: “I don’t believe that.”
Radio Free Asia: “WHAT?!?!? How did you do that???”
See. And I’m just a dumbass who does nothing but smoke weed and watch pirated b-horror movies. Whats everyone else’s fucking excuse?
People fall for this shit because they want to, not because the state department has magical brainwashing powers. Propaganda doesn’t mean people don’t have fucking agency.
Apparently learning doesn’t exist to hexbear lmao. You can 100% do due diligence, find reliable information, educate yourself, and try to form a principled and informed worldview. You are not ever immune to propaganda but acting like everyone is equally credulous and willing to simply blindly follow reactionary propaganda is silly IMO. This doesn’t have anything to do with inherent differences or vulnerabilities, but material conditions which can allow for this, and there are people who despite upbringings steeped in this propaganda manage to shake it and investigate, be critical.
Maybe I’m off base but I didn’t even jump to the “everyone is dumb but OP and the smarties who are propaganda immune” interpretation of this post at all. I think the best way to look at vulnerability to propaganda is not with a sense of superiority but as an opportunity to educate oneself and others to help recognize the signs of this reactionary propaganda. And no, I don’t think both sidesing this is fair at all - aren’t leftists supposed to have the basis of our political ideology founded in theory and analysis of history? That’s certainly a more rigorous interrogation of preconceived notions than what any lib absorbs to form their worldview.
Exactly Ironically claiming that the propaganda hard too see through is more arrogant
Why don’t you believe it, though? Have you always made that choice? Did you always notice it was Radio Free Asia? What about the New York Times quoting Radio Free Asia? How about a teacher or your classmates remembering something they read somewhere (the NYT quoting Radio Free Asia)? Did you always refuse all capitalist propaganda in all its forms? Do you do so right now?
Hell, we literally can’t escape some of it because the most pernicious form is in controlling our focus and that’s forced on us by the media and every other human following media narratives.
There is, of course, a point where people deserve blame for acceptance of propaganda narratives, but most of the time it is unconscious and shaped by the ideology of capitalism in which they are steeped and have had little chance to escape due to the left being a small presence or incompetent.
Why don’t you believe it, though?
By being online (like most people under 40 in the west) and having a curiosity about the world.
I’m more sympathetic when we’re talking shit that actually does require some research, like all the false narratives about the USSR does require doing some actual research, like from books and stuff. But there’s shit out there that really you have no excuse for not knowing about at all. Like all the Israeli-Palestine stuff, there’s fairly mainstream sources telling it like it is with that, you don’t have to be that “woke” to encounter them, yet most people who do ignore it cuz they like settler colonialism.
I agree that it’s pretty easy to learn about but killing off curiosity and any comfort with researching things is also part of the education system and culture.
Can’t tell you how hard it is to get supposed leftists to just read some Marx sometimes. I don’t think that’s very difficult either, it’s like a few hours per week for a couple months and you’re ready to go without needing someone (usually with a particular partisan bent) to tell you what it means. I then proceed to watch leftists not read Marx at all for 3 years while justifying almost everything they do in his name lol. It takes a program and hassling people and making it an inherent part of a campaign to get people to overcome these barriers. We have the luxury of hindsight and of having adopted better practices. Now we have to help others gain the same consciousness!
This is a silly post. This really is a very silly post and it really shouldn’t be upvoted.
The essence of the OP, “people fall for propaganda because they want to”, is literally a classic “personal responsibility” argument with the underlying effort of deflecting blame from the system and environmental conditions (the all-encompassing propaganda apparatus influencing peoples’ opinions) and attributing it to an individual’s vague inherent qualities instead.
“You fall for propaganda because you want to” is frankly idiotic victim-blaming. Propaganda is highly manipulative and often appeals to people’s empathy. You conveniently picked an absurd example of course, but Hamas killing Israeli civilians because of religious extremism and antisemitism, for example, is a much more believable narrative that would require active research to dispel, active research that many people literally don’t have the online literacy or critical thinking skills to do. Because of their material conditions and the environments they live in.
People fall for propaganda because their environment has primed them to believe it. It wasn’t Radio Free Asia that told me propaganda about China and North Korea, it was my parents and my teachers, people I trusted growing up. It was never as simple as saying “I don’t believe it”. I grew up thinking China and North Korea were bad and it took years of slow deprogramming until I was able to properly change my mind.
What is everyone else’s excuse in your opinion? With how the sentence is phrased as a rhetorical question, do you think there isn’t one at all, do you just ascribe other people’s failure to reject propaganda as a personal, moral failing? In that case, are they lost causes, are they just inherently less virtuous than you are?
This post is completely reactionary in nature and everyone who upvoted it should question how uncritically they’re consuming posts from a platform they trust. It attempts to take the current frustration we all feel from our environments believing propaganda narratives, and uses it to spread complete nonsense about how our ability to reject state propaganda somehow means we’re somehow innately better than others. It is, ironically, a great example of how one’s trusted environment can make one susceptible to dumbass, reactionary narratives.
OP’s being a bit bombastic, but his point is fundamentally correct. Yes, the most pervasive propaganda system in history gives everyone raised in it brainworms, but they can still escape them, they do have a choice that they’re just not taking. It’s not an easy choice, because the propaganda builds up layers of defensive brainworm fortifications that reject any attempt to undo them and because their material interests align with the status quo narrative, but it is still a choice that they have.
I think one could compare it to how historical apologia so often hinges on the fallacy of “oh well we can’t be too hard on them for [absolutely heinous thing some historical figure did and/or said], after all they were a product of their time so we can’t exactly hold them to modern standards can we?” Because yes, people are a product of their environment and that environment is so often actively toxic and full of brainworm spores that it seems inevitable that it will only create monsters, but everywhere and throughout time people have still overcome that poison and become better than it. I feel confident in saying that even where we have no extant records of it there were people opposing horror and injustice and being silenced for it, not even allowed to become a footnote in the historical record.
If they could do it, what is anyone’s excuse today?
it’s a joke, chill
Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits.
Why are you able to reject propaganda?
Edit:
In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy. When we concede that the time horizon and scope of responsibility within which we all make our decisions varies, it becomes much easier to see how their choice could be smart and intelligent. The enlightened critic can plead that if we all agreed to denounce the status quo in unison we’d be immensely rewarded, but the average worker in the first world cannot be accused of naiveté for preferring to keep a low profile, particularly after being subject — very often by that same critic — to so many grim stories of murder and of punishment and of how any attempt at radical change always goes awry.
This is called coercion. This article directly opposes your position.
Its not victim blaming to say westerners dont have an excuse to fall for propaganda
Did you read literally anything I wrote?
Did you just completely forget “You are not immune to propaganda?” What do you think that means?
When you say “Westerners don’t have an excuse to fall for propaganda”, what is the conclusion you’re drawing from that? They have no excuse but they’re falling for it anyways, is it truly just an individual moral failing? How come you don’t fall for propaganda but everyone else does, what sets you apart from them?
Edit: Also, yes it fucking is. If I lie to you and you believe me, it’s my fault for lying to you. This is literally the same “personal responsibility” argument that people bring up when talking about gambling addicts. Propaganda plays on emotion, it plays on our weaknesses, when you show someone pictures of crying children in destroyed buildings their first thought will not be “Hmm, what is the source on that?” for crying out loud.
It’s the same kind of self-deceiving smugness that eventually lead so many of Reddit’s self-styled New Atheists down a reactionary path, where feeling superior to the masses made them believe they were immune to being manipulated, which made many of them easy to manipulate by right-wing cults of personality.
Such self-deceiving smugness is poison against class solidarity, is hostile toward the people in general because of the bootstrappy attitude built right into it, and leaves the “I’m too smart to be fooled” believer more susceptible to manipulation over time.
I didn’t feel it was worth it locking horns with the OP because of prior experience, but I’m glad you put it in your own words better than I would have.
Yeah, it’s intimidating and uncomfortable to go against something that your in-group believes. Which, funnily enough, is another reason why propaganda works as well as it does. When a post like this is upvoted heavily, many people are likely to just ignore it or go along with it even if, in a vacuum, they would disagree. Because the threat of being shunned by a community you care about is a powerful deterrent. “You believe propaganda because you want to” is truly such an ignorant statement, it genuinely shocks me that this was upvoted so much.
I think it’s more comfortable to buy into because it also covers over even slight hints of discomfort about propaganda that has already been absorbed (especially in entertainment) under pretenses of “this can’t possibly have an effect on me, no matter how subtle, because I am too smart for that.”
He has a point. We are most of us here cause we just shrugged off propaganda because we were so poorly socially integrated that indoctrination didn’t take
This is no different from “you have agency, you can just not commit crimes” personal responsibility rhetoric we see from the right. Either we believe people’s material conditions influence their behavior in a way that at least lessens their responsibility or we don’t.
my cat’s breath smells like cat food
Structure vs agency debate #183757
Most people on most issues hold several mutually exclusive beliefs, all weakly held. Both the societal base and superstructure have systems which work to passively affirm certain weakly held beliefs over others. They do this with the intent of allowing weakly held beliefs to influence the formation of more deeply held beliefs. The extent to which people have agency over this varies from person to person and system to system. A child being raised in a cult does not have the same autonomy over their beliefs that an adult oil executive does, for example.
I assume this post is about an argument you had or saw online about some various group in the imperial core not being responsible for their egregious actions because something something propaganda. I understand the frustration. At the same time, I wish that the D I S C O U R S E resulting from these conversations actually involved more discussion about how propaganda works and what the implications of that are. I rarely even see people acknowledge the superstructure exists when it comes to propaganda. Seems important, especially in the US.
what b-horror movies though?
The problem is its easier/harder depending on your upbringing and country. Like for example as Teenager I was taught the Soviets were the main guys who defeated the Nazis. While there was some talk about them being authoritarian, stuff like the industrialization under Stalin made them seem like “just” another really cool Empire in History (plus they kicked the Nazis) ass. So I had a pretty positive view of the Soviets. Same with Communism I was never taught it was evil or bad. Just another system to organize society/economy. Having a pretty neutral starting point made IT MUCH easier for me to slowly fall out with mainstream liberal narratives and to question things. Obviously im not Amerikkkan.
I grew up in a rural CHUD family, as did half the people here now. No excuses.
But if you had grown up in a lib family perhaps you would have been super pro Ukraine and Israel? Perhaps something else could have happened in your life course that made you follow your family’s CHUD views. You never know how you could have turned out. I mean how did any of us get here? There are a wide variety of factors. There are many that grew up in CHUD families but never got past the whole John Stewart/John Oliver level of liberalism and are now pro Ukraine and all that shit. So yeah, you never know…
I get what you’re saying but isn’t the conclusion of this line or logic that nobody can be held accountable for anything? Like are we just embracing hard determinism? Is every Nazi innocent of their crimes because the only reason they turned out that way cuz their mom made them ham and Swiss instead of Turkey and provolone for lunch one day?
YES that in the only conclusion of this line of logic, ACTUAL SERIAL KILLERS SAY THIS. im losing my mind.
Maybe we should both touch some grass
deleted by creator
Well nobody’s beating you right now. Perhaps log off for a few days. Heck I’ll do it too if you do.
Explaining something isn’t the same as condoning it. That’s how Zionists are trying to paint people who try to explain the history Palestine (i.e. “so you condone TERRORISM!!!”)
Im not making excuses. It just seems to me that if the starting conditions were better it would be more likely for someone to break out of the liberal/chud zone and challenge the status quo. Like if there was no red scare in the USA …Communism would be less of a taboo for many people.
To turn this around im not sure I can take much credit for arriving at the conclusion that the USA is the great Satan. Im not American. Now if I was an American and I lived a good life in the USA ? Then maybe ?..it must be incredibly easy to buy into the American myth if you are white and live a good (wealthy) life.
In a way the people that arrive on Hexbear to me seem like people that beat the odds to arrive at the conclusions they arrived at. Since the site does skew towards Americans and it seems the Left is pretty fucked in the USA. So being someone who is cool with Marxist Leninism is kind of like being a Unicorn. (At least in the heart of the beast)
OP believes that they are just smarter and more built differenter than other people because theyre so cool and smart and superior
No I am very stupid. I accidentally peed in my bathroom wastebasket last night.
Wow maybe you should of known better than to do that
Yes but I materially benefit from pissing in my waste basket cuz it means I don’t have to take the time to turn on the bathroom lights, so I’m going to buy into Radio Free Bathroom propaganda about how my toilet is filled with piss eating goblins to justify continuing to piss in my wastebasket.
im sorry ur just built different
I do have a magnum dong
Lmao everyone get a load of this guy he has a dong
Unfortunately…
The fundamental unit of propaganda is not facts, it’s emphasis.Also this is vulgar idealism.
Btw I as child/preteen my father would tell my stories about how he saw videos (from Facebook) that people in china were regularly eating soup made out of aborted fetuses or that you can’t bend down to pick up your wallet in India because you will be assaulted by men because they are “so many homosexuals there”, and despite having no clue about either places thinking that it sounds ridiculous and can’t be true.
no more half measures walter
I am immune to propaganda actually im just built different
You can become immune to propaganda if you subscribe to my paid newsletter.
To steal from another commenter here
You are not ever immune to propaganda but acting like everyone is equally credulous and willing to simply blindly follow reactionary propaganda is silly IMO.
There’s a difference between attempting to be immune to propaganda (OP) and willfully obfuscating the truth/celebrating cruelty (most people)
