Image taken from https://t.me/nevlastny
I have a desire to expose some of the information the russian media and their sympathizers have been spreading for a while. Note that I'm not building bias upfront. I'm not yet calling the messages of russian propaganda "lies", "provocations", and "manipulations". Just yet.
Such a desire, as you can imagine, is natural, considering that Russia (as a state) has dropped more than 2000 bombs at Ukraine in less than two months. Oh. Excuse me. According to the russian state sources, the recent events must be called "a special military operation", just like they never mention the word "explosion" (using "clap" instead). Such a tiny little detail is a single, most innocent example of, to what extent facts can be distorted in media.
It is easy to go emotional, you know. Remove the geographical aspect and imagine that a girl next door was raped today. Her husband was killed moments before so that he didn't get in the way. The armed men were merciful enough to let her child live, took turns for god knows how long and left. She died. Because of the broken heart, maybe? Bleeding from her torn womb, and pain – more likely.
So there they are, armed, numerous, invincible, stationed somewhere down the street, and even if the fact of her rape is not upsetting per se, egoism and self-preservation have to flash red the following vague realization: there is a possibility that tomorrow you will get killed. Your girlfriend will get raped. Repeatedly. And die, too.
Fine, fine, I'm done with the introduction, have patience. Not a genuinely useful piece of content, not properly cross-linked... Alrite!
Ad hominem
The first entry I came across in the list of propaganda/persuasion techniques on Wiki, oh how very creative of me. For those not familiar with geeky Latin: "ad hominem" attacks stand for personal insults instead of meaningful objections. Like, you ask someone to respect order and stand in line waiting for their turn, and they point at your earpiece and yell, 'But yer GAY!!!'.
Anytime you see someone calling President Zelensky a "Napoleonchik", know that this is meant to tune your bias against Zelensky in this particular case. Obviously, it provides zero factual information about Zelensky.
Ad hominems are boring, they are resorted to all the time. I bet you resort to them too. I caught myself "attacking an opponent" at times I had no respect for the said opponent, or because I was out of reasonable objections, or was just unfocused, or lost my nerve. Why are they used at all? The person unfamiliar with this brutal sucker-punch technique would be taken aback, possibly withdrawing from a dispute and abandoning their stance.
Ad hominem indicates that someone has pissed someone off. Period. Not appropriate for a healthy argument.
Ad nauseam
Repetition of a simple slogan until it becomes engraved in consciousness. False becomes true, questionable becomes a matter of fact that is no longer critically re-examined. This one is dangerous in the wrong hands.
Good parents tell their child, 'You're a good child/boy/girl', supporting it with evidence and on proper occasions. Bad parents repeatedly tell their child, 'You're a bad child', providing no evidence.
Vile parents tell their children that everyone is evil. Maybe that uncle is fine but watch out for him nonetheless – he might be the enemy of the state. This is how you upbring a proper Pavlik Morozov.
Immature adults are no different than young little boys and girls.
Did you happen to meet 50-60 y.o. people, basically mature adults and elders, who behave like children? I did.
It is okay for all of us to casually play silly buggers, exhibit childish behaviour, have some irresponsible fun - it is not what I mean. I mean those who are properly stuck in the child mode for 80%+ of their waking life. In those brief flashes of consciousness when they realise what their life has come to be (decades of being passive, dependent, restricted), they want to get drunk, they want to get laid, they break into tears, they get down with depression, they want to switch back into the child mode.
Children don't have to think for themselves. Someone else is responsible. Put this on, say this, don't say that, work on that, love your Father and your Mother. The biological dad and mum will do for now, but when the time is right those two will become irrelevant. When the time is right, a child is tempted to switch their puny mom and dad for something bigger, more powerful, and more important: The Father of the Nation and The Motherland.
Children have no developed faculty of critical thinking as a rule, so they don't require evidence and have no doubt as to what The Authority imposes on them. Thus, no matter what, propaganda slogans will sit in their mind and influence their worldview and self-perception; extremely hard to eradicate once they took the root.
Doubt and Thirst for Knowledge are the Doorways to Intellectual Maturity
Doubt is a faculty of every mature intellectual human. Intellectuals are immune to ad nauseam because they can stop and think, 'maybe not true', at any given moment, and when they dig deeper they often come to conclude that, 'sh*t, I knew there's more to it'. And if they keep digging, it is guaranteed that they will discover even more to it. Doubt expands the boundaries of the known. Doubt brings forth the realization of grave mistakes and thus invites progress. Doubt is a superpower of today's magicians.
It is a superpower because it allows to shatter even those ad nauseams that used to be true in the past. Example? Church is holy, church is good, church is the go-to place to look for spirituality and meaning. Look closer, and it turns out to be a swarm of pedophiles(1 2) and nihilist state security agents(1 2).
Leave convictions to the religious traditionalist. Convictions guarantee the cessation of progress, which has been proven on multiple occasions in the relations of Church vs academic scientists.
Yet, doubt is what makes intellectuals powerless in front of a self-righteous brainwashed crowd. And conviction is what makes the crowd strong. Hell, a single pig-headed simpleton is more productive than a careful ever-doubting ponderous philosopher.
How come that so many individuals (in the crowd) have identical values, convictions, enemies?.. they even speak the same words (words they heard from The Authority via the media). The answer? Propaganda, of course. And censorship, to remove anything that opposes and counter-weights propaganda. Plus some psychology of masses on top.
Bolshevik killed intelligentsia because they probably had this gut feeling that intelligentsia threat the state. Not just a gut feeling, a cold-blooded plan perhaps. Correct, intelligentsia disproved propaganda. They wrote about Holodomor, they wrote about executions and exiles and concentration camps in Soviet Union, questioning the expedience of these state-level decisions. It definitely rendered propaganda less effective, so... off you go, intelligentsia.
A reason I hate history
See, ad nauseam are so nasty they can replace actual memories (1 2).
Certain influential bodies first broadcast repeated history-related messages until the latter become the matter of fact. Then they use the history as a leverage to manipulate people into something big, like war. The messages are usually something in line with, 'we were wronged, we are the god's people, we must take back what is ours and reinstate justice', et cetera.
Now imagine your neighbor coming to you, claiming, 'You owe me 5 bucks'. And you are damn sure you don't owe them anything. But they seem pretty convinced, so perhaps they are right, and you forgot it after all. Yes, they are now telling you that you forgot it. And that you were brainwashed into believing that you don't owe anything to anyone. Huh. What if you owe them your life savings, your apartment, and your land plot? Seems unreal!
Alternatively, imagine your neighbor coming to you, claiming that you are Nazi and don't deserve to exist.
This is where doubt and reason are, again, your best friends and your worse enemies. You doubt the baseless claims but doubt yourself, too.
This is why people have agreed to document everything concerning serious matters. As for the hypothetical 5 bucks, people who trust each other never resort to documenting the trivialities like that, so I'd go out and ask everyone I know & trust if they can approve that I'm inclined to issue 5-buck loans and forget about it.
As for the accusation of being a Nazi, I'd pick a publicly accessible definition and check if I fit it, however ridiculous it may sound, because I doubt myself. The problem is, if I start arguing that I'm not a Nazi, waving a dictionary in front of my opponent, I may end up being a Nazi AND a liar in their eyes, because bias had got there first.
Does a local community share the opinion of me being a Nazi then? Do they find my reasoning sound and clear? Bitter as is, it doesn't matter in the extreme cases of propaganda poisoning. If the crowd has been repeatedly told for decades that someone's a Nazi, they will start remembering it, their mind will play a trick on them and they will rationalize WHY it is so, to fill the gaps between the induced memories and the genuine ones. Irrational hatred will follow. A worn 80-year-old dictionary and reasoning won't help.
It feels like this text is getting tiresomely long. Some more reasons why I hate history will follow along with more specific examples of Яussiaп propaganda. Don't get me wrong. Given enough power and malicious intentions, any country could and would go awry with their "persuasion" techniques. Russia is just a great example of powerful evil propaganda right now. It is important to be able to notice the evil propaganda, while it is still small and seemingly innocent, no matter if it is "your" country spreading it or "ours".
If I'm not killed in the bombarding of Kyiv (not a joke), I will also go over the issue of Ukrainian Nazi, Russian Nazi, which Nazi is the Naziest Nazi, more historical references, more philosophical analysis, more precious advice.