| | "That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
Not being allowed to talk about something is very different that not getting a positive reaction when you talk about something. I remember Madonna responding to criticism of her anti-war song by saying how awful it was that she didn't have the freedom to talk about her viewpoint, when in fact she had just released a WHOLE DAMN SONG about her viewpoint and was at that very moment BEING INTERVIEWED about her viewpoint. People confuse freedom with acceptance. All but the most banal viewpoints is going to generate some dissent, but receiving criticism does not mean you are not allowed to talk about it. When people moan about their freedom of speech, the mean they want everyone to listen and accept what they say.
On the quote's subject, he says that good propaganda is meaningless. Not true. Effective propaganda aims for a strong emotional reaction that blots out reason and solidifies people into a single way of thinking. I like wikipedia's explanation:
"The aim of propaganda is to influence people's opinions actively, rather than to merely communicate the facts about something.... propaganda is often presented in a way that attempts to deliberately evoke a strong emotion, especially by suggesting non-logical (or non-intuitive) relationships between concepts."
"Support our troops" is meaningless, and as a result not very good propaganda. Yuppies attaching magnetic yellow ribbons to their SUVs are not supporting a particular viewpoint. They are doing a popular thing that has little meaning, and therefore little influence, over how they think.
Edited to add: It can be spun as "if you don't support war you don't support the troops" but I've also seen it as "I support the troops and therefore want them home and NOT at war." Better propaganda is less ambiguous.
(Edited by Angela Lucas
on 6/23, 12:40pm)
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The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. . . . That's the whole point about good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
