Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (62090)	10/21/2004 5:29:10 PM
From: Mannie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

That is very true.... That propaganda machine is shameless and very good at what it does.

To: stockman_scott who wrote (62090)	10/21/2004 5:34:50 PM
From: crdesign	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

"...throw enough dung at a wall, sooner or later some of it will stick. I hope the Dems have a good hose and plenty of water to keep the wall too slick to stick." Tim Smig to SI Thread, October 21, 2004 :)

To: stockman_scott who wrote (62090)	10/22/2004 2:40:43 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 89467

Re: “The Republicans have the best propaganda out there since Lenin, Here's a commonly accepted definition of propaganda: propaganda noun [U] MAINLY DISAPPROVING information, ideas, opinions or images, often only giving one part of an argument, which are broadcast, published or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions. Cambridge International Dictionary of English * I've just finished reading John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World". I have personally read many of the notices to the public distributed during that period by the Bolsheviks. While clearly designed to motivate action or to counter the lies being told by the monarchists and self-serving owners of the larger circulation bourgeois newspapers, I cannot honestly say that they fall into the category of propaganda inasmuch as they were accurately reflecting the conditions of the time which were miserable for Russians. The proletariat in Petrograd were down to a ration of four ounces of bread per day by October, 1917. Soldiers on the front were ill-clothed, often barefoot, living on scandalously small rations and fighting without adequate ammunition. The media and the czar's information ministries were suppressing these facts, and in fact either completely disregarding the plight of the proletariat, the workers and the soldiers, or they were simply engaged in distraction. What the Bolsheviks were attempting to do was to tell the the people the truth, and call them to action. This clearly does not fit the definition of propaganda as it was later perfected by the Nazis and the Bushies, warning the populace interminably about phantom threats and unquantifiable terrors. For an excellent and short introduction to the writings of V.I. Lenin, I highly recommend this analysis of the Sino-Russian War: marxists.org You perhaps will notice the similarities between the adventurism of Czar Nicholas, a thoroughly incompetent leader, and a personage much in the news today. * Howard Dean blundered with this comment. He's targeting the wrong guy as a propagandist. Besides which, it is an absurd comparison, inasmuch as the neo-cons of today have vastly more in common with the corporatist Nazi regime of the 1930s than it did with the people's movement of the late 1910s in Russia. *** Lenin was offering his people hope. What Bush and Hitler do/did is much more in keeping with this brilliant observation of government by H.L. Mencken: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."