Your second paragraph is how it works on so many people. The western media/propaganda apparatus takes the angle of “We aren’t perfect, but they are worse than we are.” and then leave it mostly up to their audience’s imagination. Surveillance increasing and human rights decreasing in the west, that’s bad, but the enemy countries are automatically worse in those regards. US has literally the largest prison population in human history? That’s bad, but have you considered: China is just lying about their prison population! Because they are worse.
It’s fascinating in a way, the whole system is set up to encourage this sort of thinking, things like movies and tv shows always having a villain worse than the hero, and the west paint themselves as the “good guys” so they let their people fill in the gaps with the fiction they’re constantly bombarded with.
Let’s not forget that major North American movies get funding from the military only if they paint the US in somewhat positive light.
It’s a powerful state propaganda that works on exporting their “values” into the outside world - this cultural imperialism gets ingrained in our imagination and most people never get to truly understand that. To this day I can’t fully shake off some positive associations with the US that were put in my brain since choldhiod childhood with the help of US media. It’s disgusting, really.
There’s a Soviet documentary “The Target Is Your Brain” that talks about this, about how different the image America projects abroad is from their actual circumstances. I think it is free on youtube. It’s scary how literally every problem the documentary talks about has only gotten far, far worse in the 30 years since.
Yeah, it’s always nice when I can get someone to read Lenin, because 90% of the time, they’ve had similar ideas to him, he was just good at articulating ideas all of the working class feels.
Your second paragraph is how it works on so many people. The western media/propaganda apparatus takes the angle of “We aren’t perfect, but they are worse than we are.” and then leave it mostly up to their audience’s imagination. Surveillance increasing and human rights decreasing in the west, that’s bad, but the enemy countries are automatically worse in those regards. US has literally the largest prison population in human history? That’s bad, but have you considered: China is just lying about their prison population! Because they are worse.
It’s fascinating in a way, the whole system is set up to encourage this sort of thinking, things like movies and tv shows always having a villain worse than the hero, and the west paint themselves as the “good guys” so they let their people fill in the gaps with the fiction they’re constantly bombarded with.
Let’s not forget that major North American movies get funding from the military only if they paint the US in somewhat positive light.
It’s a powerful state propaganda that works on exporting their “values” into the outside world - this cultural imperialism gets ingrained in our imagination and most people never get to truly understand that. To this day I can’t fully shake off some positive associations with the US that were put in my brain since
choldhiodchildhood with the help of US media. It’s disgusting, really.There’s a Soviet documentary “The Target Is Your Brain” that talks about this, about how different the image America projects abroad is from their actual circumstances. I think it is free on youtube. It’s scary how literally every problem the documentary talks about has only gotten far, far worse in the 30 years since.
Thanks for the recommendation, I will watch it this week.
That was also my feeling when I was reading Lenin for the first time…
Yeah, it’s always nice when I can get someone to read Lenin, because 90% of the time, they’ve had similar ideas to him, he was just good at articulating ideas all of the working class feels.