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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Is it rational to care or even know about propaganda in otherwise good media?

Imagine a person who doesn't know anything about Soviet Union and the concept of communism that decides to watch some movies from there. In the process of watching soviet cinema he will encounter not only direct propaganda of communism and Soviet Union itself but something more subtle, small, background details that show when and where this film was made and that it passed the eye of always hard-working socialist censors.

I think some already guessed where it goes. I was this person in relation to modern American progressive liberal views that are so common in Hollywood and general intelligentsia of United States. Without knowledge of internal us politics your mind just skips over all of the deliberately put messages in movies: specifically chosen race and sex of good characters and of evil ones, non spoken but painfully obvious and politically compliant moral of the story, slogans and signs hidden in plain sight. Many parts of it can be seen without the deep dive(the existence of same-sex relationships is the big one), in Russian, word "повестка"(agenda in English) come to represent all of the most obnoxious signs of progressive propaganda(or again just the existence of gay characters, there are living strawmans and steelmans like in any other social group), but majority of local and subtle things go over the public heads.

Of course there is a big difference here - modern progressive censorship and propaganda is not(at least not directly state-based) it emerges from a self organizing space of intellectuals who are very close to each other ideologically, but this is not very important to me personally if the outcome in the media that we consume is the same. From society-level point of view I am very grateful that there is little to no threat of state censorship in the US and America became the global cultural hegemon, not China or USSR/BigAutoritarianRussia.

And after I started noticing propaganda I saw small signs of it in almost every high-budget product. I am not only talking about the cinema here. To the point that I started to asking myself this question: "Was I wrong in learning this new information about american coming and goings if this information is useless to me and at the same time genuinely negatively affected my ability to enjoy modern media?"(As an example I can bring up Spiderverse films). Is it better to just ignore other cultures' political context to peacefully enjoy their best fruits? Knowledge is valuable by itself but the question is how much?

You know, as an adult who grew up in the 90's, a lot of the demoralization propaganda just makes me roll my eyes. When I got to the 3rd season of Disenchantment and they made the main character gay, I roll my eyes and say to my wife watching next to me "because of course she is." Usually happens 3 or 4 times every single show we watch. More or less every episode of The Fall of the House of Usher had an absurdly on the nose progressive propaganda moment.

As an adult, it's eye roll worthy. Sometimes you can see past the politically motivated characters or plot points. Sometimes you can't.

Considering the media we'll expose our children to however, it gets scary. If a person uncritically consumed current popular culture, you get the Nashville school shooter mentioned below. Brain turned to mush, on a path to mutilation and sterilization, hating everything and everyone. There was nothing I saw in that manifesto that isn't constantly beating me over the head in modern pop culture.

I'm reminded of some joke about the difference between a cult and a religion. A cult is all made up by people. In a religion, all those people are dead. We're coming up on generations that have only known demoralization propaganda, and who's parents have only known demoralization propaganda. Whatever kayfabe social signaling hating cis white males, normal women, or wholesome white families used to mean, the people uncritically consuming it and signal boosting it now don't understand it's only supposed to be insincere virtue signaling. They're ready to start pogroms now.

They're ready to start pogroms now.

Are you using a definition that isn't

an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group

?

A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group

Doesn't need to be organized, as riots rarely are. Just a racialized carnival of violence.

Do you think there are going to be violent riots with the aim of massacring or expelling cis white men in the United States? What percentage of cis white men do you expect to be killed or expelled?

I don't know about the entire united states. But many Democrat run cities seem to be at a pre-pogrom boiling point with all these massive pro-Hamas rallies. The fact that our borders are completely open, and illegal crossings are at record highs even from the last record highs doesn't bode well either. And if you've been following the activist ringleaders, their rhetoric makes few distinctions between "whiteness" and "jews" when it comes to what "privileged colonizers" deserve.

Wouldn't be the first time white people were extirpated from the societies they built, won't be the last. There is a massive population of invaders and collaborators who believes white people deserves to be eradicated.

Do you think more than 0.1% of white people will be killed during a riot in at least one of the 1000 largest US cities in the next 10 years?

Let me illustrate my expectations by going over some historical pogroms.

The 1821 Odessa pogroms are sometimes considered the first pogroms. After the execution of the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Gregory V, in Constantinople, 14 Jews were killed in response.[1] The initiators of the 1821 pogroms were the local Greeks, who used to have a substantial diaspora in the port cities of what was known as Novorossiya.[2]

So just 14 Jews killed, but the message of "Your kind isn't welcome here" is clear. Moving onto 1881

The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March [1 March, Old Style], 1881, for which some blamed "agents of foreign influence," implying that Jews committed it.[9][10] One of the conspirators was of Jewish origins, and the importance of her role in the assassination was greatly exaggerated during the pogroms that followed. Another conspirator was baselessly rumored to be Jewish.[11] The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.[12]

So that's the trigger. Here are some of the excuses made during that time.

For decades after the 1881 pogroms, many government officials held the antisemitic belief that Jews in villages were more dangerous than Jews who lived in towns. The Minister of the Interior Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev rejected the theory that pogroms were caused by revolutionary socialists, and instead he adopted the idea that they were a protest by the rural population against Jewish exploitation. With this idea in mind, he promulgated the notion that pogroms had spread from villages to towns. Historians today recognize that although rural peasantry did largely participate in the pogrom violence, pogroms began in the towns and spread to the villages.[17]

Man, the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?

At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.[18] An additional 225 Jewish women reported being raped; Of these, 17 were reportedly killed while being raped.[citation needed]

Only 40 casualties. And the results...

The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration from Russia.

I'd say historically, pogroms weren't about murdering even a significant proportion of the population. That's why it's not called genocide. Instead, they are about instilling fear through the much beloved stochastic terrorism, so that they leave. Historical pogroms also aren't a single event, but a steady roil of targeted racial violence with peaks of mob violence, and occasionally lethality. The role of the state seems to alternate between inflaming tensions with racial rhetoric, and being incredibly passive aggressive towards defending the rights of the unwanted citizens.

Frankly it's a state of affairs most Democrat run cities are already in, in their racial anti-white libelous rhetoric, and their slaps on the wrist, if any enforcement at all, for racially motivated anti-white hate crimes.

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