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When Amerikkkans are told to vote blue (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Propaganda was originally a branch of the Catholic Church, so the connotation is that it's as full of crap and dishonesty as apologetics.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I don't know about the history of the Church, but I do know that the word has been used for the handing out of legitimate and accurate information on a paper medium as a way of spreading awareness when one is censored by the State and cannot use the normal channels, and it has been used this way for a long long time before the use of it to mean the same as "lies" was popular.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Propaganda was short for "congregation for propagating the faith" in 1718, and meant a movement or organization for the propagation of ideology before the end of the 1700s. The modern usage refering to the information disseminated is from after WWI (which wasn't perjoritive at the time), when German telegraph lines to other countries were cut and they turned to high-power radio communication. The negative connotation comes from WWII after Germany's very effective use of it.

    Nevertheless, propaganda has been used as long as humans have existed, and much like the subcategory "advertisement", is more effective with as many lies as one can get away with. There's nothing inherently untruthful about propaganda, but neither is it inherently truthful. It's manipulation, and can still be effective without lies. It's much broader than papers to circumvent censure.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    "Propaganda" "Propagating", interesting, that makes a lot of sense. As for manipulation, it is a bit of a loaded term, when exposed to new information, one may make a different decision than they otherwise would have, you could say that the exposure to that new information had "manipulated" them, but that wouldn't make the information necessarily untrue or the "manipulation" as being a "bad thing" (metaphysics territory).

    As far as lies go, you don't need them nor would they even be all that useful when what one advocates for is the truth anyway. (like Scientific Socialism(Marxism Leninism))

    Thanks for the mini history lesson by the way.

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