Reply #111: You hit the nail on the head, K-W. [View All]

[Octafish]

Turd Blossom got a smirking idiot "elected" pretzeldunce twice using these techniques:

Gore the Big Liar.

Kerry the Big Liar.

Who's zooming who?

A dandy overview of the problem and a few things we can do about it:

Anxiety Culture: The Propaganda System

How semantic propaganda works & and how to undo it

Language can have "hypnotic" or "propagandistic" effects. But with the right knowledge we can resist. This article uses Bush and Blair quotes as examples of propagandistic language.

Hypnotic Propaganda

We list below several types of language "distortions" which are often used for hypnotic or propagandistic effect. These are divided into two categories: semantic and cognitive. (For short, we'll lump them all together under the term "Cognitive-Semantic Distortions", or "CSD".)

If we regard language as a map of the territory of reality, it follows that the more CSD in language, the more inaccurately the map represents the territory.

CSD can occur "naturally" in everyday communication (often causing misinterpretations, communication breakdowns, arguments, hostility, etc), but propaganda intentionally loads language with CSD to induce "hypnotic" effects. This normally works by the "map" so inadequately representing the "territory", that the audience has to "fill in the gaps" in their own minds. This process of "going inside" one's mind to fill in the gaps of the "map" corresponds to "hypnotic induction."

(When professional hypnotists perform hypnotic inductions, they try to avoid using jarring language by letting the patient fill in the gaps. They do this by being non-specific. For example, they might say, "...you feel pleasant feelings in your body...". The hypnotist doesn't say what the pleasant feelings are – that's left to the patient to fill in. Being more specific runs the risk of jarring the patient into resistance.)

Rabble-rousers do the same thing. For example, they might talk of "defending our deeply-held values", and each audience member experiences a different personal interpretation of "deeply-held values" according to their own inner maps.

Most propaganda tends to be more subtle than this. In fact, it sounds indistinguishable from "respectable" political speech. Probably the only difference is that propaganda (according to our definition) is designed, whereas most political speech contains CSD due to an institutionalised habit (going back centuries) of minimising content likely to alienate voters or offend power interests. (This results in extremely banal communication, which nevertheless has propagandistic and hypnotic qualities.) The higher the level of political speech, the more likely that the speech-writers design the speech to have a propagandistic effect.

CONTINUED...

http://www.anxietyculture.com/propagan.htm

Dehumanizing the enemy is soooo helpful.

Remember when the twisted Queen of England said, "The Irish are pigs"?