• davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    “Totalitarian” is itself propaganda: The Origins of Totalitarianism

    Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. This is a bourgeois liberal, anticommunist construct for the purposes of equivalating fascism and communism.

    Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

    U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

    If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t repressed by the red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

        • JamesStallion@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          Memes are short, contextless appeals to emotion and thus the perfect format for propaganda

          Does this satisfy the theory pedant in you? Do you have anything to say about the actual point being made?

          • я не из калининграда@lemmy.mlOP
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            8 months ago

            There is a quote by famous theorist of World Systems Theory Samir Amin on this term:

            The concept of totalitarianism is itself a false concept, invented in the contemporary era for the purpose of confining social analysis and critique within the horizon of so-called liberal, democratic, and insurmountable (the “end of history”) capitalism.

            stop being a shitlib and educate yourself about the meaning of words before using them. comrade davel gave you some wonderful resources and you are dismissing them.

            • JamesStallion@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              Ok, if you really want to ignore my point about memes and how they reflect poorly on those who use them for political messaging, we can talk about words.

              Stating that a word was inventing by a rich person doesn’t make it invalid, stating that the CIA promoted an idea also doesn’t make it invalid. Nevertheless, if totalitarian isn’t a word we are allowed to use in you doubleplusgood circles, how about you give me a word that describes a country with a single party, ruling in perpetuity? I would say memes are useful for [insert your word here] propaganda

              • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                8 months ago

                how about you give me a word that describes a country with a single party, ruling in perpetuity?

                You’re still trying to construct the thing we’re saying is nonsense. Typically attributed to Julius Nyerere: The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.

                The US has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois democracy, which was never meant to represent us, and never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

                In socialist states, the “one party” is the party of the working class. The two major parties today in the US are parties of the capitalist class, as were the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig parties before them.

                • JamesStallion@sh.itjust.works
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                  8 months ago

                  Excellent, the US is also one party. I don’t disagree. Now have you noticed that things are actually getting worse there now that all discourse is in meme format?

                  • я не из калининграда@lemmy.mlOP
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                    8 months ago

                    pure idealism. what kind of brainworms do do you have in order to attribute the determination of material conditions in the us to fucking memes of all things instead of the decline of the empire, as well as the sharpening contradictions of capitalism? clown shit

                  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                    8 months ago

                    That is not why things are getting worse in the US. I could go on at great length on why things are getting worse, but I don’t think this is the time or place for that.

                    This post is actually a great example of how memes can be effective. The meme is the hook. The conversation that’s being had around the meme is the meat & potatoes (apologies for the mixed metaphor).

                    Going back to an earlier comment of yours:

                    Memes are short, contextless appeals to emotion and thus the perfect format for propaganda

                    By “context,” I think you mean something different from what I’m about to say, but memes are densely packed with context: our shared cultural context. They are effective at communicating so much out of seemingly so little by leveraging our shared context. The a-ha moment of perceiving the meme through recognition of the implicit context is the hook.

                • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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                  8 months ago

                  dEmOcRaCy have only one pArRtY

                  But sEvErAl.1!1!

                  Lol

                  The force of democracy isn’t having 100 parties but the ability to Kick the ruling one out.

                  There, for you all wondering why so many people prefer democracy over some autocracy.

                  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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                    8 months ago

                    One has to have more brain worms than RFK Jr. to think that democracy is measured by the number of parties. What actually matters is whose interests the parties represent.

                  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                    8 months ago

                    We’re knee-deep in a thread about totalitarianism being nonsense, and now you trot out its synonym?

                    Authoritarianism is whatever the Council on Foreign Relations says it is this week.

              • я не из калининграда@lemmy.mlOP
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                8 months ago

                your question was stupid and essentially just buzzwords. rebuttals to absolutely everything you said can be found in comrade davels resources. also im not sure wether you want to reference orwell, considering that he was a snitch, a cop and a rapist (and his books are bad.)

                • JamesStallion@sh.itjust.works
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                  8 months ago

                  Rebuttals to memes lacking context and being appeals to emotion? That’s all I actually said. You folks haven’t talked about anything except the impurity of the sources of my terminology.