This morning a friend sent me a piece of literature
purportedly prepared for schoolchildren in North Korea. I have no idea the
authenticity of the document. It appeared to me to be an internet hoax, or if
it has some legitimacy it might be a particularly sensationalistic English translation
of the original Korean, with English words and phrases carefully chosen to make
it sound as batshit as possible. My favorite part was the description of Kim
Jong Il’s birth, where following the prophecy of a hummingbird he apparently simply
walked out of his mother’s patriotic vagina. That’s one way to do it. In any
case it was clearly some kind of propaganda. And the rhetorical question posed
to me along with the piece got me thinking. How can people believe this stuff?
Propaganda is one of my favorite things, I love to see it,
identify it, think about it, definitely talk about it, and I am sure I have written
about it before. But since I only seem to like what I write while I am writing it
I am unwilling to go back and look at older essays before I begin potentially
repeating myself here. I am lazy and annoying like that. But I am not outraged
by propaganda the way some people are. I dream one day of being a writer of propaganda.
I really want to get paid to tell people what to think. I think I would be
great at it.
When we become aware of propaganda, we always think of it as
happening somewhere else. We know Hitler made great use of it for example. How
else could an entire nation of people maintain even a low level of apathy
toward a horror like the holocaust? I don’t buy the ignorance argument. World
War II was very well documented and there seems to be a lot of evidence to
suggest that the German people, not to mention the people of Nazi-occupied
countries like Poland and Austria, were keenly aware that their Jewish
neighbors were disappearing. And still the 99% in those countries seem to have
just gone with it. Maybe they were afraid. I think it more likely that they
were convinced.
I think the general population, of humanity, hates to think
for themselves. This is why propaganda works so well. It is far easier to believe
someone else’s story than it is to make up your own.
I answered my friend’s rhetorical question (because I am
arrogant like that) with the story of George Washington never telling a lie,
and the one about Ben Franklin “inventing” electricity. Which I consider to be
equally incredible lies about our own founding fathers. My friend responded by
drawing a line between political propaganda and what he called “insane magical
or supernatural propaganda.” Maybe.
And then I thought about all the people I know who truly
believe in a virgin birth, when they would never believe such a story from
their daughters. I thought about the people who truly believe that once upon a
time a six hundred year old man built a boat and filled it with every kind of
animal and insect on earth, then watched while the physical laws of the
universe were suspended and magical rain clouds produced more water than even exists
on the planet and turned the whole globe into a single ocean. I thought about
all the people I know who truly believe that an angel told a fourteen year old
boy where to dig up an ancient golden book and translate it into English. Reasonable
people truly believe all these things. So why does North Korean propaganda seem
so crazy?
In reality propaganda appears everywhere, not just in North
Korea and Hitler’s Germany. Neither is it a relic of the past. I know I have
written previously about the post 9/11 “God Bless America” billboards that mysteriously
popped up all over the country thirteen years ago. But what about “In God We
Trust?” In 1864 a purposefully secular government which prides itself on
maintaining and defending freedom of religion began minting coins with this
phrase on them, and has done so continuously for 150 years now. Why? Because
that’s what they really want you to believe. That’s why. It’s the same reason
that every president ever has had the same single religion. We can have a black
president. We can probably even have a female president. But we can’t even
dream of having a president who isn’t Christian. Could you imagine? Me either.
Have you ever wondered why anyone cares so much about the
phrase “under God” in the pledge of allegiance? Of course you have. We all
have. Some of us wonder why these atheists get their panties all bunched up about
it when it is just words. Others of us wonder why theists added the phrase in
the first place to a pledge which had already been just fine without it for 60
years. Still more of us wonder why anyone recites the pledge at all, or ever
did. The truth is the pledge of allegiance might be the greatest and most
powerful piece of propaganda ever used on the American people. It is the poster
child for political propaganda. It originally appeared in a children’s
magazine. That’s genius. Any propagandist worth his salt knows that kids are
more impressionable than adults. So we teach our children to recite a pledge of
blind and unwavering loyalty to a thin metaphor for a government which they do
not understand, and in which they are unable to participate. We still compel
our children to recite this pledge in schools, decades after the Supreme Court
ruled the practice unconstitutional. Nothing teaches freedom quite like forcing
kids to pledge allegiance to a flag representing the country whose highest
court declared that they could not be forced to pledge allegiance.
It’s no wonder the “In God We Trust” people wanted to get
hold of the pledge when they did. In 1954 the pledge was wildly popular. After
having been an informal tradition for half a century, the previous decade had
seen the pledge adopted by Congress and taken up in the highest court of the
land. So it is no surprise that Congress voted to add “under God” to the
pledge, thereby igniting a new controversy. That action has managed to keep a
simple mantra first published in a children’s magazine in the conscious minds
of almost all Americans for another 60 years. Everyone has an opinion on it.
Now that’s successful propaganda.
If we really want to see through these things we must assume
that our own government is not any different from any other government. Any
time we see insane propaganda from a foreign land and wonder how those people
can believe that shit, we should automatically assume that our government is
feeding us a similar meal.
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