New Forms of Propaganda (in the 19th Century) As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side. Two ways existed: a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral. b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs. Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances. |
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Another voluntary Disinformation A very different form of voluntary disinformation are the calls for donations. Donations offer the possibility to do something good, to help the poor. Afterwards one does no longer have to feel guilty for being luckier than those "others". The same pictures of starving and desperate children for decades, of starving babies with big sad eyes. The pictures show a terrible life. But the idea that contributing money would change the destiny of those children and other people is a lie. States use their population for paying money to make the states' policy less unjust. In fact the money of the Western donators perpetuates the dependence and because of this prolongs the misery into a vicious circle of disinformation on both sides, but it is clever to have one's people believing that they can change the world. |
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Sergei Eisenstein Though Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) made only seven films in his entire career, he was the USSR's most important movie-conductor in the 1920s and 1930s. His typical style, putting mountains of metaphors and symbols into his films, is called the "intellectual montage" and was not always understood or even liked by the audience. Still, he succeeded in mixing ideological and abstract ideas with real stories. His most famous work was The Battleship Potemkin (1923). |
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Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein joined the revolutionary Baath party when he was a university student. In 1958 he had the head of Iraq, Abdul-Karim Qassim, killed. Since 1979 he has been President of Iraq. Under his reign Iraq fought a decade-long war with Iran. Because of his steady enmity with extreme Islamic leaders the West supported him first of all, until his army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, an incident that the USA led to the Gulf War. Since then many rumors about a coup d'état have been launched, but Saddam Hussein is still in unrestricted power. |
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