After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism.
Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show.
A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb.
And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us.
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With World War I an entire system of ideas how wars work collapsed. Suddenly it was no longer mostly soldiers who had to fight. War became an engagement of every day's life. Everybody got involved.
Propaganda therefore changed as well. The campaigns were no longer temporarily and recent but had to be planned for years. Who failed in organizing it or used the wrong keywords failed. Masters of modern propaganda became the British, whereas the Germans failed completely in the beginning.
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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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In the beginnings of Christianity most people were illiterate. Therefore the Bible had to be transformed into pictures and symbols; and not only the stories but also the moral duties of everybody. Images and legends of the Saints turned out as useful models for human behavior - easy to tell and easy to understand.
Later, when the crusades began, the Christian Church used propaganda against Muslims, creating pictures of evil, pagan and bloodcurdling people. While the knights and others were fighting abroad, people in Europe were told to pray for them. Daily life was connected to the crusades, also through money-collections - more for the cause of propaganda than for the need of money.
During the period of the Counter-Reformation Catholic propaganda no longer was against foreigners but turned against people at home - the Protestants; and against their publications/books, which got prohibited by starting the so-called index. By then both sides were using disinformation for
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As we have seen in the latest wars and in art, propaganda and disinformation are taking place on all sides. No contemporary political system is immune against those two. All of them utilize them if it seems to be useful and appropriate. Democracy, always pretending to be the most liberal and most human system is no exception in that - especially not a good one.
Democracy might give us more chances to escape censorship - but only as long as the national will is not disturbed. Then disinformation and propaganda come in ...
NATO-members gave us a very sad example for this during the Kosovo crisis.
It is our hunger for sensations and glory, for rumors and shows which makes disinformation so powerful. Many books and WebPages give informations about how to overcome disinformation and propaganda - but in vain. We somehow seem to like it - or at least we need it for getting through our interests.
There is a lot what we could try to do, but very little that will succeed as people prefer to believe that disinformation is an issue of the past.
At this moment the only appropriate measure to get rid of disinformation's influence seems to be the putting side by side of different aspects and ideas, especially of opinions telling the contrary, or are at least not the same. In any other case the model will probably commit the crime it is fighting against. Because how would we be able to know?
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Disinformation might also be welcome:
While the ones criticize disinformation and try to fight against it, others do nothing against it. And others again seem to enjoy getting disinformed. How this works? It is the result of a society that does no longer want to live under the pressure of doing and hearing everything at the same time. Acceleration of life seems too fast. The only way to get out is to refuse certain things/messages/truths. Receiving disinformation can be more comfortable than getting so-called correct information. This is especially true for the readers of the yellow press. The yellow press lives on that perspective, the commodity of getting light news, mostly wrong news and lies - but those being wrapped up in nice pictures and stories about those who seem to reign the world.
The aim is the escape out of reality.
A surplus of information, information terror, can produce disinformation. The profusion can get exploited for disinformation. This works in that way that in the mass of information the individual has no possibility to get an overview of the different ways of thinking and to reach a stage of objective knowledge.
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Disinformation's tools emerged from science and art.
And furthermore: disinformation can happen in politics of course, but also in science:
for example by launching ideas which have not been proven exactly until the moment of publication. e.g. the thought that time runs backwards in parts of the universe:
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Is it art, is it a commercial or is it disinformation, when web-designers create a virtual model out of the so-called best parts of different top-models?
Kyoko data-project: the virtual model and pop-star is not only regarded as a virtual thing but "had" a biography, a family and everything else that a famous star would have. She was not even less reachable as any of them. For example she received tons of love-letters by Japanese teenagers. The question arising is whether she can be regarded as a product for making money or whether the media-enterprise
more:
and
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HoriPro is a Japanese media company.
For further details see:
Black propaganda does not tell its source. The recipient cannot find out the correct source. Rather would it be possible to get a wrong idea about the sender. It is very helpful for separating two allies.
The Communications Satellite Cooperation provides international communications solutions via the global, 17-satellite INTELSAT system and 4-satellite INMARSAT satellite systems. Calls are beamed up to the satellite and back down to Earth, where special gateway land earth stations re-route them through the appropriate local or international telephone network.
COMSAT operates Earth Stations in each part of the world to route calls efficiently within each ocean region. Earth Stations are located in Santa Paula, California; Southbury, Connecticut; Ankara, Turkey; and Kuantan, Malaysia.
http://www.comsat.com/default.htm
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), probably was the most influential German dramatist and
theoretician of the theater in the 20th century. During the existence of the Third Reich he fled from Germany to Scandinavia and to the USA, where he tried to go on with his work. In the 1950s he became director of the newly founded Berliner Ensemble, in East Berlin.
for more information see:
A US military signals intelligence satellite of the second generation from the 1970s.
Menwith Hill Station is one of the biggest groundstations in the
Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815.
He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner.
Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere.
Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda.
Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself.
But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see
Slobodan Milosevic (* 1941) is a Serbian political leader.
As a young man S. Milosevic joined the Communist Party, in 1984 the banker became head of the local Communist Party of Belgrade, in 1987 head of the Serb CP. Since 1989 he has been president of Serbia (since 1997 president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). During his reign the Yugoslav Republic broke up, bringing about the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. In 1998 the Kosovo Crisis started.