Soviet Propaganda Quotes

Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal. Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on their path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.” (The Rise of Political Correctness)

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire.

Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side’s worst is truly all that it is. American political advertising is sinking slowly toward a level worthy of Soviet propaganda.

Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union, and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crushes his balls, then he will understand, but not before that. That is the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.

Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

The Soviet propaganda apparatus continued to crank out shrill, contorted documents attempting to convince whoever was listening that Finland was the real aggressor, that the Kuusinen government was legitimate, and the Mannerheim/Tanner/Ryti regime was enslaving the workers, etc.

In The Captive Mind, written in the early 1950s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote that Eastern European intellectuals, reading 1984 in clandestine editions, were amazed to find that its author had never visited the Soviet Union. How, then, had he captured its mental and moral atmosphere? By reading its propaganda, and by paying attention, and by noticing the tactics of Stalin's agents in the Spanish Republic. Anybody could have done this, but few had the courage to risk the accusation of 'giving ammunition to the enemy.

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 have served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the sell and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan's domestic economic program. The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in El Salvador and to justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.

In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.

Over the years I have had much occasion to ponder this word, the intelligentsia. We are all very fond of including ourselves in it—but you see not all of us belong. In the Soviet Union this word has acquired a completely distorted meaning. They began to classify among the intelligentsia all those who don't work (and are afraid to) with their hands. All the Party, government, military, and trade union bureaucrats have been included. All bookkeepers and accountants—the mechanical slaves of Debit. All office employees. And with even greater ease we include here all teachers (even those who are no more than talking textbooks and have neither independent knowledge nor an independent view of education). All physicians, including those capable only of making doodles on the patients' case histories. And without the slightest hesitation all those who are only in the vicinity of editorial offices, publishing houses, cinema studios, and philharmonic orchestras are included here, not even to mention those who actually get published, make films, or pull a fiddle bow. And yet the truth is that not one of these criteria permits a person to be classified in the intelligentsia. If we do not want to lose this concept, we must not devalue it. The intellectual is not defined by professional pursuit and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and good family enough in themselves to produce and intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interests in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.

I once had occasion to conduct an interview with a Soviet writer (Anatoli Kusnyetsov). (...) He made a remark which is one of the most extraordinary remarks anyone has ever made to me and has echoed in my mind more often than I can say. He said to me this: that if in this world you are confronted with absolute power, power unmitigated, unrestrained, extending to every area of human life - if you are confronted with power in those terms, you are driven to realise that the only possible response to it is not some alternative power arrangement, more humane, more enlightened. The only possible response to absolute power is the absolute love which our Lord brought into the world. (...) I can see, though we in the West have not experienced this absolute power, that there would be something futile and ridiculous even in the attempt to meet such tyranny with some alternative propaganda or ideology. As between Caesar at his most absolute and God at his most remote, there is only Christ. And that was what this man said.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

Russia's fundamental problem is not that it is a poor country struggling to modernize, but rather that it is a rich country struggling to modernize. Schoolchildren in the Soviet era were taught that they lived in the richest country in the world. In this case communist propaganda was true

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin’s purges, captured the surreal experience of living in the embrace of totalitarianism. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism, and terror. Omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary executions, and disappearances, along with famines, gulags, and a state system of propaganda unplugged from daily reality, give to all totalitarian systems a dreamlike quality.

Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school debates and trials. The idea was to initiate the children into the practices, cults and rituals of the Soviet system so that they would grow up to become loyal and active Communists.

It has already been noticed that the Nazis were not simple nationalists. Their nationalist propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never allowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics. Nazi “nationalism” had more than one aspect in common with the recent nationalistic propaganda in the Soviet Union, which is also used only to feed the prejudices of the masses. The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provincialism of the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their “movement,” international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific territory. And

Lenin did not write as eloquently about religion as Marx, nor did he write about it often. He wielded Marx's 'opium of the people' from time to time, but his own metaphor was alcoholic. In his 1905 essay, 'Socialism and Religion,' he wrote of 'the distribution of state-clerical gin' in which 'slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent life.' His alternative metaphor suggests a shift from thinking of religion as anesthesia to thinking of it—much as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov did—as a vice.

Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” “Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The retaliation came in all varieties. One variety came largely from the Soviet soldiers. When they entered East Prussia in January, their propaganda officers hung up huge banners: ‘Soldier, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’ The village of Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoya) was taken by the 2nd Red Army Guard, a few days later German troops launched a counteroffensive and entered the town again. They found bodies everywhere: refugees crushed under tanks, children shot in their gardens, raped women nailed to barn doors. The cameras rolled, the images were shown all over Germany: this is what happens when the Russians come in.

There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation, all reminiscent of the old Soviet style. In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law [230―31].

Eventually, Eisenhower found his “hopeful alternative” and presented it in a speech proposing an “Atoms for Peace” program. He suggested that the U.S. and the Soviet Union should contribute fissionable materials to an international effort to develop peaceful nuclear energy power plants. Delivered on December 8, 1953, at the United Nations, the speech was initially a public relations success—but the Soviets failed to respond. And neither had the president been candid about American nuclear weapons. Gone from the speech was any accounting of the size and nature of the nuclear arsenal, or any other information that was grist for a healthy debate. Instead of candor, Eisenhower gave America a fleeting propaganda victory.

half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire.

It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn't worked for foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.

Middle class propagandists For propaganda to be effective, the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes. These are acquired only with a little affluence, some education, and peace of mind springing from relative security. Conversely, all propagandists come from the upper middle class whether Soviet, Nazi, Japanese, or American popagandists. The wealthy and very cultured class provides no propagandists because it is remote from the people and does not understand them well enough to influence them. The lower class does not furnish any because its members rarely have the means of educating themselves (even in the U.S.S.R.) More importantly, they cannot stand back and look at their class with the perspective needed to devise symbols for it. Thus studies show that most propagandists are recruited From the middle class.

...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.

Government use of agitation propaganda Governments also employ this propaganda of agitation when after having been installed in power, they want to pursue a revolutionary course of action. Thus Lenin, having installed the Soviets, organized the agitprops and developed the long campaign of agitation in Russia to conquer resistance and crush the kulaks. In such a case, subversion aims at the resistance of a segment of a class, and an internal enemy is chosen for attack. Similarly, most of Hitler's propaganda was propaganda of agitation. Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost. Nazism grew by successive waves of feverish enthusiasm and thus attained its revolutionary objectives. Finally, the great campaigns in Communist China were precisely propaganda of agitation. Only such propaganda could produce those "great leaps forward.

Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. ... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. ... Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

The disaster was the first major crisis to occur under the fledgling leadership of the USSR’s most recent General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. He chose not to address the public for three weeks after the accident, presumably to allow his experts time to gain a proper grasp of the situation. On May 14th, in addition to expressing his anger at Western Chernobyl propaganda, he announced to the world that all information relating to the incident would be made available, and that an unprecedented conference would be held with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in August at Vienna. Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else. In addition, although the Soviet delegation’s report was highly detailed and accurate in most regards, it was also misleading. It had been written in line with the official cause of the accident - that the operators were responsible - and, as such, it deliberately obfuscated vital details about the reactor.

But more importantly,  I agree with a CIA assessment that  “ all US military Combatant Commands,  Services , the National Guard Bureau, and The Joint Staff  will be devoid of learning about the psychology,  intent, rationale, and hatred imbedded in Islamic Radical Theory.” So from my professional  perspective,  I should never have been taught by the CIA and DARPA the following fields of knowledge—Soviet Communism;  Agitation Propaganda;  Political Psychology;  National Character Studies[ replete with their customs, hatreds and proclivities];  US Imperialism;  Arab Terrorism;  Muslim Terrorism;  Jewish Terrorism; Zionist Terrorism; Hindu Terrorism;  Christian Terrorism. As a matter of fact,  to put it very simply,  I should never had read both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution because both are extremely subversive documents dedicated to the eradication of any interference both military or civilian to the wellbeing of our republic---this wonderful experiment called America.                 This kind of censorship, in any form, in both the military and civilian sectors of our society begets the tyranny of today and suppression of tomorrow. And that leads, to … oh my God!  A Revolution! Perhaps…. a Second American Revolution.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words. Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to an abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost―and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about "The End of Socialism," and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, "Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed." I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that "socialism" failed, why don't they say that "democracy" failed?―and the proof that "democracy" failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves "democratic"―in fact, they called themselves "People's Democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that "democracy" failed, not just that "socialism" failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, "Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy." And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right? Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves "socialist" ―but they also called themselves "democratic." Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives―but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup―and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism. But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful―that's why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that's been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West―because it's made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, "Well, that's socialism―and look what it leads to." Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.

Simple class-based bigotry that infected truth in the liberal media. And he knew the difference between those same propaganda dicks who distinguished between blue collar and white collar workers with the old Soviet-catchphrase, “Working Class,” as if human beings were broken down into different species according to their education or wealth or jobs. He hated that jarringly divisive phrase as the kind of Cold War propaganda that launched “class struggle” and “people’s democracy” as American political concerns, among the evil Communist movement’s greatest coups. It was something he only heard from the so-called “elites” but never back home in the old neighborhood. “Old Harbor Village housing projects.

Unfortunately, Stalin's collected works contain very little mention of his early comrades. Ketskhoveli's relationship with Stalin must be inferred from the accounts of third parties. Official biographers evidently thought it unseemly to dwell too much on the connection between the leader of the Soviet Union and a tertiary figure, who figured only in the history of Georgian Social Democracy for about a decade and then died in prison in a quixotic gesture in 1903. The historical literature about Stalin is patently designed to create parallels between him and Lenin and, whenever possible, links. Thus, Stalin had to be no less a leader in Tbilisi than Lenin had been in St. Petersburg. In the official version Stalin is already first among equals in his relationship with the central figures of Brzdola (The Struggle), the underground Georgian Marxist organ. But by his own admission, in 1898 he was still an apprentice seeking sponsorship and advice from the leaders of Georgian Marxism.

Deng’s judgment about the importance of strong economic growth was later validated by a series of studies of the collapse of the USSR conducted by party scholars in the 1990s. These scholars concluded that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) fell for four main reasons: •  The economy did not grow fast enough, leading to frustration and resentment, and this failure resulted from insufficient use of market mechanisms. •  The CPSU’s propaganda and information systems were too closed and ideologically rigid, preventing officials from getting accurate and timely knowledge about conditions both inside and outside the Soviet Union. •  Decision-making was far too centralized, and hence far too slow. •  Once reforms started under Gorbachev, they undermined the core principle of the party’s absolute monopoly on political power.14

Volodya’s happiness did not quite let him forget the horrors he had seen and the profound misgivings he had developed about Soviet Communism. The unspeakable brutality of the secret police, the blunders of Stalin that had cost millions of lives, and the propaganda that had encouraged the Red Army to behave like crazed beasts in Germany had all caused him to doubt the most fundamental things he had been brought up to believe. He

The Obama Administration has been trying to indoctrinate the public with its climate ideology in many ways and through a variety of agencies. This includes material on agency websites, advocacy of climate “education,”470 exhibits in National Parks,471 and grants by the National Science Foundation. One example is the $700,000 NSF grant to The Civilians, a New York theatre company, to finance the production of a show entitled “The Great Immensity,”472 “a play and media project about our environmental challenges.”473 A second example is a $5.7 million grant to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an Earth destroyed due to climate change.474 A third example is a $4.9 million grant to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s climate actions on climate change including a utopian future where everyone rides bicycles and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.475 The general approach pursued by the Administration for arts and education-related climate propaganda appears to be very similar to the similar propaganda campaigns by Soviet and Eastern European governments to promote their political ends.

In a “secret speech” to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev made a sensational revelation of the crimes of Stalin’s era. In the name of the future of socialism, Stalin had had millions of his own citizens tortured, subjected to inhuman deprivations, executed, or sent to die in Siberian labor camps. What had been dismissed as capitalist propaganda was now revealed as true by the leader of the socialist world: The flagship socialist nation was guilty of horrors on an unimaginable scale.

this is like Soviet-style, late Brezhnev-era propaganda that's coming out of the main stream media.

We must not think that a man ceases to follow the (official) line when there is a sharp turn. He continues to follow it because he is caught up in the system. Of course, he notices the change that has taken place, and he is surprised. He may even be tempted to resist — as the Communists were at the time of the German-Soviet pact. But will he then engage in a sustained effort to resist propaganda? Will he disavow his past actions? Will he break with the environment in which his propaganda is active? Will he stop reading a particular newspaper? Such breaks are too painful; faced with them, the individual, feeling that the change in line is not an attack on his real self, prefers to retain his habits.

The Soviet propaganda effort in the West played on this sentimental view of Russia and the image of Stalin as a man committed to peace and democracy, a view swallowed uncritically by the Western public whose knowledge of Soviet realities was gleaned entirely from the propaganda image. When the bishop of Chelmsford, president of the National Council for British–Soviet Unity, opened a congress in London in November 1944, he talked of the Allies as the ‘three great democracies’. A second churchman at the congress spoke of the ‘truly religious achievements of the Soviet Government’ and the great contribution the Soviet regime had made ‘to the ethical side of life’.[78]

This raised the antennae of the House committee members and its counsel. Robert Kunzig paused to ask Gitlow if he was claiming that Dr. Ward had engaged in direct communist propaganda when he was in China in 1925. Gitlow responded emphatically in the affirmative: “Certainly. … All the lectures delivered in China by Dr. Ward had for its main purpose bolstering up the position of the Communist movement in China and winning support of the Chinese intellectuals and Christians in China for the Chinese Communist movement and for Soviet Russia.” Gitlow said that Ward’s lectures in China in 1925 were highly appreciated and “discussed at length in Moscow at the Comintern.” He said that Comintern officials judged that “clergymen with Dr. Ward’s point of view, using the cloak of religion, could render service of inestimable value to the Communist cause in China and to Soviet interests.

The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. . .

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.

Part of the greater importance of the novella owes to its treatment of Animal Farm not as an isolated entity but as part of a network of farms—an analogue to the international political arena. Orwell thus comments on Soviet Russia and the global circumstances in which it arose. But the tactics that we see the pigs utilizing here—the overworking of the laboring class, the justification of luxuries indulged in by the ruling class, the spreading of propaganda to cover up government failure or ineffectiveness—evoke strategies implemented not only by communist Russia but also by governments throughout the world needing to oppress their people in order to consolidate their power.

Al final, fue por culpa de esa incomprensión del marxismo que muchos de ellos alcanzaron a ver cómo desaparecía la Unión Soviética y cómo Cuba se sumía en la más humillante pobreza. De triunfo en triunfo, y de década en década, esos viejos comunistas lograron destruir los sueños de ellos mismos y de la revolución cubana: el democrático en el año 1960, el económico en 1970, el social en 1980 y el ideológico en 1990. Al final dejaron un país devastado. Cuba pasó del monocultivo al cero-cultivo, de protestar por los intereses de los préstamos bancarios a vivir de las remesas, de luchar contra la prostitución a tener que aceptar el jineterismo, de una balanza migratoria positiva a miles de ahogados en el Estrecho de la Florida, de una pirámide poblacional sana a un país envejecido y con cada vez menos ciudadanos en edad productiva, de una patria unida bajo un mismo cielo a una diáspora de refugiados en las cuatro esquinas del mundo. Todo eso sucedió mientras la propaganda repetía, hasta el hastío, que la familia era la célula fundamental de la sociedad. Hoy, aunque pocos estén dispuestos a aceptarlo, o muchos se refugien en el consuelo de negarlo, es difícil encontrar a un cubano que no sea parte de una familia destrozada. Montreal, 22 de diciembre de 2016

new and more terrible cause of quarrel than the imperialism of czars and kaisers became apparent in Europe. The Civil War in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the Battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs. Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government which, while it claimed to save the Italian people from Communism, raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.

Josef Zissels from the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress has been observing anti-Semites and neo-Nazis in post-Soviet Russia for over a quarter of a century. Ukraine is by no means a problem case compared to Russia. [...] Zissels knows which way the wind blows when there is talk of fascists on the Maidan: from Moscow. [...] The alleged fascist infiltration of the protest movement is a propaganda trick from Soviet times, he explains, and it sounds a bit like: How many more times will you guys in the West fall for it? [...] We know from Soviet times that anyone who turns against Russia, who stands up for national independence, is turned into a fascist. This is nothing new.

The Left is perhaps the most naively credulous audience — permanently stricken with the ugly naiveté of adolescence — gullible for any shameless political propaganda, and slapped upside the head so hard and so often by reality as to never quite stop reeling from one capitalist political crisis to the next. This has been true since the 1930s, when Stalin’s Soviet Union could never decide which way was up — or down — between FDR, Hitler and Churchill. But at least Stalin knew a “useful idiot” when he saw one. Today there are nothing but idiots. — We are all useless idiots.

I have since learned that at other latitudes and at other times, the same Communist powers created similar traps for making people believe and hope in illusions. This led to the misery of countless peoples: in France, in America, in Egypt, and perhaps most notably, in Armenia. Tens of thousands died there in 1947 under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda, which had painted the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia as the land of milk and honey. The Soviets… promised that the ancestral culture and religion would be respected and that the newcomers would shortly see a new generation rise and flourish in social justice.

Seventy-five percent of our soldiers were manual laborers. Many among them had been susceptible, once, to Soviet propaganda. They stood with their mouths agape when they saw in what conditions of decay and exhaustion the Russian proletariat existed. They shook their heads, having to look twice at the scene before believing it.

They were nowhere near as biased as the mainstream media when it came to how they reported the news. Long ago, before she was born, the media had surrendered to being told by the government what to report. Her grandfather said that it was similar to what the Soviet Union had. He told her when she was younger that Pravda was the official news program or newspaper of the country and reported on whatever the government wanted them to report on, propaganda twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three-hundred-sixty-five days of the year.

Here, Žižek’s elaboration of Lacan’s concept of the ‘big Other’ is crucial. The big Other is the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field. The big Other can never be encountered in itself; instead, we only ever confront its stand-ins. These representatives are by no means always leaders. In the example of the White Sea Canal above, for instance, it wasn’t Stalin himself who was the representative of the big Other so much as the Soviet and foreign writers who had to be persuaded of the glories of the project. One important dimension of the big Other is that it does not know everything. It is this constitutive ignorance of the big Other that allows public relations to function. Indeed, the big Other could be defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which is required to believe even when no individual can.

For nearly thirty years the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky's name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor. To the present Soviet generation, and not only to it, Trotsky's life-story is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved in gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers and ghouls have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.

Even Soviet love songs were first and foremost propaganda, ballads of metalworkers or farmers who loved their country first and each other second.

There were stories, told about Ukrainians, who had never previously seen toilets. They washed their feet in the toilet bowl. Others bought fish and kept them alive in the bath tubs. They were faced with another problem. They realized that many people had radios and could hear news from all over Europe. In the Soviet Union they only had loudspeakers at every street corner and they played marches or propaganda from Moscow. At home, the population could enjoy a kind of news box (tochka-spot) which transmitted the same program as the loudspeakers. The length and breadth of that entire vast country everybody heard the same thing: propaganda. They were really cut off from the rest of the world and were indoctrinated to think that theirs was the best country in the world.

on June 22, 1941 the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. A few days before the actual attack, the English supposedly warned the Soviet Union that Germany was massing troops on the Eastern frontier - from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Day by day, Stalin was supposed to be informed, but disregarded the warnings as English propaganda, as an attempt to thrust a wedge between the two allies: Germany and the Soviet Union. On Sunday morning, June 22, a few days before the first anniversary of our "liberation" by the Soviets, Germany staged a surprise attack all along the German-Russian border; they bombed the entire length of the frontier.

From 1934,5 we heard the raving and ranting of Hitler, the venomous speeches and the vicious Nazi propaganda, which made us cringe with fear and apprehension. From the Soviet Union, we were wooed with propaganda, in all the European languages. We were the first among our circle of relatives and friends to possess this magic box and did we have guests, no end.

It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist — surely any serious Marxist — should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism. As for the world’s second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the ‘socialist’ dungeon.

Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, “this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie,” but can only be “realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

The actions of both sides made it easier for that American wrath to be warranted as retribution of the aggrieved. The early months saw the United States refuse to buy Cuban sugar or refine oil purchased from the Soviets. The Cubans instituted land reform, confiscating American land (with offers of compensation that were refused), then turned to the nationalization of American industry. As more property was taken, more economic measures were instituted against Cuba. American aggression ran from the embargo, propaganda, isolation, and the Bay of Pigs military invasion. As the rhetoric increased, terrorist acts were formulated and carried out. In partial response to the terror and other hostilities, the revolution became increasingly radicalized. From the start, policy makers knew terrorism would put a strain politically and economically on the nascent Cuban government, forcing it to use precious resources to protect itself and its citizens. It was to be part of the overarching strategy of making things so bad that the Cubans might rise up and overthrow their government.17

the campaign in Poland is remembered as one in which an antiquated Polish army was quickly pummeled by the world’s most modern army. Polish lancers charging in a valiant yet idiotic attack against German tanks is the only image from the 1939 Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland remaining in the popular imagination today. Originating as a piece of Nazi propaganda, paradoxically adopted by the Poles as a patriotic myth, the fictional charge obscures the actual events of September 1939.

The Soviet Union he returned to, in January 1970, was even more repressive, paranoid, and dingy than the one he had left three years earlier. The Communist orthodoxy of the Brezhnev era seemed to leech away all color and imagination. Gordievsky was repelled by his own homeland: “How shabby everything seemed.” The queues, the grime, the suffocating bureaucracy, fear, and corruption stood in grim contrast to the bright and bountiful world he had left in Denmark. The propaganda was ubiquitous, officials alternately servile and rude, and everyone spied on everyone else; the city stank of boiled cabbage and blocked drains. Nothing worked properly. Nobody smiled. The most casual contact with foreigners provoked immediate suspicion. But it was the music that gnawed at his soul, the patriotic mush blaring out of loudspeakers on every street corner, written to Communist formulas, bland, booming, and inescapable, the sound of Stalin. Gordievsky felt under daily assault from what he called this “totalitarian cacophony.

The scene at Moscow’s Khodynka Aerodrome that day was striking. Along the runway, swastikas fluttered alongside the ubiquitous hammer and sickle banners of the Soviet Union. The swastikas had been requisitioned, as Roger Moorhouse notes in The Devils’ Alliance, from “local film studios, where they had recently been used for anti-Nazi propaganda films.” No less jarring was the musical accompaniment, with a Soviet military band serenading Ribbentrop with “Deutschland über alles,” before switching over to the socialist “Internationale.” More ominous were the handshakes of secret policemen. As one German diplomat observed, “Look how the Gestapo officers are shaking hands with their counterparts of the NKVD and how they are all smiling at each other. They’re obviously delighted finally to be able to collaborate. But watch out! This will be disastrous, especially when they start exchanging files.”27 The

Some socialists might object and say that freedom of speech is possible in a socialist model and that many modern socialist parties and groups in the West adamantly support free speech. That’s true, but so did the Soviets. And so did Hugo Chavez and the other socialists in Venezuela—before he started confiscating the nation’s radio stations to spew propaganda. Socialists always promise that they will protect individual rights, but, as the Soviet Constitution makes clear, not if those rights get in the way of some other, supposedly more important societal goal.

By 1937 Soviet standards, mementos of Russian history before the 1917 revolution were irrelevant. Even the suggestion that china, jewelry, or furniture created for the imperial palaces of the tsars was worth more than its weight in gold might be construed as anti-Soviet propaganda.

President Obama quietly signed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act (SMMA), buried inside the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), effectively repealing the Smith-Mundt Act while allowing the Obama administration to run Soviet-style propaganda operations inside the United States.

The Historians’ Dispute The debate between the New Historians and the critical sociologists on one side, and the social scientists of the establishment on the other, broke out less than a year after the Oslo Accords were signed. The first salvo of what came to be known as “the historians’ dispute” was in a 1994 article published in Haaretz by author Aharon Meged, a longtime supporter of the Zionist Labor movement. In the article he accuses the post-Zionists of rewriting history “in the spirit of its enemies.”40 He claims that the post-Zionists had signed up to support the aims of “the Arabs” by constructing an anti-Zionist historiography that reproduced “the old communist and Soviet propaganda which presented Zionism as an imperialist-colonialist movement.” Meged claimed that this was the result of an innate suicidal instinct amongst the post-Zionists who know that denying the justification of Zionism will bring about the destruction of Israel. Hence, he overtly called for a social science whose role is to confirm the central tenet of Zionism.

The first thing the President had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television. It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would ‘allow’ as its puppet opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be. And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the centre of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a grey fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman. ‘The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,’ TV producers and political technologists liked to

This amounts to nothing more than misleading propaganda. The purpose is to create a climate of acceptance for the passage of legislation which will turn the majority of parents into criminals of the most heinous kind-those whose victims are defenseless children. The resulting body of law will play directly into the hands of ultraliberal social engineers as well as social activists within the professional community. The outward motive-the protection of children-conceals several more insidious ones: • The desire to expand and consolidate the power of the helping professions. At the present time, there is no law that says an individual must, under certain circumstances, submit to psychological evaluation and counseling. If they are written as is being suggested, however, antispanking laws will require exactly that. They will give helping professionals the power to define when the law has been broken, who is in need of "help" and how much, and when a certain parent's "rehabilitation" is complete. It is significant to note that in all of history the only other state to confer this much power on psychologists and their ilk was the former Soviet Union. • The desire to manipulate the inner workings of the American family; specifically, the desire to exercise significant control over the child-rearing process. Take it from someone who was, at one time, similarly guilty, a significant number of helping professionals possess a "save the world" mentality. They believe they know what's best for individuals, families, and children. The only problem, as they see it, is that most people are "in denial"-unwilling to recognize their need for help. This self-righteousness fuels a zealous, missionary attitude. And like the first missionaries to the New World, many helping professionals seem to believe that their vision of a perfect world justifies whatever means they deem necessary, including licensing parents, taking children away from parents they define as unfit, and the like. (For a close look at the social engineering being proposed by some professionals, see Debating Children's Lives, Mason and Gambrill, eds., Sage Publications, 1994).

Berezovsky went so far as to propagandize for the notion that the power of big capital was natural. He could say to FSB director Mikhail Barsukov, ‘If you can’t understand that we have come to power, we will simply remove you. You will have to serve our money, our capital’ (Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk, 289). It is likely that Berezovsky believed the West was actually ruled by big capital, as Soviet propaganda had always insisted, but considered this acceptable. Here again we see the monstrous influence of vulgar Marxism on post-Soviet anti-Communist sensibilities.

Munich was also the base for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, CIA-connected broadcast services that beamed news and anti-Soviet propaganda into Communist countries. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, headed by the former Nazi officer Reinhard Gehlen, had its headquarters in the outlying district of Pullach.

The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus” labor who were then “free” to work in its precocious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order. To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful. Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.

That Orwell should uphold a Marxist view of religion appears to have struck his earliest Russian admirers as his most dangerous flaw, a fatal streak of naiveté. And that was, in part at least, because atheism and Bolshevism were so closely linked in their imaginations..... Moses did not make it to Russia until more honest admirers picked up on the deception during glasnost. Such was the all-consuming logic of the Cold War. Orwell was to be sainted as an anti-communist, but western propagandists superstitiously erased his atheism in order to wield him against the godless utopia. The Bolsheviks, they seem to have reasoned, had launched their struggle on the spiritual battlefield, and it was there that the West had to finish it.

left school without knowing what capitalism was, much less a mortgage, interest rates, central banking, fiat currency or quantitative easing. The word imperialism had never been used in the classroom, much less ‘class struggle’. What history I did learn can be seen as little more than aristocratic nationalist propaganda; Henry VIII and his marital dramas; how Britain and America defeated the Nazis – minus the Commonwealth and with a very vague mention of the Soviet contribution; how Britain had basically invented democracy and all that was good and wonderful.

More than half of the Christian Democrats’ funds came from the United States. According to the Church report, the CIA, besides supporting the Christian Democrats, “mounted a massive anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers and wall painting.” In the first week of the CIA’s efforts, in June 1964, the agency produced 20 radio spots a day in Santiago and 12-minute news reports broadcast five times a day on three different Santiago stations. Activities in the provinces were even more extensive. To those inclined to react with indignation or outrage at Washington’s interventions, it is important to point out that Chile was hardly virgin territory whose purity was violated only by the intrusive, predatory United States. The Soviet Union and Cuba were doing their utmost to back Allende. If virtue was defined by a lack of foreign intervention, then nobody, inside Chile or out, could be said to be clothed in virtue. But even if critics are reluctant to celebrate it, the American covert effort can be seen as one of the great foreign policy success stories of the 1960s: Frei won the election with 56 percent of the vote compared to 39 percent for Allende. Afterward, Frei thanked the Americans for their help, though almost no one, including Frei himself, knew just how extensive that help was. The CIA, which did know, congratulated itself as one of the “indispensable ingredients in Frei’s success.

Throughout this section, we’ve seen how the US government, which increasingly resembles a terrorist organization, worked with extremists, including its then-asset Osama bin Laden, to destabilize and then destroy Serbia. According to John Schindler, professor of strategy at the US Naval War College, the American Department of State and President Clinton sought to bomb the Serbs to help the Muslims, “following the lead of progressive opinion on Bosnia.” Thousands of Arab-Afghans (Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Iraqis, Libyans, Jordanians, and others), with extensive combat experience gained fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan on behalf of the Americans, opened a new front in the Balkans. They had weapons procured with help from the US government, as well as money from the Saudis and Americans, including that passed through the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. They had the assistance of the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Office), set up to recruit, train, and aid fighters for the Afghan war. Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, wanted a repeat of the Afghanistan model in the Balkans, using Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan to send arms to the combatants. Front companies, secret arms drops, and Clinton’s National Security Council all played a role. The result was the creation of a larger and more capable cadre of murderers, war criminals, and human rights violators. They enabled the United States to topple a socialist opponent of its policies in Yugoslavia, tap the natural resources of the region, and control the routes from and access to oil and natural gas in Central Asia. American propaganda that flooded the media about murderers, war criminals, and human rights violators was particularly effective in gaining support in the United States and abroad. Like actions against the USSR, the United States trained fighters, supplied arms, and provided financial aid to rebels seeking to overthrow their government. Washington and NATO applied economic sanctions to Yugoslavia, hastening the country’s collapse. The KLA, directly supported and politically empowered by NATO in 1998, had been listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization supported in part by loans from Islamic individuals, among them allegedly Osama bin Laden.

Richard Nixon, then the vice president, highlighted a six-room model ranch house to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. “Soviet propaganda had been telling Russians in advance that the ranch house they would see at the U.S. exhibition was no more typical of workers’ homes in the U.S. than the Taj Mahal was typical in India or Buckingham Palace in Britain,” according to a Time magazine story.

Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive.This is a subset of misinformation, which also may be unintentional. The English word disinformation is a loose translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya,[derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department. Joseph Stalin coined the term, giving it a French-sounding name to claim it had a Western origin. Russian use began with a "special disinformation office" in 1923.[Disinformation was defined in Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) as "false information with the intention to deceive public opinion”. Wikipedia

Without realizing it, those in America who called the police “pigs,” who evaded the draft, who rioted and protested, were subtly being prompted by a gigantic clandestine propaganda machine organized by agents of Moscow and funded to the tune of a billion dollars by the Soviet General Staff and KGB. As Col. Lunev says in his book, “it was a hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost. The antiwar sentiment created an incredible momentum that greatly weakened the U.S. military. Quite naturally, knowing about the history of communist subversion and propaganda in America, I tend to react negatively to accusations against America’s police and armed forces. Whenever someone calls America an “empire” or a “fascist state,” I listen closely to the entire diatribe and consider who really benefits from this kind of talk. I listen for certain code words borrowed from Soviet or Chinese propaganda. I listen for concepts lifted from Marx and Lenin. It doesn’t matter whether the anti-police or anti-military sentiment is expressed from the left or the right. The question always remains: Does this sort of talk hurt America and help its enemies?

[Khrushchev] took a trip to America and spent some time in the state of Iowa. He saw how vigorously the maize grows there and decided that the shortcomings of the collective farm system could be counterbalanced if the expanses from Kushka to the tundra were sown with this magical cereal. One word was all it took, and the entire country was planted with maize. It didn’t grow. They divided the party into agricultural and municipal regional committees. It didn’t grow. They transformed the ministries into national economic councils—NECs— and the maize still didn’t grow; it refused. They gave up on the maize and set about introducing a reform of the Russian language that would have meant a hare was called a “her” and instead of “cucumber” people would have written “queucamber.

Some people in Dolgov, such as Aglaya or even Divanich, couldn’t understand the humane approach taken by the organs. This Shubkin had written an appalling anti-Soviet work and published it in an émigré journal—how could he not be put in jail for that? But there were many things they didn’t understand. For instance, that Shubkin, as we have already noted, was the only one of his kind in the district. If there’d been ten of them, one or two could have been put away. But if you put away the only one, then who would you wage a struggle against?

In fact this was outrageous to many of his early admirers, that he would become a revolutionary Marxist, because in the United States that always had been associated with Soviet style bureaucratic Marxism and of course then you began to think about the Cold War and all the little films you saw in grade school of Russian kids with their hands hanging on barbed wire, and all that stuff... which actually wasn’t a mode of thought, but was just our mode of propaganda. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t better than their propaganda; events have proven it was… better.

The reason for breaking out an old Soviet military textbook is to show that Russia is still following Soviet ideas. At the same time, America does not seriously embark upon war preparations of its own. The American side does not place its key military industries under mountains, and does not teach its population the principles of nuclear civil defense (as the Russians do). Even more critical, the American people have never received any schooling on the Russian threat. With rare exception, American schools do not teach students about the enemies of America. This was not even done at the height of the Cold War. In fact, Marxists were busy infiltrating U.S. schools and universities during the 1970s and 1980s. American students were more likely to receive indoctrination closer to that given in communist countries than to receive any proper orientation about a communist threat to the United States. And so, there was never any similarity between Russian war preparations and American war preparations. This is a fact that ought to make a deep impression, as it dispels the usual propaganda about the all-powerful U.S. military-industrial-complex.

While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.

The Soviet authorities didn’t outlaw climbing completely; they just shifted it from an individual experience, which they categorized as a “relic of bourgeois alpinism,” to a collective endeavour that could be manipulated by the propaganda machine.

The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror,” Stephenson noted. “The power of a totalitarian regime rested on propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm.* Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy. Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin’s sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.* The Soviet Chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.

Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy. In the sixties and seventies, the favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity of developmentalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them with Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldviews. (Conflating all opposition with terrorism plays a similar role today.) A stark example of this strategy comes from the early days of the Chicago crusade, deep inside the declassified Chile documents. Despite the CIA-funded propaganda campaign painting Allende as a Soviet-style dictator, Washington's real concerns about the Allende election victory were relayed by Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: "The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on- and even precedent value for - other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it." In other words, Allende needed to be taken out before his democratic third way spread.