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Saturday, June 16, 2007

Propaganda

As they promote thier dogma, environmental alarmists are always quick to dismiss and demonize those who disagree with their position as "deniers" or discredit them for being in the pocket of "big oil". It reminds one of totalitarian censorship and propaganda. At the Reference Frame, Luboš Motl investigates the similarities in Green and Communist propaganda: a comparison.

Those readers who haven't lived in a totalitarian system may have problems to understand why the rest of us finds the structure of the environmentalist propaganda almost identical to the structure of the communist propaganda. To fix this problem, let me translate the official response to Charter 77, the pro-freedom statement penned by Václav Havel. You can compare it e.g. with DeSmogBlog's new defamatory pages against 61 of the "climate change deniers".

[...]

Let me now try to identify some basic common features of the propagandistic algorithms of both ideologies; it won't be too hard:
  • They try to convey the message that the opposition doesn't exist
  • If the opposition exists, it is composed of unsuccessful or dead bodies who have been defeated decades ago
  • The members of the opposition are being controlled by others, usually by demonized sources of power, with hints of corruption
  • Opposition gets badges that are meant to be derogatory - capitalist, Zionist, deniers, renegades, contrarians, reactionary, burgeoisie, oil-funded etc.
  • Opposition is presented as being against all the people - and all the people should agree and do agree with that; statements that everyone agrees and everyone keeps on supporting the official position are repeated all the time
  • The opposition members are criticized for their very existence and for the tiniest deviations from the official ideology, to assure everyone else that one simply can't join them if he wants to survive
  • Opposition is claimed to misinterpret words and facts even though it is pretty obvious that it is the official party who is doing that
  • The opposing individuals are deconstructed one by one by carefully crafted ad hominem attacks
  • The propaganda openly states that a debate or a dialogue itself is unacceptable and no details of the opponents' opinions are ever analyzed
  • Whenever it's possible, the opponents must be fired or otherwise harassed
Sound familiar?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very familiar. And such propaganda and censorship could not be effective without the complicity of an MSM either very sympathetic to or controlled by the Greens/Communists.

Zookeeper said...

AGW: It's the religion that appeals to atheists, the organized rule that appeals to anarchists; the big business that appeals to greenies. Everything that these people scorn the rest of the world for is embodied in one movement that has their support.

The irony would be delicious if the stakes weren't so high.

John Nicklin said...

deSmogBlog is, in my books, a bunch of small minded hacks of Suzuki. Their activities border on libel and slander. Their whole arguement is ad hominum, no facts, just smears.

John Nicklin said...

halfwise: well said, maybe you should change your handle to mostwise.