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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

As someone born during a transition from "democracy where communist party gets all the seats every time because everybody loves their glorious leader Tito" to real democracy, I can tell you from personal experience that there was shitloads of propaganda in everything my parents and grandparents had access to.

I've read books and comics from the 50s and 60s in Yugoslavia and I can tell you that the Communist Party can do no wrong, the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes, and Tito himself was a poor lad who rose from nothing to ultimate power just because of how awesome he is. And of course we all are equal in everything, if someone feels unequal or god forbid better then they are stealing and robbing and doing bad things.

The history books I was taught from in the 90s and 00s painted a very different picture.

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Thanks. There is a lot of whataboutism in the replies to your message.

God forbid we consider both sides of a situation. We must only condemn one unilaterally, and never put both (or more) in perspective.

Lest we fell pray to the modern day thought crime of whataboutism, of course.

And you are sure there wasn't even a tiny bit of revisionism in those books from the 90s.

C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted.

Today's propaganda is hidden as organic voices of different organizations and you need to do some digging to see if org is genuine or someone is pulling the strings.

You vastly underestimate the volume and dimensions of proper totalitarian propaganda, like Soviet one. It is literally everywhere. You think stuff like "hidden as organic voices of different organizations" was invented recently? That's just the basics, Soviets had that in early 1930th when there were letters from workers and peasants demanding that the party would take care of Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors or whoever was the traitor du jour that day. It's something they have done for decades, and they did much more. You think you'd be able to tell truth from lie in such environment - unless you are spectacularly bright genius, you'd probably not able to. You may identify some lies, but definitely not all of them, and would be definitely driven to believe into a lot of things that were either distorted or completely false. In an environment where nearly all information sources were controlled (except for rumors and foreign radio-"voices") it would be very hard to discern and avoid it.

As an anecdata of just how tight this control was, my high school professor told us stories of how he used to smuggle rock'n'roll CDs into the country in the 60s and 70s. Selling outside music was illegal and he could leave the country regularly without suspicion because he had family in Italy.

I think it's much more likely he was smuggling vinyl, unless the smuggling was also done via a time machine, but I get your point! My wife (Estonian) had an uncle who was a respected yachtsman during the Soviet occupation, and who invariably came back from his trips with lots of 'subversive' albums. It put a different perspective on music I'd had ready access to growing up in Australia, for example Genesis' 'Invisible Touch' - I remember biking to the record store and buying it with (obvious) great ease and some pleasure. My wife told me this album was one she heard after her uncle smuggled it into Estonia, and it was copied by her Dad onto open-reel tape. The story behind the 'how and when' of hearing the music really brought home the difference between being part of the USSR and not.

> C'mon - at least propaganda was easily discernible and you could avoid it easily if you wanted.

In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at schools. At least according to my mum, she never even found out about all the mass graves and other attrocities until after Yugoslavia fell apart. Partisans being the absolute good guys was just the accepted default.

At least in Poland there was "official" truth (taught at shools/media) and one that was a bit closer to reality that was taught at (most) homes.

I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.

Yeah the tricky part of Yugoslavia is that when our king announced alliance with Hitler, we executed a civil coup and forced the king to flee to the UK.

Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate.

Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis.

What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.

"Whites" are loyalists. In Slavic languages "white" stands for "pristine, unsullied" and in the context of a revolutionary civil war refers to the side, which remained loyal to the government being overthrown.

It was a war, wasn't it? Millions and millions have died, we just can't imagine what was happening at that horrible period. Now it is very easy to say "I would never do THAT!", but who knows.

Astroturfing.

And yet these are not good examples of that. I've definitely read books that had propaganda though. Mostly by marshak.

In US they had Captain America so it balances out.

Not only Captain America. They had everybody from Horatio Alger to Joseph McCarthy, all the tele-evangelists and their ilk, all their popular movies, books, comics, tv shows etc with overly simplistic morality plays and nationalistic narrative etc. Even the 60s rock n' rollers just added some tamed dissent to an otherwise hook line and sinker adoption of the "american dream", all the way to Rambo, Rocky, Top Gun, and so on.

It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.

Rambo? Rambo is luridly anti-government.

It doesn't have to be pro-government to be pro-US, pro-national interests and pro-national ideology, in other words to promote all the same that those in power promote and evangelize.

On the contrary, "anti-government" is the official party line in an era when even the President (Reagan), in his inaugural address says: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.""

In the first movie, he kills a bunch of policemen and feels he and his friends have been abandoned by the military.

In the second, the military is actively concealing the existence of live POWs in Vietnam. He ends the movie by threatening a military official.

In neither case can you reasonably call the movie "propaganda", at least not without logic that you could use to connects the dots between any movie, from Bridget Jones Diary to Being John Malkovich, to propaganda.

I'm not arguing that the movies are anti-propaganda. I'd call them neutral in that regard.

First Blood was. The sequels? not so much...

In Rambo II, the government is actively concealing the existence of Vietnam POWs, and the movie ends with Rambo threatening a government official.

> In US they had Captain America so it balances out.

There is still a lot of propaganda in media for children. It's just not (obviously) pro government propaganda anymore. But I recall Bubble Guppies including descriptions of police as (my words) grown up hall monitors. No guns. No power of arrest. The monopoly on the use of force is basically the point of police forces. To elide that and teach about sirens and traffic tickets is a bit... overly sanitized.

The United States teaches a lot of propaganda about so much of its history. The most salient example being the veneration of the Founding Fathers as if they were saints when many of them were brutal slave owners and serial rapists.

> the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes

Right. And Superman is of course built like, well Superman, and commits no war crimes (at least in early DC universe).

Of course there's propaganda on both sides - then and now.

Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes.

Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect. And then we think how could they be so dumb? We're just as dumb now, we just don't know it yet.

A rare opportunity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe is that a lot of us have access to both the pre- and post- truth and can see the difference.

> Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect.

Maybe sometimes? I see a lot of new media with plenty of propaganda built in. Especially in the categories of: pro-arts, pro-environment, anti-violence, pro-diversity, pro-people-with-disabilities, pro-healthy-eating, pro-exercise, pro-sports, anti-bigotry, etc.

Many of those probably seem benign or beneficial, but they all have political implications and definite viewpoints.

>Of course. The larger point is that it's nigh impossible to identify propaganda until the regime or at least public perception changes. Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect.

I think it's the opposite, at least for the old soviet regimes -- and I've read several accounts that match that. People didn't believe what the party said, and knew perfectly well what was going on, they just pretended to agree (for obvious reasons). They also made jokes (very popular ones) that clearly show a good understanding of the politics and propaganda mechanisms.

Propaganda of that kind only worked at the early years (when it wasn't pure propaganda, but people also legitimately thought, some of the leadership included) that things are going forward in the right direction.

So, when we ask "how could they be so dumb?" the answer is simple: they weren't.

> People didn't believe what the party said,

True to some extent. However, while suspecting the party lies, they absolutely had no idea how deep and vast the lies were and that exactly was the truth. I've once heard an anecdote about North Korean woman who fled to South Korea and was asked how she thinks the life in the West is, how she thinks people in countries like USA live. She said she thinks it's a very good life, everybody is rich - everybody can get no less than 800g of rice every day!

The point is that when you live in the environment of a totalitarian state with little to no access to outside sources of information, you can easily deduct you are probably not being told the truth. It is much harder to know what the truth is, especially if you most basic assumptions might be based on the same propaganda you seemingly reject - because you've had nothing else to base them on.

And if you look at Russia now, it is surprising how many people who were alive at Soviet regime feel nostalgic about it and even about figures like Stalin. They experienced all the lies themselves, they knew those are the lies - and ask them now, they'd repeat them anyway.

They mostly feel nostalgic due to the economical and social hell happened to them in 1980-2000. Most of them never recovered from these times and could not adapt to new reality not because of brains washed, but because you cannot simply make it to the top after losing / not having it all. Ask your local homeless guys why they don't buy themselves a house, car and good life. Multiply that by pretty median smartness and hope for "it would fix things if returned" and you get the result.

See here for confirmation: http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/27/stalin-edges-out-putin...

I don't think it's only nostalgia.

As always, it worked much better on the kids than on the parents. My great grandparents didn't believe most of the propaganda. My grandparents are pretty sure Tito gave them a nice cushy life. My parents know for a fact that nice lives were had, but thought that maybe it's not cool that people who speak against the party go to jail and that all the really nice stuff can only be bought in Italy and Austria. They also think that maybe those hippies in the America were onto something.

Hence regime fell. Aided greatly by the overarching global political climate of the late 80's.

My generation is pretty sure modern capitalism is the savior and the only way to prosperity.

The cycle continues.

What will our kids believe? Who knows. But it's definitely going to involve the idea that overpriced organic artisanal foods are the only thing worth putting in your body.

>My grandparents are pretty sure Tito gave them a nice cushy life.

Yeah, but note that your grandparents also had life before socialism to compare, and, whatever troubles the regime had, regimes and lives before it weren't that nice in most of the Balkan either. So it might not be that propaganda worked better on them, but that they legitimately thought their conditions had been improved.

It's not like they went from cushy capitalist life to soviet style misery -- it was lots of war, national tensions, conscription, hard village life, culminating of course to the horror that was WWII.

And Tito was a bug war hero (for them, but legitimately too), and did held the country together (way better than his successors did post-socialism, so there's that).

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