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Ukraine War and Propaganda: Embedded Opinions

2022-05-06T16:58:42.009Z


Truth and morality are distantly related, but twins are not. War propaganda lies, that's their nature. We should consider that.


Enlarge image

Pro-Russian troops near the Azov Steel Plant in Mariupol, May 5, 2022

Photo: Alexander Ermochenko / REUTERS

attunement

In a time when everything matters, nothing matters except the moment of attention.

Therefore, 60 years ago, Mr. Warhol autographed one dollar bills that were on sale for $5,000 upon completion of this act.

Today that would not be understood as art, but would be an opportunity to award the young blond man a prize for start-ups.

Nowadays, as one could see on page 1 of the "FAZ" of May 4, the member of parliament Roderich Kiesewetter travels to Irpin, where the chairman of his party "can be shown the destruction" (page 3), dressed in a destruction-resistant windbreaker and surrounded by laughing photo reporters who allow themselves to be shown the destruction.

He himself looks as we know it from him, concerned at the sight of the destruction shown to him, but on page 6 of the »Süddeutsche« he has caught himself so much that he is photographed in a tender embrace with a lady named Halyna Yanchenko can, also here in the background a picturesque destruction, this time from Kyiv.

We suspect that MP Laschet will take a close look at the snapshots.

The weekend before last, the "Frankfurter Sonntagszeitung", which appears on Saturdays, printed a large color portrait of the governing Chancellor, whose name is "Scholz" and, as we gather from the press, "is coming under more and more pressure", which is the pure truth, because it's in the newspaper every day.

The picture seemed irritating to us for a short time, until we saw through it sensory: Scholz, the Chancellor under pressure, was depicted as a clown mask.

That's what the dignity of the office of editor was worth on April 24, 2022.

The Süddeutsche, second morning reading, printed a photo three days later showing the press conference of UN Secretary-General G. and Russian Foreign Minister L.

Mr L. is 1.87 meters tall, Mr G. 1.70 meters, so it reaches the minister's upper lip.

The ministry's photo department sharpened this message by positioning the camera head-on in front of Lavrov and using a short focal length lens.

In this way, it was possible to document almost without forgery that Mr G. is about 1.35 meters tall and of short stature, whose nose reaches just over the minister's jacket pocket.

These are a few random examples from the truth agency propaganda oceans.

Propaganda I

Not all readers will be familiar with the Wikipedia article "Propaganda" and the instructive article "Techniques of Propaganda."

I would like to recommend both at this point.

At the latest after reading it you will know that – whatever one may think of it – there is no opportunity to experience the theories and systematizations developed on the subject of »propaganda« in a more genuine, direct and disgusting way than a war makes possible.

War is not only an emergency for every bachelor's graduate of a Bundeswehr academy, but also the ultimate challenge for the millions of German people who have studied something to do with media, will study soon or just want to do it.

As you hopefully know, Mr. Lavrov mentioned above made a strange remark about Ukrainian Jews on Italian television, which the German philosophers might not care about if the Russians as such were not the latest icing on the cake of the Germanic desire for world order.

The Feldjäger d.

R Dr

Reinhard Müller explained in the »FAZ« how such nasty propaganda works: In order to legitimize his »inhuman aggressive war«, »the enemy is declared a Nazi.

And against Nazis everything is allowed«.

The exposed propaganda trick may not be completely new to the "FAZ" reader, but it's shabby nonetheless.

Author Müller continues: Lavrov's statements "revealed

We are happy about that for various reasons: On the one hand, because it has been made clear from a competent source that it is a dirty propaganda lie to insult others as Nazis who are not at all, while you yourself are an "actual" Nazi who is does not admit it, but is thereby convicted.

On the other hand, it is nice that we learn here, as well as in two hundred other places every day, that the Russian war is "inhuman" and "cruel", especially since even women are killed in it.

This distinguishes it from the "brave war" and always from the real war, which, as we know, is human-oriented, hard but tender and in which practically all civilians are evacuated before even a single drone, four suspected radical Islamists plus 17 collateral passers-by »switched off« or 1000 NATO fighter jets bomb targets of the »civilian infrastructure« in Serbia.

propaganda II

In the course of the Ukraine war, it seems to me, being Russian gains more identity content the more being German is rediscovered as a quality.

Whereby being German in its human dignity-oriented form is supposed to mean a kind of opposite of »being Russian«, as Konrad Adenauer, a recent constitutional expert, already knew.

Has the CDU actually apologized for having for decades lit candles in front of the Kokoschka portrait of the man whose Interior Minister Höcherl was not walking around with the Basic Law under his arm?

A party member and later party friend of the funny minister said: "Germany cannot be defended with nuclear power, but it can be destroyed" and proclaimed in the Bundestag "Create peace with fewer and fewer weapons".

But that was not Brandt, who enabled Putin, but the honorary citizen of the city of Fulda, Alfred Dregger, for whose disguised early Putinism there is still no apology from the Adenauer House.

Only Herbert Czaja recognized in time what the Russian character was leading to.

In 1990 he resolutely voted against four plus four and demanded his Upper Silesian homeland to rejoin the German whole to the end of his life.

But like Adenauer and unlike Dregger and Höcherl, he was not a Nazi.

Nowadays, Russian dominates the German consciousness in a way that was hardly ever experienced even in the days of Dzhugashvili.

If you take the national German print press, at least 30 newspaper pages should be wasted every day describing the abysses that could be traced in Russia's military, politics, society, nature, economy, art, universities, fashion and above all people within a very short time after they were kept secret for decades from several German generations.

experiential journalism

However, there are differences: there is hardly anyone in the editorial offices who has “returned from Russia”, “was in Stalingrad”, was murdered in the Ukraine or witnessed the murder of their own relatives by the Red Army.

The day and night of writing, reporting, filming and reporting comes mainly from people who, up until four months ago, knew as much about Russia, Ukraine, war, military logistics, the gas pipeline or post-traumatic stress disorder as a cow knows about flying.

Near-ministers of agriculture, near-chancellors, full-time foreign ministers and honorary editors of various provenances can be included in this evaluation.

That in itself isn't that bad.

Times change, you learn.

But it must be said: The experience journalism of the military kind is to a not inconsiderable part a repulsive self-portrayal of overwhelmed people and structures.

Firstly, it is driven by the media market itself, i.e. competition, familiarization with pseudo-speed and "simultaneity" as well as a self-circulating assertion of equal communication, secondly by a sometimes absurd transfer of practiced patterns of "dismay" and experience from the distant sphere of oversupplied children in the brutality of the policy of violence, thirdly, the logistical availability of locations, structures and news suitable for propaganda: Visiting and photographing destroyed Aldi markets is more difficult in Sanaa than in Lviv.

The results are: endless repetitions of the same narrative, enriched with trembling phrases of dismay and stereotypical images without explanation, but with sentiment saturated with morality.

Safeguarded by the supposedly overwhelming need for »empathy« of the anxious consumer masses and enriched with seemingly indiscriminate strategic revelations about the world situation and either about the fall or triumph of the Occident.

Nobody should be denied a good will!

Nobody should be prevented from calling the war what it is.

But from whom should one expect a professional distance to propaganda from all sides, if not from people who have attended seminars on "propaganda"?

You can't put the description of the world entirely in the hands of the Twitter delusional system.

Of course the Russians lie!

And of course the Ukrainians lie.

Lies and truth are not determined by morality!

Do we really have to remind journalists aged 30 to 50 of this?

expert propaganda

The memories, nightmares and life dreams of the affected generations are undoubtedly important.

However, they are neither a prerequisite nor a goal of an enlightening journey into the war, the past or the political and social sciences of the past 70 years.

Consider: For the vast majority of people in this world, it is not important to experience how the food tastes every day, if you are sitting in a hotel in Kyiv instead of in Hamburg and hear distant artillery thunder.

On April 30, Jürgen Habermas wrote an intelligent text in the »SZ«.

You don't have to find it convincing, but you should be able to understand it before attempting to refute it.

Most of what was written about it did not meet this requirement.

I will remain silent about the abysses of healthy popular sentiment that were reached when 28 so-called intellectuals (hello!) were stabbed in the back.

Most recently, on May 4th, a literature professor raged for two columns in the Frankfurt feuilleton, so that the blood spurted into the sports section.

In general: The flood of experts is frightening.

I don't mean the speechless screamers' accumulated expertise in private.

What strikes me as strange is, for example, how surprisingly high the proportion of young to middle-aged people who are specialists in Ukraine, Russia, the military and the world war is who are classified as "Polish philosophers";

»Czech director« or »Bulgarian violinist«, i.e. combining Eastern European origins (»root«) with general human education.

I'm afraid the reason for this is that root concern, let's say good old ethnic identity, is now seen as the authentic source of media-prescribed concern.

Confessing from the bottom of your heart "what it's doing to you" or "how it's doing to you", especially: "how horrified you are",

perspective

But what is the effect of constantly piling up new cascades of disgust?

What explains, orders, determines, calling the violence of war first terrible, then cruel, then criminal, then horrific, then abnormal, then beyond all human standards?

What is the point, strategically or even tactically, of calling Russia "Putin," of inventing a devil figure for the stupid and fearful, of acknowledging the world's disintegration into empires of good and evil, when in truth everything is filled with contradiction , non-simultaneity, differentiation?

What is the pull of accusing the enemy of preparatory propaganda for world war until one's own population has grown accustomed to believing it to be inevitable?

Should this be the turning point?

Federal chancellors and federal presidents going down on their knees to Kyiv if Mr. Zelenskyj allows them to give his country, which has as many assistance pacts with Germany as Burkina Faso, the prescribed number of tank battalions?

What is the aim of this turning point?

The claim that “the whole world” is keeping its fingers crossed for the “West” as it once again puts barbarism in its place is a daydream at best, and the wishful thinking of the German internet community of being protected by nuclear warheads and howitzer-tipped watchtowers at the same time Moving back to black and white TV and forward to world power will come to nothing.

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Thomas Fisher

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The media maker knows that the most beautiful constant excitement cannot be preserved forever.

Meanwhile, things could hardly be better for the oil and gas companies.

In my opinion, what is needed in this country is an end to collective panic attacks and the termination of their simulation.

Everyone who can hear has heard a thousand times that most Russians are criminals, Mr. Putin is a monster, the German politicians of the last 60 years have failed, and oil and gas are scarce but fortunately still available for another 300 nice years, if we manage to thaw Antarctica.

The summer vacation is approaching, and the preparations for the Oktoberfest 2022 do not indicate a general spirit of war.

The German, fighting to the last foreign drop of blood, has not yet fully awakened, so it snarls in disappointment but reassuringly from the people's receivers.

So it would be good

Source: spiegel

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