PROPAGANDA THROUGH THE AGES: Books and Deadly Deceits
I pointed out how our government has undermined the right of self-defense in the United States. I contrasted our emotional attachment to the right of free speech.. with the gross infringement on the right of self-defense. I was criticized since guns and books are different. My critics said books don’t kill people while guns do. They could not be more wrong.
The ideas in books are as deadly as any bullet contained in a gun. Ideas, like alcohol, can lower our inhibitions. We can, and we have, killed millions of people with books. There was a time when books were necessary tools of war. They were so necessary that you couldn’t kill millions without a good propaganda book. That was true 60 years ago. Now, all it takes is a partisan media to spread government propaganda on TV.
There are the lethal particulars.
— The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx advocated subjugating political and economic activity to the state to satisfy class envy.
— Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler advocated racial superiority of the German people.
— The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao advocated the destruction of the educated class. It decreed distributed production into the countryside while retaining centralizing ownership.
That is a murderous reading list for you. I think those three books alone rack up more than 75 million people murdered by their adherents. Does anything else come close to the murderous ideas advocated in these books?
Nuclear weapons have not killed as many people. They barely reached 200 thousand deaths. Biological weapons have not. You could make a good argument that books were not only useful, but a necessary prerequisite for the use of firearms in modern war. There would be no war if we took away the propaganda a government needs to inflame a society. All the firearms used for self-defense were not as murderous as these three books have been.
Am I condemning books? Far from it. I am condemning propaganda no matter how it is popularized. Note that each of these books prescribed violent opposition to opposing ideas … opposing ideas propagated through the written word in books. They said “We get to kill the people who disagree with us.” We hear that same phrase today.
Modern propagandists don’t bother with books any more. Books are too demanding for the modern audience. Video is an easier medium with which to sway an audience’s emotions. That is progress.. of a sort, and the tools of propaganda changed with technology.
The goal of propaganda has changed as well. Rather than subjugate a people through war, today’s propagandists subjugates a people through their government. Rather than steal your land by conquest, propagandists seek to take billions of dollars and control your life by controlling the power of government. That is the progress of modern propaganda.
See Al Gore’s video on global warming to see the power of video propaganda. Watch the response of Islamic crowds to see the power of religious propaganda. Much of our news and television entertainment advocates for the views of America’s elites.
The one constant through history is human character. Beware the political or religious leader who claims they will reform the world once they take office. They are promising heaven tomorrow so they can impose their rule today. You’d know that if you’d read many books.
Image: http://mills-soc116.wikidot.com/lecture:later-marx
