People are losing trust in mainstream media because of perceived biased coverage of the Gaza genocide. If that erosion of trust is real, why isn’t it prompting wider public re-examination of historical cover-ups and contested narratives — Watergate, Iran–Contra, Iraq, even shifting beliefs about who “beat” the Nazis? If we don’t question how past information was shaped, what’s the point of preserving evidence (e.g., Gaza genocide evidence recently removed from YouTube by Google)? Won’t this all be forgotten in a few years, the same way all those previous events are no longer discussed?
What’s stopping a sustained, constructive public inquiry into these parallels between past cover-ups and current information control? Where are good, constructive places to discuss these issues without falling into unproductive conspiracy spirals?
You know that Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Iraq are settled history at this point, right? They are no longer contested by serious people. A better example might be the JFK assassination & cover-up, or better yet, ongoing events like the astroturfed Mexican “gen-z revolution” or the fake Venezuelan “narco-terrorism” the US made up in an attempt to overthrow president Maduro.
Where are good, constructive places to discuss these issues without falling into unproductive conspiracy spirals?
The fediverse, which for the most part currently isn’t run by corporations or by NGOs funded by governments or corporations. There are also a few independent, non-corporate, non-NGO investigative reporting sources. I can name a few good ones if you like. People on lemmy.ml often post articles from them.
Wait, what is this about who beat the Nazi’s?
People now think the Americans beat the nazis due to all the Hollywood propaganda.
Do they? I mean, I’m sure some people do. But some people also think shoving chili peppers up their anus is pleasurable. We don’t go around saying “People now think shoving hot peppers up their ass feels good.”, because while it’s technically true, it’s disingenuous considering how few people fit into that category.
the majority of people do now
Ok, but who did?
The Red Army was responsible for 80-90% of the war effort in Europe against the Nazis, the eastern front absolutely eclipsed the western front.
This graph definitively answers the question, “Does propaganda really work?”
Thanks I had never questioned that fact myself until I saw your post. I also did some googling and found the same thing on multiple articles and not only find it fascinating but also breain dead obvious.
Because that’s not how people think. Not anyone.
You can study history, and if you do it right you’ll see how stupid and individually directed most things are. It’s all conspiracies, that’s how the world has worked for millennia
One realization doesn’t free your mind and make you a scholar… That’s just not how humans work
Wutno. Humans are not genetically doomed to being stupid. They can learn to think analytically, they can learn about known biases and how to mitigate them. They can learn historical materialism.
But you can bet we are going to keep discussing Tian’anmen Square instead of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Jeju Island massacre, Indonesian anti-communist purge, etc. It’s as if the average person believes anything so long as mainstream media says it.
Maybe I’m reading wrong, but your comment seems to imply that Tian’anmen Square was mainstream media lies?
There was political violence around Tian’anmen square on june 4th 1989 yes. This cannot be denied and no one is denying this, not even the CPC. The narrative around that political violence that we hear in the west is however, riddled with lies and intentional distortion for the purpose of propaganda. Here is a great video on the subject that is fully sourced if you are interested. Some of the source links are unfortunately 404s now, I’ll see if I can find the articles referenced and make a followup comment.
Edit: I have unfortunately found zero archives of the missing articles and my sleuthing skills are limited to searching the only 2 archive sites I know rn.
I did however find the wikileaks info that the telegraph article discusses
Yes Tiannenmen is pretty lied together. https://youtu.be/IqxU5RdI88M
Most USians believe there’s no censorship here while this video keeps getting removed.
That is the stance of the server that hosts this community. Make of that what you will. There’s a reason most avoid it.
And yet here you are 🤷
And?
verifiable american propaganda is a very difficult pill for westerners to swallow; so most, like you, don’t bother.
Not at all. As an American and a westerner who’s family has suffered at the hands of the government. That’s easy, though you may want to check your Anglophobia. Campism and hypocrisy is the hard bit to swallow. Where when two groups do similar things but one is accepted or at least excused because they’re “your” camp right or wrong.
i’m an anglophile and dispelling the western propaganda about tianamen square is only a 30 second google search away; but your comment makes it look like you’ve never bothered.
i’m an anglophile
I gotta say, I’m curious what you mean by that.
If it’s all propaganda and nothing happened, then why the fuck is China so draconian about preventing any and all conversation about it?
I mean, if it was all made up lies, certainly they would want people talking about the truth of the matter, rather than banning and prosecuting anyone who dares mention that it was anything other than a normal day.
Now, some people might see this and easily be able to tell that something stinks and clearly there is something they are trying to cover up. We call this “Not having the critical thinking skills of a dead goldfish”
This is a really dumb perspective, in general. By that logic I could say, “If Holocaust denialism is so baseless, then why does it get censored so much? If there’s no truth to it, wouldn’t you want people talking about it?” No, it’s censored because it is baseless, because we don’t want people spreading around long debunked misinformation. Just because something is untrue doesn’t mean that people repeating it can’t create confusion, doubt, etc.
I mean, look at all the bullshit propaganda the right puts out, and because they have so much money backing it, strengthening their signal, it’s all some people ever hear, and if some spends thousands of hours watching Fox News, and the other side gets like 20 minutes once a year at Thanksgiving, which narrative they go with is going to have very little to do with what’s actually true.
That same far-right media sphere has spread out from the US to all sorts of small countries around the world. If you look at them, you’ll often find right-wingers in those countries screaming about shit that doesn’t even apply to their country, because it’s what this propaganda network told them to be mad about. I mean, fucking anti-mask protests in Japan, for example.
Regardless of your perspective on Tienanmen Square, this logic of, “If it’s not true then there’s no reason to censor it” doesn’t really hold up.
They don’t, they reference what they call the “June 4th incident” all the time when relevant. What they don’t allow is spreading the fictionalized version of events, ie tanks running over 10000 protestors in the square. They acknowledge the real events, which were riots around Beijing that were put down by the PLA, resulting in a few dozen deaths of officers and a few hundred rioters killed by the PLA. The west uses the atrocity propaganda of the former story to undermine the socialist project in the PRC.
No, not at all. For using “the West” as a crutch to deflect all blame from your in groups. There isn’t one China, much less one West. More than anything, though, it is a tongue in cheek nod to the servers favorite deflection. Sinophobia.
It’s also easy to find links to the United States or those in the West to exonerating themselves of things they’ve done. That doesn’t mean I believe them.
the difference is that sources defining the tiananmen protests as a massacre are funded by the state department (both directly and undirectly) which has a long, storied and undisputed history of peddling propaganda; including my government’s own public admissions of doing so.
Here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tienanmen-square-142085625
Note that the sources in the description are mostly “mainstream” Western sources.
Also many of the sources are 404s, or seem to link to different articles, or actually don’t contradict the general narrative. Also some random guys patreon. Gotta say I’m convinced.
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What’s stopping a re-examination of historical cover-ups? I think you answer your own question when you say: where’s a good place to discuss this without going into conspiracy spirals? I mean that any time topics like this come up, people who are sincerely interested have to constantly militate against the “conspiracy theory” stigma. If you’re hit with that label, you’re persona non grata in academia, news media, and mainstream accounts on social media. That’s what stops people. The places to discuss conspiracy adjacent topics would be alternative platforms like this, until news media slowly come around on accepting anomalies many years after the fact: Jack Ruby did have mob ties; the Saudis did seem to fund hijackers, etc.
Information is about as rapid as money exchanges. There’s so much going around because News is 24/7 and there’s so many outlets that it will burn out anyone’s minds trying to follow it all. It was like with the Hong Kong protests, it got traction for a while, then something else happened and it was dropped within weeks.
And we have all of these wikis in existence where the legitimacy of the articles written, are constantly challenged through the edits of those that believe differently in how it should be written to the reliable sources conflicting with those beliefs.
And we have generations of people who do not remember the time of certain events as they’ve happened where previous generations did. So it can be harder for someone who wasn’t born around the time of Pearl Harbor and WWII to relate and take in information as opposed to the one who actually lived it.
Then we take into account of instances of history being re-written by revisionists, some sections of history is white-washed, censored, redacted .etc
Top it all off with how incredulous and sensationalist projections the media reports that just shits all over it.
And we have ourselves one big, informational train-wreck where almost nobody knows what to believe. So what most people do anymore is if a news report aligns with their beliefs, they’re going to take it at face value.
Most of the past ones have been admitted and are out in the open. A few big ones like JFK and 9/11 remain.
Tucker Carlson did an Interesting 9/11 series recently though (no I don’t endorse Tucker Carlson as a whole)
1092: Tucker, The Man And His 9/11 Documentary
The guys at Knowledge Fight went over the first part of the documentary, and my takeaway was there’s nothing new, the primary person being interviewed is a well known liar, and there’s a lot dishonest claims being made and not a lot of evidence being given.
So what exactly do you think is so interesting about Tucker Carlson’s series? What new things did you learn about 9/11?
I searched that website for mentions of Gaza or Palestine and there seems to be no episode about it so I’m going to treat it as government propaganda.
What are you talking about? Why would something be government propaganda just because you can’t find mentions of Gaza or Palestine? It’s a podcast mostly about Alex Jones, not a news agency. Are you always like this?
If it never debunks any propaganda about Palesestine it’s government propaganda it’s literally that easy. Try reading the post you are in.
Alright, cool. So what did Tucker Carlson say that you thought was so interesting?
And I guess follow up question: was it all just government propaganda? Because I doubt he ever debunked any propaganda about Palestine.
Some fun facts about how the attackers were very obviously recruited by the CIA for a false flag. How they kept getting Saudi visas to the US even when one of the attackers stupidly locked himself out of the US.
Also yes Tucker has debunked a lot of Israeli propaganda, though just by repeating left wing points.
Starting around 38:30 in the podcast
Dan Friesen: So the argument is that the CIA was trying to recruit these hijackers and make them into informants. And that is a theory. It is not established. It is not proven. But they start to just treat it as if they have proven it.
Mark Rossini: You have the CIA then following one man and then two men all over the planet and then eventually even to America, right? Landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don’t tell the FBI.
Tucker Carlson: But why would the CIA want to hide the highly relevant and potentially dangerous fact that two known al-Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California? According to a recently released court filing, former White House counterterrorism star Richard Clark told government investigators that the quote: “CIA was running a false flag operation to recruit the hijackers.”
Richard Clark: When Cofer Black became the head of the counterterrorism center at CIA, he was aghast that they had no sources in Al-Qaeda. So he told me, I’m going to try to get sources in Al-Qaeda. I can understand them possibly saying we need to develop sources inside Al-Qaeda. When we do that, we can’t tell anybody about it.
Dan Friesen: So it’s important to pay attention to the way that information is used by people like Tucker and notice the little tweaks that they make in order to push their narratives. In this case, Tucker is setting up his clip of Richard Clark, and he says that Clark revealed that the CIA was engaged in a false flag to recruit these hijackers.
Then he plays the clip of Clark that does not say that. But instead is Clark saying that he could understand the intelligence folks trying to secretly turn the future hijackers into informants. He wasn’t saying that the CIA was doing this, but he understood how it was possible.
Yeah, one of the conspiracy theorists’ main tricks is equating proving that something is possible with proving that it’s true. Richard Clark saying that it’s possible that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers as informants is not the same thing as him saying that is what happened. But Tucker knows that to his audience, it is the same.
I don’t know man, maybe you need to work on your media literacy a little more. Or maybe just as a rule, you shouldn’t be taking anything Tucker Carlson says seriously.
What’s stopping a sustained, constructive public inquiry into these parallels between past cover-ups and current information control?
There is no mechanism to promote the investigation. At best there will be queries like you made for the general, and social media reactions to specific events as they unfold.
A large chunk of government, politics, and press in the USA no longer exists. There are no authorities to turn too, now or later, regardless who gains power in Washington.
Most of the Anglosphere outside the USA is in a free fall too, a few years behind, maybe 20 years.
We never trusted the media either way it goes. History is written by the winners so how do we decide what really is history or propaganda? Without time travel at the end of the day everything is subjective truths
