Luckily these folks would not yet have been immunized to Nazi-style propaganda campaigns or other forms of indoctrination.
I’m having a hard time thinking of any population that is. I mean sure we won’t see a rise in Nazism in our life times but that’s because the Nazi’s lost the war, not because people became immune to their propaganda techniques. If anything modern propaganda techniques are much better and we are even more helpless against them.
I’m having a hard time thinking of any population that is [...] immune to their propaganda techniques.
Immunized != Immune.
If anything modern propaganda techniques are much better and we are even more helpless against them.
It’s an arms-race. Nazi-style propagandizing included use of radio and television, and control over print media, as well as sponsored postings of visual posters and the like in public spaces. These things are what I was referring to; and people today are relatively immune to such “crass” techniques, which is why modern propaganda techniques are so much more sophisticated: the “old” ones stopped being sufficiently effective.
If we consider propaganda a form of virulent memeplex, then the immunological model describes quite well the history of and reactions to various forms of propaganda by the common populace over time: first there is exposure to a new “strain”, and then people become resistant to it in a very similar manner to how we become resistant to various viruses.
I wonder if anyone has ever studied Third World propaganda campaigns over time to demonstrate an ‘evolution’ which recapitulates Western evolution in propaganda?
(I mention this because I saw recently the old example of Liberia’s Charles Taylor who was elected when he ‘campaigned on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.”’. Of course, his landslide was probably due to “the belief that he would resume the war if he lost.” which is why one would want multiple countries. Do they all show this sort of phenomenon where laughably crude propaganda and campaigning works initially and is slowly replaced by subtler psy-ops, or is there no evolution because crude propaganda works best on those of low IQ, say?)
I would imagine that any researcher who confirmed such an effect would refrain from publishing, and instead become the supreme dictator of some third world country.
I’m having a hard time thinking of any population that is. I mean sure we won’t see a rise in Nazism in our life times but that’s because the Nazi’s lost the war, not because people became immune to their propaganda techniques. If anything modern propaganda techniques are much better and we are even more helpless against them.
Immunized != Immune.
It’s an arms-race. Nazi-style propagandizing included use of radio and television, and control over print media, as well as sponsored postings of visual posters and the like in public spaces. These things are what I was referring to; and people today are relatively immune to such “crass” techniques, which is why modern propaganda techniques are so much more sophisticated: the “old” ones stopped being sufficiently effective.
If we consider propaganda a form of virulent memeplex, then the immunological model describes quite well the history of and reactions to various forms of propaganda by the common populace over time: first there is exposure to a new “strain”, and then people become resistant to it in a very similar manner to how we become resistant to various viruses.
I wonder if anyone has ever studied Third World propaganda campaigns over time to demonstrate an ‘evolution’ which recapitulates Western evolution in propaganda?
(I mention this because I saw recently the old example of Liberia’s Charles Taylor who was elected when he ‘campaigned on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.”’. Of course, his landslide was probably due to “the belief that he would resume the war if he lost.” which is why one would want multiple countries. Do they all show this sort of phenomenon where laughably crude propaganda and campaigning works initially and is slowly replaced by subtler psy-ops, or is there no evolution because crude propaganda works best on those of low IQ, say?)
I would imagine that any researcher who confirmed such an effect would refrain from publishing, and instead become the supreme dictator of some third world country.
Dictator? You mean campaign manager.