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The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

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Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three types of people circling around conspiracy theories. 1) Literate people who care about history and know that industry does what's best for profit at all costs. 2) People who don't read much looking for a hobby. 3) Liberals hoping to pass off their empty skepticism as allegiance to the mainstream.

Before the JFK assassination, 'conspiracy theory' literally meant a theory about a criminal conspiracy. In the case of the JFK assassination, all theories that were counter to the official lone-wolf theory were conspiracy theories, theories about multiple people being involved in the assassination are categorically conspiracy theories while a lone-wolf theory involves no conspiring. Due to this, the term 'conspiracy…

Have you read CIA 1035 960?

https://archive.org/details/CIADOC1035960/mode/1up

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#92
post #47

After the end of the vietnam war, the pentagon embarked on a deliberate program of propaganda as the attitude towards the military was at an all time low. This has only only involved hollywood (Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines with Philippine military gear because the Pentagon wanted script control) but also professional sports, who get billions a year from the pentagon these days. I understand that (and…

My family had a friend who was an officer in the Marines. In the Vietnam war he was one of the people who went in and burned villages, you know the bad stuff. When Apocalypse Now came out he got a copy on Beta-max, brought it over and insisted all his friends watch it. He said it was the only movie that really captured the insanity of that war.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#93
post #16

"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]" https://en.wiki…

Wow that's insane. If China did that same thing today, we would be up in arms.

If china opened up their theaters to normal american movies? Right now they only allow heavily censored and de-westernized movies. Things have to be heavily re-edited for the chinese audience, which isn't strictly bad, but the kind of things that get edited out are unfortunate

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In those same groups that made those VHS tapes, there's a theory on the name Hollywood itself. The wand that Merlin used to cast spells was made from holly. This was a core part of their evidence that the movie industry is meant to keep the populace under the spell of their illusions, or some such logic Sadly, I have way too much familiarity with these VHS tapes and 'zines and radio programs. Once the internet took o…

Are they archived somewhere for viewing? I wonder because I was too young to really understand it much and it'd actually help me sort out part of my childhood.

I couldn't find any, but eBay seems to have a lot of weird VHS tapes for sale.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#95
post #3

I'm curious: for how many people is this news? For those more inquiring you should look into the Smith-Mundt Act, which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people; it was effectively repealed in 2012.

Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? This is a practical question. If they say “propaganda” but in practice simply plant false information, is that still in scope?

Actually propaganda is quite often very not false information. That's the whole point. You take a kernel of truth and surround it with false pretenses and warped context to make something that is one way seem completely different. That kernel of truth is absolutely essential for your sycophants to use to beat everyone else over the head with, pushing that the legitimacy of this one bit of truth legitimizes the rest of the bullshit.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#96
post #81
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.

It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.

Good point.

Although if we do have a pandemic with 20% mortality rates I feel like we would experience societal collapse in a much larger scale than in the movie. Much larger as in: we can’t finish developing a vaccine because world order is severely degraded.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#97
post #14

War is probably not possible without propaganda. Wars are strategic, but people generally won't participate in mass killing or property destruction without an (invented or exaggerated) ethical justification. The most significant cause of global insecurity are myths like good, evil, ethicality and fairness between nations, etc. My hope is that tracking resources and making them more abundant and distributing first-par…

What if the propaganda gets set up to keep us always in war?

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#98
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's insane. If China did that same thing today, we would be up in arms.

If china opened up their theaters to normal american movies? Right now they only allow heavily censored and de-westernized movies. Things have to be heavily re-edited for the chinese audience, which isn't strictly bad, but the kind of things that get edited out are unfortunate

For China it is not surprising to censor "normal american movies", but it should not be forgotten that even some western countries like UK have heavily censored many "normal american movies" for several decades, before relaxing the censorship rules.

In IMDB, at the "Alternate versions" sections, many cases of censored versions are described, and the British censorship rules were especially ridiculous.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#99
post #66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inaccurate part of the movie is that all that stuff worked. In real life, what "ended" the pandemic was a combination of mother nature and the human willingness to accept a lost cause and move on.

Are you deliberately ignoring vaccination? I genuinely can't tell if I'm being trolled into a conspiracy argument or not. But just in case: The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease. This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief that vaccines saved 14M lives. Our "willingness to accept a lost cause" was informed heavily by the justfied belief…

> The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease.

Effective vaccinations were pretty much limited to the first world countries. Third world countries either did not have access to vaccines or used subpar ones like russia's sputnik. I would like to see a scientific study comparing the duration of pandemic in vaccinated vs non-vaccinated countries. It would be apples to oranges comparison but there are be some interesting insights to learn.

Re: The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

#100

"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]" https://en.wiki…

> "* signed May 28, 1946, by the Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and representatives of the French government Léon Blum and, especially, Jean Monnet*"

I am not surprised. Jean Monnet worked as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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