Propaganda and its consequences.

Subject: Propaganda and its consequences.

Propaganda is not the art of convincing people of something, a point of view, but of drowning out any other point of view other than your own. Of continually projecting only one view and not allowing other views to take hold in the minds of the people.
Propaganda has the insidious twist of closing down debate of any kind by the sheer volume and tenacity of its message.
It creates not only misinformation but has a dissembling effect on the human mind by continually distorting rational truth for a process which manufactures everything for an end in itself, to brain wash people and subjugate them to a political / religious ideology.
The damage this does to individuals is seen in the mass adulation of the North Korean leader and just recently the upheaval in Israel with the pronouncement that the young Israeli soldier who shot dead the Palestinian lying wounded and incapacitated on the ground was convicted of manslaughter.
One of the revealing things about modern day communication is the reliance on amateur video footage which captures unarguably the actions which are later reported on. The nation is split between those who see with their own eyes and form their own opinion and those who see for their own eyes but who are so damaged by living their lives under a regime where propaganda is the tool to convince people that black is white that they prefer to follow the party line.
The confidence that the soldier had to shoot a person, as if they were a dog laying in the street comes from the distortion that state propaganda brings and the sight of his grinning face as he entered court was further evidence of his assumption that the state would protect him since after all the person he shot was a Palestinian and less than human. Funny how the wheel has turned when it was the Jews who were deemed inhuman by the Germans. Israeli PM Netanyahu has been very vocal demanding that his courts had got it wrong and that the State should pardon the man.
The image in my mind is of a nation in denial. A nation which can justify what I would describe, having watched the video as an act of murder since there was no provocation, no act of retaliation, no threat only the cold blooded dispatch of a human-being without thought or compassion and most of all, because of propaganda, without fear of reprisal.
Without the camera without the evidence he was most surely right but even a court in Israel has to accept the evidence before its eyes.
Netanyahu's Israel is perhaps a harbinger of the future as nationalism begins to take a place once again alongside the global aspirations of Wall Street.