Propaganda: Rising to New Heights

Note: this post contains a slight in-direct spoiler having to do with the Hunger Games, for those of you who may care about such things.

I suppose the idea for this post occurred to me the first time while I was reading The Hunger Games over a year ago. You see, the government in the books made a mistake maintaining their tyranny. The time period when the books take place is supposed to be sometime in the future. If this is the case, then instead of showing the same footage year after year of District 13's state of decay after (nuclear?) weapons destroyed it, they should have used CGI and special effects to make “new footage” which showed its continued state of desolation.

Backing up some, if you haven't read The Hunger Games, in that world, there was an uprising of District 13 and the use of weapons left the landscape desolate and, as the government would have the other Districts believe, totally destroyed and without inhabitants. They maintained this lie by showing the same footage year after year taken of the area soon after the conflict took place, when it truly did look desolate.

If I remember correctly, the government in the movie V For Vendetta used false news coverage, painting the rest of the world as a place where there was constant famine, plagues, riots, and other horrors of the night. If the rest of the world is that chaotic and terrifying, maybe my government isn't that bad, they may be repressive and seemingly unjust, but they keep me safe.

In this day of technology and “movie magic,” as long as you can keep your populace isolated, give them no access to unauthorized and undoctored news sources, and regulate the technology which they have available (so they don't know about CGI and other special effects), you can paint the rest of the world whatever way you wish. You wouldn't even have to produce anything new, but rather could cut clips from any well-made movie you wanted. You could have the rest of the world be filled with aliens, zombies, riots, explosions, barren landscapes, crumbling and devoid of people.

You may be thinking, people wouldn't really believe that stuff, they would have to know it was fake. Well, here's something to keep in mind, in the 90's my family lived in a developing country and we would have movie nights with some of the university students. Sometimes we would have a fairly hard time convincing the students that the special effects weren't real, that those things didn't really happen. These were smart people, university students, but they had never been exposed to such things. When you've grown up believing what you see and have no reason not to, it can take some getting used to when this is no longer always true. These were people just watching movies, who were being told the things they saw were just for entertainment, and yet they still, at first, had a hard time believing that they were not real. Now imagine the same situation, except it is news sources only showing clips, and the government is confirming what was shown was true.

Also, even as skeptic Americans, we can't really poke fun at such a situation, as proved by the fact that after Animal Planet aired their program Mermaids: The Body Found, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt they needed to issue an official statement denying the existence of mermaids because so many mistakenly thought a video contained in the program was authentic.