Propaganda Story

Several times each year....I point out propaganda-value stories (some German, some Brit, some American, some French) and how its done in a way to manipulate people into thinking something. 

Focus today, brought up this Austrian story, which  is worth a moment of reviewing.

There's this Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty which has been pushed around the globe, with a small number of European countries who signed up.  Austria itself....signed the document.

Germany, I should note....has NOT signed the document.

What the treaty basically says is that you will not have nuke weapons in your possession, and have no intention of ever going this direction. Nuke power?  Well....that's not an issue contained in the treaty.

I should note here....France has not signed the treaty...nor has Italy....nor has Spain....nor has Belgium.  

So the Foreign Ministry of Austria did something curious.  They paid someone to go and produce a video, which shows a simulated atomic bomb hit on Vienna.

What they suggested....just in their scenario....roughly a quarter million Vienna folks dead and half-a-million wounded.

This went out into the public arena....via social media mostly.  

Positive view?  Well...a number of folks felt it was pure propaganda.  Even the mayor came to have a harsh amount of criticism over the product.

The gentle push by the Foreign Ministry?  I would suggest that they wanted to push Germany a bit and suggest that by going the Austrian way.....we'd all work to make the world a safer place. 

The general problem is that you'd get a generally naïve group of local residents viewing the video, and thinking that Vienna is thirty-two minutes away from annihilation. You'd go and ask the guy/gal....who exactly is going to nuke you?  They'd mostly answer 'well, those folks....the ones with the nuke bombs'.  You'd counter this and ask...'you mean the Swiss, who didn't sign the treaty'?  

The guy/gal would be aggravated because you just didn't perceive the threat correctly.  But you'd continue...'you mean the Finns or the Norway folks who didn't sign the treaty'?

Finally, you'd go to the heart of the discussion....asking the Vienna person....who exactly is the enemy of Austria?

There would be this fairly long pause at this point.  If the guy had enough booze or enough drugs in their system....they might utter 'Nazis', but generally....they are stuck there in this silly discussion with no real worry in life.

Then you'd ask them to list out their top three-hundred worries in life.  

Mostly, they'd talk about winter storms, escalating fuel prices, their wife having an affair, their dog advancing in age, their daughter dating some gypsy guy from Bulgaria, sales taxes going up, too many people living beyond their means, too many people using non-recyclable coffee cups, dog crap on their sidewalk, public TV showing too many vaccination episodes where the needle is inserted into the guy, too many zombie movies on TV, circuses disappearing from the landscape, too many Vienna women showing boobies, too many retired guys getting drunk in the park, too many Chinese tourists in Vienna, their cousin Ernest who flipped from being 100-percent gay to 100-percent straight, too much sugar in sodas, and Russian mafia types who seem to own a third of the bars in Vienna now. 

Yeah, that nuke worry thing probably wouldn't fit into their truly top three-hundred problems.

So you'd end this discussion with the guy....asking what Vienna did to get simulated nuked?  Maybe two or three minutes would pass, and they'd finally say that they hadn't really thought about that end of the scenario.  

Propaganda is generally designed to make you think something....which is probably 90-to-100 percent not true.  It'll be so crazy....that your common sense 'meter' will just sit there in overload, and not be able to ask real questions about the nature of the story told.

Now, if I were running the Vienna-propaganda system....I'd go and suggest that 12-foot long Boas have been seen in the subway system, and swallowed up some 12-year-old kid last week.  Then I'd show a picture of a Thai Boa looking awful full, and push this out via social media.  I'd probably have 10k Vienna folks all hyped-up in less than a week....over a fake Boa story.  I also have a mad-crazy Nazi scientist fake story, which probably would work just as well.