[HN Gopher] The Powers of Soviet Puppetry
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The Powers of Soviet Puppetry
Author : prismatic
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-08-07 04:59 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| cess11 wrote:
| Propaganda?
|
| Sure. Still better than contemporary pervasive advertising.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I wonder why that word, propaganda, is only used against
| foreign influences and not ones within the country. Both sides
| use propaganda everyday - in political speeches or social media
| or whatever.
| persnickety wrote:
| It's not. I've personally heard it used to mean political
| speech in general, and separately to mean dishonest political
| speech internally. The definition seems to vary based on
| cultural background.
| xg15 wrote:
| It's such an ugly word, we prefer the term "public
| relations"...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In _Psychological Warfare_ (1948), Linebarger apologises that
| he (having been subject to army approval for publication)
| only gives examples of enemy propaganda, but reassures the
| reader that the Allied departments in which he worked churned
| out exactly the same kinds of thing in the opposite
| direction, and even relates an anecdote of reverse
| engineering a captured Japanese PsyWar HQ to discover that
| their org charts looked very familiar, very much like his
| own.
| cess11 wrote:
| Back in the day, when the first nazis were still around, they
| used propaganda as a neutral word and thought of persuasive
| mass communication as a good thing.
|
| It's related to a progressivist and modern view of societies
| being at different points of the same trajectory between
| primitive and advanced, or later, developing and developed.
| Forcing mass communication on people brought their primitive
| minds to a better state, they thought.
|
| During the postwar period mass communication was honed by
| academics and married private capital, producing somewhat
| scientific marketing disciplines optimising for efficiency in
| changing people's minds at scale. Puppet theaters as mass
| communication wouldn't have survived that if they were still
| around.
|
| Seeing similarities with advertising is rather easy even
| without this historic connection.
| golergka wrote:
| Given the negative meaning that the word "propaganda" has
| today, I think we should only apply it to deceits or outright
| lies. If a government disseminates information that serves
| it's interests, but this information is also a decently
| subjective representation of reality, we should use some
| other word for it.
|
| For example, Radio Liberty was used as "propaganda" tool by
| the US. However, it was also a fairly good source of
| information -- certainly closer to the truth than soviet mass
| media at the time. Should we really call it propaganda,
| putting it into the same category as aforementioned soviet
| media? I don't think so.
| benterix wrote:
| I disagree. Although ads often do have negative influence on
| the population, although it very much depends on what is being
| advertised, who is targetted and so on, it's a far cry from
| propaganda, where the whole nation is being convinced that it
| is fine to kill the members of another nation because someone
| declared them to be `nazi`[0].
|
| [0] Another term that has been abused so much that not only it
| lost its original meaning but became almost expressionless.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| When I decided to learn the cyrillic alphabet, I had the
| advantage of being able to watch a few relevant episodes of
| Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi; not only did I learn my alphabet but I
| really appreciated the puppetry of not just hands and mouth but
| even the eyes --to great expression-- of Stepashka, Filia i
| Khriusha.
|
| (one of these days I suppose I should also learn the cyrillic
| handwriting script...)
| tropdrop wrote:
| There is such a cool puppet culture there. If you ever get the
| chance and are interested, you should check out a production by
| Obraztsov [1] - a lot of the concerts are on YouTube.
|
| When I was in Russia in 2018 I was shocked at how big puppet
| theatres are there, still, and perhaps even more so. They're a
| vibrant part of life, very sophisticated, no doubt due to the
| popularity of Obraztsov and his ilk. It made me realize how
| neglected this part of theatre is in the US (not to mention
| circuses and clowns, which by now have just been thoroughly
| associated with horror or terrible birthday parties. Only
| Cirque du Soleil gets a mild pass).
|
| I kept wishing one of my colleagues (in grad school currently)
| would make a dissertation about the rise of puppetry in the
| USSR and beyond, but alas, she abandoned her work with Russian
| theatre, though the probable reasons are obvious.
|
| 1 - https://youtu.be/SuR174hMr_Q?t=1208
| golergka wrote:
| > On 10 October 1935 the People's Commissariat for Education of
| the Kazakh SSR had declared that a puppet theatre be established
|
| Just a couple of years after communists engineered a famine that
| killed 2 million kazahks.
| ta988 wrote:
| and a couple of years after starving to death 3.5 to 5 million
| Ukrainians (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) This was
| a large scale operation
|
| It likely started as an accident, but then was really
| convenient....
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