Redirection - deflect attention

One of the measures of a successful propaganda is the extent to which a target’s attention is deflected from the real into imaginary or abstract concepts. Goebbels said that repetition of untruth made it truth, and used the media accordingly. McLuhan was in error - the media is purveyor of acculturation, not message. Hence the acculturated message becomes an invisible part of the motivate culture:

“In a country where the poor and old cannot afford health care, in a country where the economy is falling apart, in a country where 44 million people live on less than $12,000 dollars a year, in a nation where 5 million people are homeless, in a country where the entire media system is owned by only six media mega conglomerates, in a nation with the highest crime rate, in a country with the world’s largest prison population, in a society where 60% of marriages end in divorce, in a country where 25% of kids under 12 live in poverty, in a country that cut 25 billion dollars out of veterans benefits to help pay for a new war, in a country where the gulf between the rich and poor is growing everyday,in a nation that supports dictatorships in Saudi, Egypt, and Turkey,[and many others], in a country where the government is full of corruption, in a country with the world’s highest teen suicide and stress rates, and you’re telling me our biggest problems are TERRORISM and DRUGS?” –Corey Cananza

Successful propaganda is invisible to the target population. For example:

“… the new … approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s ‘prop-agenda’. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‘intelligence’ and selected ‘leaks’.”

“… With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then ‘use the democratic process’ to agree or disagree - for, after all, their intention is to mobilize enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.” –Brian Eno, writing in The Observer, London, UK, Aug. 17,2003

“Television doesn’t tell people what to do. It shows them. People can resist admonition. But if they see something happening over and over, month after month, if they see the same values approvingly portrayed, they will adopt both behaviour and values. It takes years, but it works. To be sure it works, we put our children in front of the screen from infancy.” –Fred Reid

“The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation…. The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed…. on the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.” –William Shirer