and now for something completely different.

[jumpy]

http://www.ep.tc/howtospotajap/index.html

:huh::lol: more than a little out of date now but an interesting and sometimes amusing glimpse into the past.
I wonder if there are any surviving examples of other nations publishing 'information' pamphlets describing the allies during WW2? Be interesting to see which stereotypes are applied in such a manner.


I especially liked 'the H-bomb and you' lol
http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/5622/jonnyck5.jpg

hehe, that's right Johnny, you dirty little commie rat!


Classic propoganda from a bygone era. Certainly I think that these days most of us would not be swayed by such naive and obvious attempts, but back in those days the 'media' as we know it was in its infancy and though I consider myself a little bit smarter than your average plonker, I have to wonder how much more sophisticated and subtle these same techiques are today by comparison?

Now, where did I leave my tinfoil hat?:arrgh!:

[Subnuts]

I have never seen a Japanese person with "lemon yellow skin" or bucked teeth in my entire life. Also, most of the ones I've met do have abdomens.

I guess I'd be the first one to die! :rotfl:

[kiwi_2005]

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c387/mischazion/POSTER3.jpg http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c387/mischazion/POSTER.jpg
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c387/mischazion/POSTER2.jpg

[tycho102]

Ah, yes. Nixon = Hitler. I like that one. Not because I think Nixon was Hitler, but I find the entire pacifist/appeasement crowd somewhat humorous. Ironic, perhaps.

However, I see the "Help End Demonstations" one, and I immedately think of a machine-gun. It might have been a better poster if they had said "Stop the War to Stop the Demonstations", or something along that mode of thinking.

As for the atomic bombs, fusion bombs are considerably "cleaner" than straight fission bombs. The amount of locally-deposited radionucleotides is far less because the blast throws everything up into the troposphere and spreads it to the four winds.

[CB..]

Certainly I think that these days most of us would not be swayed by such naive and obvious attempts, but back in those days the 'media' as we know it was in its infancy and though I consider myself a little bit smarter than your average plonker, I have to wonder how much more sophisticated and subtle these same techiques are today by comparison?

Now, where did I leave my tinfoil hat?:arrgh!:

...if you actually believe you are more sophisticated than folks back then- then you have allready swallowed the current propoganda message without question...refer to the "emperor's new clothes" fairy story for all the back ground information you will ever need on propoganda..

[jumpy]

:roll:
that's not quite what I said, is it?

[August]

I'm curious, swayed by what obvious attempts? Have any of you read that comic book? It's pretty good advice for 1954 when it was written. A lot of you guys are too young to remember air raid drills in classrooms and fallout shelter signs adorning every public building, but nuclear war at that time was a very real and frightening proposition.

[jumpy]

It was a slow day yesterday, so I ended up reading practically that whole site. Hehe, it struck me as all being a bit 'Chumley-Warner:Women, Know your Place' styley.
Compared to todays media and publications all of the ones from that site look very simplistic and with todays exposure to ever increasing multimedia content, to a modern eye it looks very dated, hence some of it can seem quite amusing. I suppose this does not detract from the original intent of the information, just some of its current relevence. At no time did I draw a comparison between myself today and people back then in terms of sophistication, rather by todays standards I don't believe everything I read in a tabloid (or other) newspaper etc. However, with this last in mind, my question was how much more subtle and insidious is advertising and propoganda now it has come of age, so to speak, than it was then and how much are we influenced by it wheather we are aware of it or not? - going to war with iraq on the premise of 45 minute WMD strike capabillity, for instance.


I guess I'll be thinking twice before making anymore light-hearted threads; some days it don't seem worth posting round here no more with so many pedants about the place... oh well.
Evidently subsim.com is suffering from a serious loss of a sense of humour :dead:
Perhaps some of our captains have been out on patrol in the doldrums for too long?

[Dowly]

"Japs use G-strings"

Oh no.... THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!!! :rotfl:

[scandium]

Propaganda has become increasingly more prevalent, subtle, and sophisticated (though still sometimes blatant, since "the big lie" will be readily believed if it originates from a credible source and is repeated often enough). Probably this is partly due to much of it being outsourced to PR firms which, as a whole, have considerable knowledge and experience in the art of persausion.


One example of modern propaganda:

The technique of lending credibility to an assertion by linking it to an already credible event that provokes a powerful response in people (the idea being to get people to associate the one with the other). For instance, if you wanted to convince people that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, in order to further drum up support for the war, then you would have different people repeat, as often as possible, statements beginning with 9/11 (the credible even that provokes the powerful emotional response) and ending with a remark about Saddam Hussein. And in fact this was done, repeatedly, and it produced the desired effect:

March 14, 2003:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html

WASHINGTON – In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was "personally involved" in Sept. 11, about the same figure as a month ago.

Sources knowledgeable about US intelligence say there is no evidence that Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, nor that he has been or is currently aiding Al Qaeda. Yet the White House appears to be encouraging this false impression, as it seeks to maintain American support for a possible war against Iraq and demonstrate seriousness of purpose to Hussein's regime.

"The administration has succeeded in creating a sense that there is some connection [between Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein]," says Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.

Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.

According to Mr. Kull of PIPA, there is a strong correlation between those who see the Sept. 11-Iraq connection and those who support going to war.
Though effective, there is nothing particularly subtle or sophisticated about that example. It worked because, minus Bin Laden and with the self-destruction of the Sept. 11 hijackers, the American public has never really been given any closure on this event and since Saddam Hussein is already a hated tyrant then perhaps many Americans even wanted to believe he was connected to 9/11 and were therefore not motivated to examine these "connections" any closer.

Better examples of propaganda (because of their ability to turn white into black) are of the Orwellian kind where people can be convinced that:

1. War is Peace (many people believe this already)
2. Freedom is Slavery (ditto)
3. Ignorance is Strength (3 out of 3)

Maybe I will elaborate on this further in a later post.

[Edit] There's an excellent Wiki article on propaganda here, including historic usage and common techniques. Good reading. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

[CB..]

I guess I'll be thinking twice before making anymore light-hearted threads; some days it don't seem worth posting round here no more with so many pedants about the place... oh well.
Evidently subsim.com is suffering from a serious loss of a sense of humour :dead:
Perhaps some of our captains have been out on patrol in the doldrums for too long?
inferring that the generation who lived thru the war were stupid...is hardly what i would call light hearted....propoganda is rarely funny...and well you asked the question..not my fault if you didn't like the answer...no it's not funny..not funny at all....:rotfl:
cheer up tho .....this generation is so much more sophisticated than any previous it's a wonder you haven't been elevated to an entirely different plane of existance...where humour is a finely balanced intelectual blade...or some such..

[Bertgang]

On my point of wiew, propaganda has less strenght now than in the past.

Of course, as everibody knows, today's media have plenty of tools, techniques, elaborated strategies, special effects and so on.
All said things give a strong impact to the desired message, but tech also provides us a good defensive weapon: internet.

Quite everybody, from cuban to iranian dissident, has at least a chance to navigate the web to discover a different point of wiew.

During the most part of XX century, the average citizen had little or none possibility to make a similar thing: so, for rulers, it was really easy to support any silly message, simply because people was totally defenceless.

[TteFAboB]

Actually, that's quite an accurate manual. If you were in China during WWII you'd be able to differentiate many Japanese from many Chinese. Jumpy, what you might be forgetting is that in 1940's hardly anybody had ever seen enough Japanese and Chinese people to be able to point who is who. What about Koreans? They could've added Koreans into the fray, they are different from both Japanese and Chinese. Actually, If the Japanese used Korean agents and you had no Korean manual you'd be in quite a trouble then. :rotfl: Ah, the hell, just recruit Taiwanese and then it's all dufus.

You want an example of not being able to tell anyway? Then I challenge you:
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/2034/evomoralespt6.jpg
Guess the nationality and ethnicy of this man.

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/7551/pvikg2.jpg
Now of this one.

http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/6675/atmzb7.jpg
And this one.

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4488/bziqd6.png
And this one.

http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/7813/ct2be8.jpg
And this one to test if you've really read the manual. :lol: :arrgh!:

[CB..]

from my point of view believe-ing one self to be wiser than previous generations is just about the biggest mistake any-one could actually make..

and IMO it is hard not to intepret this as something that has come about as a result of the the propoganda we have all been drowned in for the last few decades...

that is unless you consider advertising as exempt from the list of propoganda tools..

if one believes one is too wise to fall for the proganda methods that were used in the past...it is a sure sign that one has missed the point of the propoganda....

yes we can check the internet for many differing sources of informations...but if after checking and considering and thinking about the issues we then don't actually DO anything in response...then the propoganda has done it's job with absolute ruthless effeciency...

the pay off being the hype surrounding one's increased media savvy and intelligence regarding our resistance to propoganda..

so yes....absolutely.....that to me is the current propoganda message..it is the underlying sedative effect on the population that comes with a propoganda message that tells the people they are too clever to fall for propoganda messages...excellent stuff...

in some ways too much information is as bad as too little..
as we can now find just about any point of view on any subject what so ever..there are very few sources that one can be trusted implicitly.(if any)...so in the end we are left with those sources that we feel to be accurate....and the whole thing slips into relative percentages and one source being likely to be more reliable than another..with no known way to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt..

mean-while whilst we are doing this the machine of current events (what ever they happen to be at the time) grinds ever on regardless...frequently by the time we have made up our minds the situations has progressed to the point where by it is far too late to react pro-actively any way..(in any meaningfull way) and so on...

any group of people whom believe them selves to be wiser than their grandparents....will have to learn by making the same mistakes as their grandparents..
quite what all this means at the end of the day is niether here nor there...the machine is now so large that it is in the process of tipping the earth off it's axis..and all one can do is buy a hard hat and hope...which shows that i am not too wise to have fallen for the propoganda message my self!!
AFAIK:huh: :lol:

oh gosh darn it..

[jumpy]

inferring that the generation who lived thru the war were stupid...is hardly what i would call light hearted

NO, no, no, no, no. That is not what I said at all.

At no time did I draw a comparison between myself today and people back then in terms of sophistication, rather by todays standards I don't believe everything I read in a tabloid (or other) newspaper etc. However, with this last in mind, my question was how much more subtle and insidious is advertising and propoganda now it has come of age, so to speak, than it was then and how much are we influenced by it wheather we are aware of it or not?

I guess I failed to make clear what I was saying :-?

[CB..]

inferring that the generation who lived thru the war were stupid...is hardly what i would call light hearted

NO, no, no, no, no. That is not what I said at all.

At no time did I draw a comparison between myself today and people back then in terms of sophistication, rather by todays standards I don't believe everything I read in a tabloid (or other) newspaper etc. However, with this last in mind, my question was how much more subtle and insidious is advertising and propoganda now it has come of age, so to speak, than it was then and how much are we influenced by it wheather we are aware of it or not?

I guess I failed to make clear what I was saying :-?

well ok accept my apologies..i must have missed the second part of the reply....so again my apologies...current propoganda is certainly a major catch 22 of gigantic proportions..it used to be said that the first casualty of war was the truth.....now it seems the first casualty of EVERYTHING is the truth...and i for one am no longer able to tell where the joins are any more....and as i was saying one of the principle goals of propoganda is to limit the general populations ability to make clear and reasonable decisions about the issue of the day...to render us passive recipitents of what ever mesage is presented to us..OR at the very least render us less capable of reacting in any organised way against the policys of the day...a march every now and then is fine....looks good on the news ..makes every-one feel better about them selves..but any serious long term protest would be considered tantamount to an act of terrorism..i don't know about the rights and wrongs of this....in an increasingly globalised political landscape it is allmost impossible for the man/woman on the street to make any sort of decision that could stand up to the full impact of all the possible issues ..it's like trying to eat spegghetti with a straw...if our leaders have started to believe their own propoganda or have become so committed to trying to up-hold the policys dictated by their propoganda then things are getting a tadge out of control...dwindling resources....the clash of cultures religions etc etc...our in-ability to take our foot of the gas pedal and slow down for the bend..the last thing we need now is orwellian type propoganda machines blinding us to what we all know is coming...major global up-heaval..if were lucky it will socail and economic up-heaval...if we are un-lucky it will be war..looks like it'll be both at the moment..!

[Yahoshua]

In order as seen:

Korean (North)

Cambodian

South American (Brazil?)

Unkown

And a Chinese- American

[August]

The first one is the President of Bolivia i believe.

[SUBMAN1]

http://www.ep.tc/howtospotajap/index.html

:huh::lol: more than a little out of date now but an interesting and sometimes amusing glimpse into the past.
I wonder if there are any surviving examples of other nations publishing 'information' pamphlets describing the allies during WW2? Be interesting to see which stereotypes are applied in such a manner.


I especially liked 'the H-bomb and you' lol
http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/5622/jonnyck5.jpg

hehe, that's right Johnny, you dirty little commie rat!


Classic propoganda from a bygone era. Certainly I think that these days most of us would not be swayed by such naive and obvious attempts, but back in those days the 'media' as we know it was in its infancy and though I consider myself a little bit smarter than your average plonker, I have to wonder how much more sophisticated and subtle these same techiques are today by comparison?

Now, where did I leave my tinfoil hat?:arrgh!:

If you understand the H-Bomb, then yes, you could be swayed. This little cartoon represent reality and as long as a full scale N-War does not break out and only a limited exchange happens, then yes, you will be surviving along with the cockroaches. Too much hype that everyone will die in such a war and that is not correct. Only way this could happen is if only one side of the planet is hit so hard that all the H-bombs make a small thruster to push the Earth off its orbit. Then you can have disaster, but only then.

Maybe we should create an H-Bomb thread called "what would really happen?"

-S

[SUBMAN1]

Propaganda has become increasingly more prevalent, subtle, and sophisticated (though still sometimes blatant, since "the big lie" will be readily believed if it originates from a credible source and is repeated often enough). Probably this is partly due to much of it being outsourced to PR firms which, as a whole, have considerable knowledge and experience in the art of persausion.


One example of modern propaganda:

The technique of lending credibility to an assertion by linking it to an already credible event that provokes a powerful response in people (the idea being to get people to associate the one with the other). For instance, if you wanted to convince people that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, in order to further drum up support for the war, then you would have different people repeat, as often as possible, statements beginning with 9/11 (the credible even that provokes the powerful emotional response) and ending with a remark about Saddam Hussein. And in fact this was done, repeatedly, and it produced the desired effect:

March 14, 2003:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html

WASHINGTON – In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was "personally involved" in Sept. 11, about the same figure as a month ago.

Sources knowledgeable about US intelligence say there is no evidence that Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, nor that he has been or is currently aiding Al Qaeda. Yet the White House appears to be encouraging this false impression, as it seeks to maintain American support for a possible war against Iraq and demonstrate seriousness of purpose to Hussein's regime.

"The administration has succeeded in creating a sense that there is some connection [between Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein]," says Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.

Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.

According to Mr. Kull of PIPA, there is a strong correlation between those who see the Sept. 11-Iraq connection and those who support going to war.
Though effective, there is nothing particularly subtle or sophisticated about that example. It worked because, minus Bin Laden and with the self-destruction of the Sept. 11 hijackers, the American public has never really been given any closure on this event and since Saddam Hussein is already a hated tyrant then perhaps many Americans even wanted to believe he was connected to 9/11 and were therefore not motivated to examine these "connections" any closer.

Better examples of propaganda (because of their ability to turn white into black) are of the Orwellian kind where people can be convinced that:

1. War is Peace (many people believe this already)
2. Freedom is Slavery (ditto)
3. Ignorance is Strength (3 out of 3)

Maybe I will elaborate on this further in a later post.

[Edit] There's an excellent Wiki article on propaganda here, including historic usage and common techniques. Good reading. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Go research your sources - they are wrong. Start with the Yellow cake and the French - should lead you to some interesting conclusions.

-S

[scandium]

Go research your sources - they are wrong. Start with the Yellow cake and the French - should lead you to some interesting conclusions.

-S
Really? Wrong where? Document the errors. And as to the "Yellow cake and the French", what conclusions am I to be led to and where are your links to lead me there?

Frankly this is old news, and it is "not wrong"; your protestations to the contrary only expose you as one of the few remaining Americans so thoroughly brainwashed by this basic propaganda technique that you still stubbornly cling to the false belief even when its been thoroughly debunked.

One more trip down memory lane:

http://usatoday.com/news/world/2002-07-28-iraq-al-qaeda_x.htm

July 29/02

WASHINGTON — Bush administration lawyers have concluded that establishing a link between al-Qaeda terrorists and Iraq would provide the legal justification the White House needs to attack Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. officials say.

An intensive effort by U.S. intelligence to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq is being driven, in part, by a conclusion reached in recent weeks by White House and Pentagon legal and legislative advisers. They believe that connecting Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks would allow the administration to avoid debates at the United Nations and in Congress over what some would call an unprovoked strike.

The administration has sought the connection since the first days after Sept. 11. There is the motive and the means laid out in black and white before the propaganda operation even
begins.

September 2/02

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/26/time.iraq/

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a Foreign Relations Committee member who has warned against a pre-emptive strike, insists, "Saddam is not in league with al-Qaeda. Of course he cheers and encourages them. But I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al-Qaeda." Evidently Chuck hadn't read the memo, but not to worry.

September 28/02

http://www.la.utexas.edu/~seant/gop.html (http://www.la.utexas.edu/%7Eseant/gop.html)

In Phoenix this evening, Mr. Bush made his most direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, describing Mr. Hussein as "a man who hates America, a man who loves to link up with Al Qaeda, a man who is a true threat to America."
And so it begins.

November 1/02

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021101-5.html

It's going to take a while. It's going to take a while to make America safe. It's going to take a while to do everything we can to fulfill our responsibilities and protect you. The American people understand that, they understand it's a new kind of war. They also understand there's a -- they also understand there's a new reality we face, and that's important. The new reality is oceans no longer protect us. After September the 11th, 2001, every threat that might be emerging overseas we need to take seriously. In the old days we could sit back and say, well, there's something emerging over there and these oceans protect us and we're safe, and we can decide whether or not we want to be involved in that theater, we can decide if we really think it's in our national interest, because our people aren't threatened.

We have a new day here in America. It's a sobering reality. It's one that you better make sure your elected officials are clear-eyed about the threats that we face. And we face a threat in the form of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Saddam Hussein is a man who has told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, and yet he deceived the world. He's got them.

Not only does he have them -- remember, this is a guy who was a short while away from having a nuclear weapon. Then they dismantled it. Then he started deceiving the world again and no telling how close he is to having one now. We know he's got chemical weapons, probably has biological weapons.

But, more significantly, we know he uses them. He uses them not only on his neighbors, he uses them on his own people. That's the nature of this man. We know he's got ties with al Qaeda. A nightmare scenario, of course, is that he becomes the arsenal for a terrorist network, where they could attack America and he'd leave no fingerprints behind. He is a problem.

Repeat after me: 9/11.... Saddam Hussein... Al Qaeda ....

February 5/03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2727471.stm

There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News. The BBC and British Intelligence hadn't gotten the memo either, apparently, but that's ok - it was intended for domestic consumption and its not like Americans watch the BBC anyway so they don't even count.

August 8/03

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0803/080803nj2.htm

Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues have told National Journal that the prewar evidence tying al Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies. The Bush alumni, as well as other intelligence veterans and some members of Congress, say they see parallels between how the administration painted the Qaeda connection to Iraq and the way that the White House often portrayed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction as being definitive or rock solid.

"Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have seen al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated."

Other Bush veterans concur that the evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq was overblown.
It was BS then, they knew it was BS, but they used it anyway to sell a war nobody wanted. Though unless you read the foreign press you'd never know any different anyway because the "left-wing" media was entirely complicit in selling it - the entire televised "Shock and Awe" spectacle probably set record ratings - it was like the 4th of July, only on steroids and 4 months early.

[TteFAboB]

In order as seen:

Korean (North)

Cambodian

South American (Brazil?)

Unkown

And a Chinese- American

Good effort.

1. August got it right, it's the President of Bolivia. Difficult one. There's two ethnicities in Bolivia, one of them shares similarities with the guy from the next picture, but the subject at hand is far too mixed to identify at a single glance. The hints are subtle and come from his great-grandfather.

2. He's a peruvian Inca. And a rather fine example too.

3. This one looks like a Mexican, hopefully he is because I took it from Google, in a sort of Aztec costume. He almost looks like an impostor though, if he has any native blood, it didn't marked him very much.

4. What an irony, this one is a South American Brazilian indian.

5. This one is great. He looks alot indeed like a Chinese, but, guess what, he's Japanese! His eyes might give him away, because he's mixed with, not American, but Portuguese blood.

[Yahoshua]

Oh well...I threw out some wild guesses but at least I pegged one (although it was the wrong number).

Maybe we should have a "Name that (whatever it is)" thread.