and now for something completely different.

[jumpy]

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

more than a little out of date now but an interesting and sometimes amusing glimpse into the past.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


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?

[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]

[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..]

Originally Posted by jumpy

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?

...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]

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
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..]

Originally Posted by jumpy

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
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:

Guess the nationality and ethnicy of this man.


Now of this one.


And this one.


And this one.


And this one to test if you've really read the manual.

[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

oh gosh darn it..

[jumpy]

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by jumpy

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