They Called It Propaganda

When one is a student of history they come to realize it’s all circular and cyclical. True, undefiled, unbridled originality – especially in politics – died a quiet and unannounced death sometime between Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas, and the invention of the automobile.

Men realized it is far easier to recycle old clichés than sit around a table and brainstorm new and original ideas. Another thing they realized is that in order to fool the simple folks like you and me they had to redefine certain key words to make them more palatable.

What used to be called propaganda is now being called ‘the narrative’ and with the help of a complicit media the narrative is like an ever advancing bulldozer flattening dissenting opinions wherever some foolish or courageous soul ventures to make them known.

Let’s face it, mankind in general suffers from attention deficit, and to make matters worse we get bored easy. Sure, the first time we hear something ludicrous and completely idiotic being spouted by one of the talking heads on television our ire is stirred and we mumble a few words between bites of Chinese takeout, but then a second fool and a third fool parrots the words of the first fool, and well, we’ve got jobs to go to and kids to feed and mortgages to keep up with.

Although ‘the narrative’ sounds much kinder and gentler than propaganda does, make no mistake, be ye not fooled, it is still propaganda.

Propaganda is defined as information of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. If you watch more than ten minutes of news on any given day, you will readily identify propaganda being regurgitated time and again.

The purpose of propaganda is as simple as it is sinister: to cause you to doubt your own eyes, your own ears, your own reasoning, and bring you ever so gently into the fold. In essence, to make you just another faceless worker bee who has no opinion other than what he’s told his opinion ought to be, and who voluntarily puts on the shackles of captivity.

At this point some may just be rolling their eyes thinking I’ve gone off the deep end, but having lived through indoctrination, having lived through programming and propaganda, let’s just say I know of what I speak.

Once the hooks are in and the narrative creators or propaganda pimps have a majority, any dissent, any voicing of an opposing idea is met with swift and unbridled violence.

Perhaps one of the most sinister and as yet largely overlooked aspects of propaganda purveyors is that if they can’t get you, they will gladly settle for your children.

Everyone in our village knew that my parents and grandparents were believers, and that their relationship with God went far beyond the superficial. As such they didn’t bother too much with them, but for four hour each day for the time I went to school in Romania, my education consisted of me being told by one adult or another that there was no God.

So why am I bothering to pick at old scabs and talk about these things? I guess because somebody has to. Anyone who’s lived in a Communist country or under an oppressive totalitarian regime is getting a bit antsy if not downright squirrely, because they’re seeing a repeat of history, and not the nice parts.

Know this: we cannot avoid persecution through silence forever.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.