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Originally Posted by mburbank
Actually, Iwas responding, just in a fairly opaque sort of way.
I think the best weapon for fighting propoganda is a combo platter of transperency and trying really hard not to do the things the other sides propaganda says you do, like torture, kidnapping, disobeying your own laws, destroying entire neigborhoods to get a handfull of insurgents or make headlines and lying about your 'news artcles' coming out of the Lincoln group.
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That kind of approach will work against regular rebels with paticular, rational sorts of demands, like 'hey, give us our oil back!' or 'we want political independence!' or 'enough of tyranny, we want a better government that doesn't do this and that to us all the time!', but if your dealing with crazy theocratic nutjobs, transparency and such won't really help. The fact that we're bombing them and such is helpful for the insurgents in their propaganda efforts, so I guess taking your approach would certainly slow down the insurgent effort and influencing the population through propaganda, but it would probably have no impact on the actual attitude of the already indoctrinated insurgents that are actually spreading the propaganda. They'd continue to spread propaganda, and they'd probably have at least some success. Consider the nazis, they were able to convince the germans that the jews were evil and controlled the world and such, and the jews never did anything like invade germany or anything like the americans are currently doing. Crazy people living in imaginary realities can be pretty convincing sometimes, and can definitely be pretty convinced of their own fantasies, and pretty determined to get them realized.
I don't know how well counter-propaganda would work in any case, but it's a tough situation one way or another. Could be that the insurgents aren't really so crazy as I'm making them out to be, but it would kind of seem to be, especially if you actually listen to what they have to say about themselves. You can say that all that jazz about allah is just some kind of metaphorical abstraction resulting from poverty and relative depravation and indignation at what the evil americans are doing and so on, but it would seem that the insurgents themselves actually take their crazy myths quite seriously. I mean, it doesn't make much sense to blow yourself up unless you seriously believe that what you're doing has a divine transcendent purpose that will give you a payoff in the afterlife.