We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Deutschland 83: The Spy Thriller Is Watching You!

Click here to access article by Joseph Waters from Russia Insider.

Ordinary Americans are seldom conscious of propaganda that is fed to them via corporate media news programs and much less by their entertainment programs. But their propaganda is in the latter in a much more insidious form. Thus it is mandatory for all politically conscious Americans to be aware of all forms of propaganda that corporations are using to manipulate people in support of their many nefarious projects of profits and power. This author contributes to that effort by analyzing the propaganda content in the TV entertainment program series called "Deutschland 83".
Deutschland 83 is another example of “entertainment propaganda” - fictional entertainment laced with propaganda messages - in which anti-heroes are used to reach a left-leaning audience. These individuals are drawn to the anti-hero because he or she personifies the moral ambivalence, disorder and confusion in a society. For those who have difficulty in seeing everything around them in either black or white, the anti-hero’s stumbling path to redemption appeals to their own sense of the complexity, uncertainty and shifting realities of the modern world.