Anti-Communism is something bred into Americans from the time we are children. We are taught how anything related to Stalin is automatically bad and anything involving the Soviet Union is inherently secretive and authoritarian.
This bias is so deeply ingrained, that, having finally after years of Marxist and Geopolitical study, I've finally reached a point where those little anti-Communist tropes and sound bites inserted into our political conversations catch my attention automatically.
Now this took a really long time to reach. Anti-Communism is so deeply ingrained in our society, so embedded in our information space, and this completely by design, that we don't notice it in our everyday lives. We're not meant to. We're meant to internalize these stereotypes until it affects every aspect of our political thinking.
And I'll give you an example of how even the most obscure media consumption can result in our exposure to anti-Communist propaganda.
So I'm watching one of these obscure science channels on YouTube, being interested in the science behind nuclear criticality. So in the first video, which is about a famous incident in which a Russian scientist was exposed to a particle beam in an accelerator that resulted in serious injury but he survived. And at the end of the video, they start talking about how he really suffered under that awful Soviet Bureaucracy when he was denied his free government healthcare in 1997. 🙄
I seriously face palmed on that one.
But then I'm watching an entirely different science video on an entirely different nuclear accident. This one the only fatal Nuclear reactor accident in American history.
So I get to the end of this video, they've done a great job at really helping you understand the science behind what triggered the accident, and I'm really satisfied with the video, and then, right at the end they throw this little tidbit of information out as though it too were a statement of fact:
[Speaking factually about the fatal design flaw responsible for the US accident in 1961 that was also present in the design of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986]
"When we don't learn from history (deeply accusing stare at the Soviets) it tends to repeat itself"
Ugh!!!!!!!
🤯
Okay, so basically he has to throw in the insinuation that somehow the Communists are even more deeply responsible for Chernobyl than the Americans were for SL-1, the destroyed US nuclear reactor from 1961.
Now on its face, most people aren't going to think twice about such a statement. It is meant to evoke a response inside you of "ugh those Communists were just terrible to see our mistakes and repeat them anyway!" without ever giving any kind of critical nudge at the thought whatsoever. After all, we Americans all know how evil and awful Communists, and especially Russian Communists were.
And that's supposed to be the end of that. Two science videos, both ending with throw away lines of anti-Communist propaganda, both meant to leave me feeling superior as an American and especially an American Capitalist!
But the reality exposes the absurdity of American anti-Communist propaganda!
How would the Soviets have known about the US design flaw years earlier?
Am I just mistaken and it was common practice from the 1960's to the 1980's to share our nuclear trade secrets with our greatest adversary??? To share nuclear designs with the great evil empire the USSR at the height of the Cold War?
Please. How the fuck could the Soviets have known the details of the SL-1 design flaws?
But that's not even really the point, because in the end, it does not matter how ridiculous or absurd or counter factual US propaganda becomes because the public is just so deeply propagandized, so well trained, and so peppered with this kind of subliminal propaganda all day every day.
And it truly took years for me, not just to be able to recognize propaganda anyone can do that, but to really begin to understand the depth and nature of which we are being saturated in this constant stream of pro-Imperialist, pro-Capitalist, often conflicting narratives that are intended to make us accept without ever critically analyzing what "approved" sources tell us.
I cannot stress enough the importance and personal responsibility of every worker to educate yourself on the nature of advertising and propaganda and their relationship to Capitalism and Imperialism.
It is so important that we understand how Wall Street, the Big Banks, Big Investors and Big Corporate bosses, how they use the tools of the media and internet to control and maintain the information available to us and how they use that control to maintain the myths of Capitalism, Neoliberalism and an Imperialist Foreign Policy, as well as maintain the myths of "authoritarianism " and "human rights violations" maintained around US Adversaries like the Soviet Union and now Russia, Iran, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, China and on and on and on.
