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Propaganda Emails, Conflation, and "Proof of Abuse by Our Troops"

Submitted by Ken Watts on Fri, 06/19/2009 - 07:45

THE STREAM OF RIGHT-WING email propaganda is seemingly endless, so this time I want to concentrate on a theme which appears time after time.

"Nothing is sacred. Not our fighting men and women, not religion, certainly not the truth."

I've mentioned conflation before as a propaganda technique, but I've never explained the method in detail. Today's example gives me the opportunity.

Conflation, put simply, is a kind of mental confusion: two or more ideas get so tightly identified in our minds that it becomes hard to separate them. This can lead to faulty thinking.

A perfect example is found in an old riddle:

A man and his son are in an auto accident. The man is killed, but the boy is only seriously injured. He's rushed to the hospital, where it's discovered that he needs immediate surgery. They wheel him into the operating room, whereupon the surgeon exclaims, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!"

How is this possible?

The answer, of course, is that the surgeon is the boy's mother.

I suspect this riddle doesn't work as well now as it did forty years ago. But back then, it was surprising how many people couldn't come up with the answer. (Even some feminists!)

The reason was that they had conflated the idea of "surgeon" with the idea of "man"—even though there was no necessary connection between them.

In that case, the conflation occurred quite naturally, and was simply based on experience. It was rare at the time to meet a woman surgeon, so one expected a man out of habit.

But even under those circumstances, it led to faulty thinking.

In the case of propaganda, there's an intentional effort to confuse people, and control their thinking, by connecting certain ideas over and over.

The most prominent recent example of this is the Bush administration's (successful) attempts to connect Iraq to 9/11 in the public mind.

They didn't do this through argument. In fact, their actual direct statements on the matter, though generally false, only pointed to relatively weak connections anyway.

No. The way it was actually done was much more subtle. Speech after speech would mention "Iraq" and "Saddam" and "9/11" in close proximity, without actually saying what the connection was. The result? To this day a good part of the country still believes that Iraq was behind 9/11.

This kind of blatant conflation is only the tip of the iceberg, however—as today's example of email propaganda makes clear. The lengths that the far right will go to, in order to promote confused thinking which works to their advantage is not only surprising, but shameless.

Nothing is sacred. Not our fighting men and women, not religion, certainly not the truth.

But we'll get into specifics next time...