The power of propaganda can turn a lie into a piece of gold

How you ever heard the term "propaganda"? It is a word with amazing power used to deceive.

Generally defined, the word means "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person."

Now I’m just a simple Dargan lad, but I would wager more than a few dollars that each person reading this sentence will have been deceived by propaganda many times over.

Permit me to give you a few examples.

Certainly, you must have heard that President Joe Biden at the age of 80 intends to run for reelection in 2024. Many, including himself, suggest that he is "physically fit and mentally prepared" to lead our country in another term. Would you say that this is a truth or a yarn spun to convince you otherwise?

Anyone with or without a medical degree would surmise that as humans age, one’s faculties decrease in operation. If you answered propaganda, you would most likely be right.

As anti-Israel protestors have taken to the streets of America, some protestors have suggested there was no attack by Hamas on Israeli territory that killed more than 1,000 Jewish settlers on Oct. 7.

Would you say this is a truth or a yarn spun to convince you otherwise. If you chose propaganda, you would most likely be again right.

Other protestors have asked those with inquiring minds to treat as a lie that Hamas rockets destroyed parts of a hospital in the Gaza Strip, causing many casualties among Palestinians. Is it true that a Hamas rockets did not strike the hospital, or more propaganda?

If you answered propaganda, you would most likely be right again.

Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster chess player once suggested that “the point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

If those protesters with the microphone confine themselves to a few points and repeat them over and over, soon the masses will embrace them as true, or so the theory goes.

Speaking of such, Adolf Hitler once devoted two chapters of his book "Mien Kampf" to propaganda.

Hitler proclaimed that "Propaganda is a weapon, as much as submarines, tanks and bombs.”

He was a self-made professor of propaganda while the German people suffered through an economic depression and social upheaval. His volumes of lies made Jewish people the root of all problems.

Soon the entire German nation set course to destroy every Jewish person in Europe.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. They "used these sites for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people thought to be enemies of the state, and for mass murder."

According to the National World War II Museum, "The Holocaust was Nazi Germany's deliberate murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war."

A slogan used by some antisemitic pro-Palestinian protestors around the world today suggests that Jewish people should be eliminated from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Hitler had a similar idea.

Many Palestinians of Gaza are caught up in the middle. They merely are seeking a place to live in peace.

Hamas is a terrorist group that uses innocent Palestinians as human shields to protect them during war, according to experts on the topic.

They have established military units near hospitals and mosques to disguise their presence and protect them — a despicable enemy.

A 2019 article by Ruth Eglash in the Washington Post tells of Suheib Yousef, who is the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef. The younger Yousef talks of his disillusionment with the group’s rampant corruption and disappointment with leaders living opulent lifestyles abroad while the people in Gaza continue to suffer in abject poverty.

Although Yousef tells the story of one who lived with Hamas, those with the protesting microphones fail to share his realistic information.

Propaganda lives and grows with few facts considered. The internet has made it far more effective to spread propaganda, and the entire world can be connected by a simple computer button.

But in the words of old Aesop:

"Life will be evil and painful for men while lies prevail over truth."

So let us think before we know and send propaganda packing to the ninth circle of Dante’s hell.

Pete Waters is a Sharpsburg resident who writes for The Herald-Mail.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Propaganda is a deceiving devil