Just a pet peeve of mine when people say something major is happening to “distract the narrative” from something way less important

kinda like when the US brought up aliens and the reaction from some people was “oh, they’re only doing this to distract from events in Ukraine/somewhere else” my sibling in christ, Americans stopped caring about the war after a month, let alone like a year

to go off on a bit of a tangent, at the end of the day, I do wonder sometimes how much propaganda actually shifts things. like, I’m not talking about, say, engineering a global situation where citizens of most countries want to study in the West and especially America in order to bring back liberal capitalist ideas and practices to their home countries - that’s clearly at least quite impactful (though I think “if you DON’T do capitalism, then we’ll sanction the fuck out of you” is the greater motivator). I mean in terms of the government saying shit like “this is a war for freedom and democracy” etc etc to their populations as the justification for events, or “we need to tighten our belts because the budget is low” when that’s obviously bullshit (in the US most especially). as in, if a population in general needs conditions to reach X Level Of Badness for a revolutionary situation to become possible and perhaps even probable, how much does all the propaganda actually shift X? By 5%? By 50%?

because I can’t personally name any situation where I can say “Oh, this situation would have been revolutionary, the material conditions were all there and the people were all ready, except the propaganda was just that good, that it prevented it from happening.” Or, alternatively, “Oh, this situation might not have been revolutionary, but man, that country was just so bad at propaganda that the conditions didn’t even need to get that bad for the revolution to start.” often times when it appears that propaganda is making a large difference, it’s just an artefact of a worldview not focussed enough on material conditions, or with its own mythology as to why a revolution did or did not happen that is disconnected from a more “objective” analysis, or just not being educated in how bad things got, or even being so bad at analysis that you believe that Very Special Good/Evil Guy magically persuaded the population to do Good/Bad thing

my inkling is that the propaganda feels quite overwhelming and very impactful when you’re living under the government creating it, but once you’re outside of the system or it’s collapsed, you sorta realize “oh. I was complaining all the time that the people around me are brainwashed propagandized liberal subjects who love foreign wars just because the government said so, and that they were buying state propaganda hook line and sinker, and that’s the reason why socialism isn’t working, but in reality it was a combination of a very strong police+surveillance state making collective action very difficult; the built environment discouraging collective action; the public services being unable to easily facilitate mass action and instead encouraging a lot of car usage; and the incredibly financialized economy and much of the means of production being shifted abroad making it much harder to create leverage over the bourgeoisie compared to workers in the early 20th century who could physically seize factories making steel and guns and use them against the police - you can’t do that with like, a funko pop factory and a bitcoin mining facility. those are the factors we had to overcome, and the fact that most of suburbia was comprised of crazed racists whose only goal in life was to become a landlord was just a symptom of the disease, and we needed to treat the disease and not the symptoms, so it was useless to yell at crazed suburban racists and attempt to teach them how to become human beings with empathy again and stop posting their idiotic opinions on reddit and twitter”

I know Roderic Day’s redsails essay goes into this a lot, and about how people generally won’t buy propaganda (without extreme coercion) if they don’t have some level of implicit support for it, but my currently tired brain can’t remember if he ever explicitly says what he thinks propaganda is like, really doing, if it isn’t turning Good People into Bad People (to vastly oversimplify).