Blank slates are easier to cover with lies
One of the single episodes preserved at Archive.org is an inconsequential 1945 program from WMCA in NYC. It's the usual 'breakfast' format, a man and woman casually discussing events and slipping in product plugs.

They're talking today about tax collectors.....

...Reminds me of another story that happened in a village in Borneo. All the villagers were followers of the prophet Mohammed, and they were Mohammedans. And they must bathe, you know, every day. But they had to bathe in a river with crocodiles.

The rest of the joke is about a crocodile eating a tax collector. It doesn't make much sense, but that's not the point.

The point is this: In 1945, Mohammedans were not an enemy or an ally. We didn't know much about them because we didn't need to. But what we did know was CORRECT. The breakfast lady casually mentions that Mohammedans have to bathe every day, assuming that it was common knowledge. (Most Americans didn't bathe every day in 1945, so the religious requirement was salient.)

Now Mohammedans are the official enemy, so we know a lot about them, and all of it is WRONG. Look at any combox in any "conservative" website, and you'll find the same old shit about stone age primitives, never wash, never saw a wristwatch, etc, etc, etc.

We're transitioning the official enemy toward Russia again, and again everything you read in media and comboxes is WRONG. Some of the official shit was true in Stalin's time, but that was several generations ago. It was already false by 1968.

It's easier to inject false propaganda on a blank slate. Most Americans had little contact with Islam, and little contact with Russia, before the official lies started.

But what about full slates? In 2001 I knew quite a bit about Muslims. I'd known several of them, and I generally felt positive toward them. They were smart and sophisticated, and lived by rules that made sense.

Even so, the shock of 9/11 served to inject the standard negative shit. I knew better, but the injection destroyed my knowledge. You can see it in the first few years of this blog, before I started to question the shit. I swallowed every bit of it and begged for more. I didn't truly reject the lies until 2011 when I unplugged the TV.

The latest injection of RUSSIAN_AGGRESSION shit happened after I unplugged the TV, so I'm able to reject it immediately and easily. I'm still trying to disentangle many decades of earlier injected shit.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 8:59 AM