“perpetual war for perpetual peace” Photo of Wall Mural in Prague
The title I borrowed from Gore Vidal’s book (I read it ages ago in my political science days). That is not the actual title of the mural. I don’t know what the actual title is. I guess I could ask around, google, check out tour books or we can make our own titles. War Against Infinity works too, in my mind.
Anyway. I share.
Propaganda protects its fictive world to the very last. The broken Adolf Hitler, the dictator whose hands were shaking so much he could scarcely sign his name, held his own histrionic wedding in his shadowy bunker, cursed the German people for their inability to achieve victory and then he and his new bride shot themselves. The dying propaganda machine then announced to the public, who by now were thinking of nothing but how to survive, that their Fuehrer fell in a heroic struggle in defence of their capital city.
Totalitarian regimes cannot survive without totally untruthful propaganda and propaganda cannot exist without a regime determined to resort to every dirty trick in the book. When the regime falls, its propaganda machine dies too. For the majority of people it means the arrival of a long-awaited moment of truth, but there are also quite a lot of people who are terrified of the moment when they will be cast out of the fictive world into real life.
One is tempted to compare the fictive world created by the propaganda of totalitarian states with the world inhabited by the citizens of the democratic countries. Do they really live in the real world, or are they too presented with an illusive world with its own particular language and its own clichés, a world that differs from the one in which they spend their daily lives?
There are at least two phenomena that are worth our attention: news media and advertising. When we watch the news we are presented with a more-or-less one-sided world. And it need not even be one of the gutter-press variety: the image of the world presented to us is dismal at first glance. There is none of the optimism that is typical of all totalitarian propaganda, there is none of the good-evil dualism. […] In the world of free news, evil prevails without political orientation. It takes the form of floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, lethal landslides, forest fires, escaped wild animals, epidemics and other natural disasters.
People who watch the news day in and day out without realizing that it is simply a tendentious stream of carefully selected, titillating information, which does not constitute an image of the world in its true proportions, find themselves in an unbearable world, from which they must escape.
Luckily they have the world created for them by the advertising experts. This, by contrast, is a carefully constructed mosaic of velvety smooth and soothing words, a parade of well-built properly slim young women whose tantalizing attire and footwear ensure the seductiveness of first one brand and then another. They have “irresistibly soft skin and hair that doesn’t frizz, but is smooth and has a magnificent sheen” thanks to the cosmetics of one brand or another, a landscape of unblemished purity, “perfect whiteness”. It is a world of ideal men ready to welcome gorgeous beauties into the passenger seats of their newly-purchased luxury cards of one brand or another….
The language of advertising and news broadcasts resembles the language of propaganda in the way that it creates clichés that are repeated over and over again with only the slightest variations.
However, there is a fundamental difference between the image of the world presented by totalitarian propaganda and the world created by news media and advertising in the democratic countries. […] Nobody obliges citizens to accept this image as a true representation of the world and if they do so they do so of their own free will. But those who reject this fictive world need not fear sanctions.
Respectfully, I assert the following:
The art and literary worlds too runs on propaganda and most artists are creating within those parameters.
And although those of us who live in democratic countries need not fear sanctions for rejecting political and news propaganda and, if we so have the courage, can reject the antidote of another fictive world provided by advertising, we live like outlaws amongst the very people who wish for the same freedom we don’t just quote or preach but actually live. It may sound presumptuous to state that everyone wants to be free, however we all readily agree if I stated otherwise, “everyone wants to be happy.”
thank you very much for your thoughts and wonderful post annie. i read your post with great interest. photo no 1 is a fantastic picture. very nice capturing of the situation!
Beautiful thoughts and great photos. Thank you!
Wow ~ a few things with this post. When I first saw the mural I was amazed at the figure 8 shape. Like a never ending cycle of war, destruction and rebuilding upon that…on a side note my WIP ‘cliffs and water’ painting I’ve been working on has somewhat gone in a very different direction & just a few days ago started to pull out a figure 8 shape so to see it on this mural connects to me and like you said in an earlier post Annie, ‘one must go deeper’ and deeper I go with this….Also, in regards to the excerpt from Ivan Kima, reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’ very good stuff. Your posts are always thought provoking and I connect very much with this. Take care!
Well this is a Möebius’ band as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_stripwith ) references such as M. C. Escher for graphics and J. Lacan for psychoanalysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan). Altogether and infinite theme you brilliantly write about.
Brilliant contrast between news dystopia and advertising’s false utopia, with “real world” caught between them, forever in quotes, trying to be felt and experienced by us unmediated. Thanks for sharing this long excerpt and your thoughts about it, much food for thinking, along with the evocative mural of an infinity.~lucy
thank you all for stopping by and your thoughts that only provide me with more for food for though. so i appreciate the input sincerely. @verena thank you for your feedback about the photo. i really was quite frustrated trying to capture this and then just decided to click and call it enough. @annika thank you! always lovely to have your input. @Renee thanks for stopping by renee. @xea many thanks for those two links! i noted: “The Möbius strip has several curious properties.” and I did not know of Lacan, so I will check him out. @fictional lucy–thank you for your energetic and authentic feedback, always. @helios thank you for stopping by! : ) a fellow writer today said the following tonight at the farewell dinner and i share: “strange how the advertising in Prague hasn’t really had any impact on me. so much so that i felt there is none. [which is not true! just like any city, advertising here too is every where!] i mean, i am not really interested in vodaphone for example or any other ‘deals’ etc. that might be going on so don’t pay attention. i don’t live here and don’t plan on buying anything like that here.” imagine if that was the level of consciousness from which we operated where ever we call “home”. i am just struck by how many artists are creating within various propaganda as well. stepping outside of the parameters is jumping off a cliff. the most dangerous part is that most don’t know they are within any parameters. just because one is creative or talented doesn’t mean one is out side the scope and influence. thank you for thinking with me! just because something IS and hasn’t changed as long as humans have existed, doesn’t mean one gives up. Privacy and equality MUST be defended. Mediocrity and complacency MUST be objected. Going with the flow need not mean one swims with shit. ~a.
@so_you_know Annie Glad we could share! Lacan has introduced quite a few radical innovations in psychoanalysis, among them, the algorythm and Topology. The paradoxal topological forms illustrating and “decoding” mental processes and consequent behaviours (enjoy).
These symbols that Baudoin speaks of in the last comment represent deep processes in the psyche..
There are many shades to the dominant patriarchal discourse. When the dominant discourse is internalized, much is lost for it takes a whole lifetime to unearth one’s true experience. Ah, the samsaric wheel in eternal motion..
Annie, thanks for sharing this post. I appreciate the mural and quote as well as you last spin.
“Going with the flow need not mean one swims with shit.” Indeed. I feel many don’t understand the meaning of flow. The flow of a river is able to carve new pathways, hence discovering its own journey.