Indoctrination stands as perhaps the most powerful tool a State could wield without imposing actual,
physical violence. Patriotism often acts as a means
of self-policing — whereby a populace relentlessly
criticizes any segment not wholly on board with
devotion to that State. Orwell also keenly understood
this, as is clear in 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith’s
description of the youngest citizens of Ingsoc (an
abbreviation for English Socialism — the governmental ideology firmly entrenched in that ‘fictional’
time period).
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such
organizations as the Spies they were systematically
turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this
produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel
against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary,
they adored the Party and everything connected
with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of
slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a
sort of glorious game to them.”
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“American leaders have convinced a majority of
the American people of the benevolence of their
government’s foreign policy. To have persuaded
Americans of this, as well as a multitude of other
people throughout the world — in the face of
overwhelming evidence to the contrary … —
must surely rank as one of the most outstanding
feats of propaganda and indoctrination in all of
history [.…]
“It is not at all uncommon to grow to adulthood in
the United States, even graduate from university,
and not be seriously exposed to opinions significantly contrary to these prevailing myths, and know
remarkably little about the exceptionally harmful
foreign policy of the government. It’s one thing for
historical myths to rise in the absence of a written
history of a particular period, such as our beliefs
concerning the Neanderthals; but much odder is
the rise of such myths in the face of a plethora of
historical documents, testimony, films, and books.”
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When the State manages to hoodwink millions of
people, facilitating an imperialist empire isn’t a cumbersome task. Blum analogizes the American people
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