Apparently "nationalism is bad" is an uncivil take. Unless there's another reason someone would ban this comment... 🤔
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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sigh
During the first year of the Korean War, Edward Hunter, an American journalist who had worked in wartime intelligence, and post-war with the CIA, coined (or, more accurately, first popularised) the term brainwashing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hunter_(journalist)#Journalism
In March 1958, Hunter testified before the US House of Representatives' House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the US and NATO as losing the Cold War because of the communists' advantage in propaganda and psychological manipulation. He felt that the West lost the Korean War for being unwilling to use its advantage in atomic weapons
It's a bit funny to hear people use the term without recognizing it's tortured and sensationalist history. "We've been tricked into not kicking off a nuclear war" isn't what most people think of when they hear "brainwashing". But during the height of the Red Scare, that's what Goldwater conservatives and John Bircher reactionaries were arguing for.
Brainwashed is the appropriate term to describe nationalistic ideology, yes
No no, nationalism is freethinking because [checks notes] an American in the Cold War was a lunatic.
conflates two completely different points about propaganda and losing-because-not-using-nukes together