7 July 2012 They’ve come to believe their own propaganda

Cassi Creek:  It is amusing to see and hear how much of the propaganda spread by the GOP/teavangelists is actually absorbed as truth and parroted back in response to any public challenge of their party line. 

          The continual misapplication of political, social, and economic labels by the propaganda factories and by the target demographic is a frightening example of the poor state of education in these United States. 

          The BS machines are targeting the segment of the GOP/teavangelist base that has the highest disdain for education and the lowest awareness of history and science –all disciplines – of the general American populace. 

          When some apparatchik in a BS factory pumps out an advertisement that refers to Obama, or any other Democrat candidate as a communist, it is all too likely that the cog in question has never seen a communist and was probably released from high school after the collapse of the USSR.  It is also all too likely that the cog in question has no clear understanding of the differences in the basic theories that separate Soviet communism and the Nazi party. 

          Therefore, the base demographic, those folks who have no appreciation for education beyond using the schools as a babysitting service and a training camp for athletic franchises, fails to question how a centrist such as Obama can be a communist and a Nazi.  The affordable health care act is therefore both capitalism when it meets the needs of the GOP Congress person for hire; and is equally communist (or socialist) when proposed by anyone who can read and write above 8^th grade level and who possesses a library card. 

          Sargent’s cartoon points this out quite adequately and should be displayed to the younger registered voters at every chance. It points out the mechanics of the Propaganda lie mill beautifully.

          For those of us who recall an older, more complex world, I submit the folksong parody, “In Old Moscow.”  A certain amount of historical background is provided for those less familiar with the life and times of Lev Davidovich Bronstein. 

http://www.folkarchive.de/moscow.html

IN OLD MOSCOW

(Walter Cliff, aka Walter Gourlay) (Tune: My Darling Clementine)

Part of a skit prepared by the Jacobin Jerques,
Young People's Socialist League (4th International),
Staten Island, New York.
Circa 1940-'41.

Lyrics and info kindly provided by Bill Friedland.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

On August 23, 1939. Stalin shocked Communist parties all over the world when he signed a pact with Hitler. 'The Daily Worker' missed publication for one day until the new line was handed down. Said the new line was "Fascism was no longer a threat" ... it was only a matter of 'taste.' Nazis ceased to be beasts, and any opposition to Hitler was branded as detrimental to the cause of 'world revolution.' The new slogan of the American CP was "The Yanks are not coming" as the Nazis and the Communists embraced in old Moscow. In Old Moscow was written by Walter Gourlay under his party name Walter Cliff. Friedland met Gourlay while he was living in Staten Island. "He recruited me to the Shachtman group," he said. "He wrote beautiful polemical parodies. 'In Old Moscow' was one of his songs. We used to build skits around these things - whole skits - and that was only one of the songs we used. This would have been around 1941."

Ronald D. Cohen & Dave Samuelson, liner notes for "Songs for Political Action," Bear Family Records, BCD 15 720 JL, 1996, pp. 195-197.

First released on Joe Glazer & Bill Friedland, "Ballads for Sectarians" (Labor Arts, late 1951 or early 1952) 

In old Moscow, in the Kremlin,
In the fall of thirty-nine.
Sat a Russian and a Prussian
Writing out the party line.

Chorus:
Oh my darling, Oh my darling,
Oh my darling party line.
Oh, I never will desert you
Cause I love this life of mine.

¹Leon Trotsky was a Nazi,
Oh, we knew it for a fact.
²Pravda said it, we all read it
Before the Stalin-Hitler Pact.

Once a Nazi would be shot, see.
That was then the party line.
Now a Nazi's hotsy-totsy,
Trotsky's laying British mines.

Now the Nazis, without Trotsky,
[ALTERNATE: Now the Nazis and Der Fuehrer]
Stand within the party line.
All the Russians love the Prussians
Volga boatmen sail the Rhine.

^“1Trotsky, Leon: In a series of frame-up trials held in Moscow in 1936-38, the co- architect of the Bolshevik Revolution, first Foreign Commissar, founder of the Red Army and Commissar for War (1918-1925) was 'proved' to have been an agent in the pay of various foreign governments, including Hitler's Germany. Once Hitler became an ally of Stalin, the latter accusation became somewhat 'inappropriate.'”

²Pravda: The official party organ in the Soviet Union.”