as vladimir putin's army continues its assault on ukraine war has also broken out on another front information putin's propaganda machine has overtaken social media within russia to paint a misleading picture of his invasion but government propaganda during war is a tale as old as time when i hear the the phrase in war truth is the first casualty my response is that's absolutely right one of the things that we see over and over and over again is governments utilizing propaganda as a means to rally individuals behind foreign [Music] we dig too deep let's define propaganda when
i'm talking about propaganda i mean something that satisfies three different criteria so first it is aimed at some sort of political cause secondly it is purposefully biased misleading or false and third it's bad from the perspective of the recipient in that it inhibits our ability to engage in rational decision making in the long term or in the long run propaganda can effectively undermine or erode the critical checks and balances that are so important in democratic society because one of the main functions of propaganda is that it limits an individual's ability to make good decisions and
so from that perspective propaganda is incredibly dangerous in terms of eroding constitutional constraints but also in terms of eroding liberty you might remember that we discussed how people make decisions in our video on austrian economics humans act they drink they move they trade as a way to relieve feelings of uneasiness and we use reason to evaluate and rank different options and in our afghanistan fiasco video we showed that war never works out for anyone war inherently means destruction of capital not to mention innocent lives the very nature of war guarantees misery for all involved both
videos are linked in the description check them out after this one taken together they affirm that war would be a thing of the past if only we had accurate information with which to make decisions vladimir putin knows this and he's scared of the truth it's why he's banned facebook and twitter and even made the word war illegal take it from someone who's lived it it's also informational war happening right now in social media i saw that there is a girl in hikov and her mother lives in moscow and when her daughter calls her to tell
her mother it's shooting it's a war please believe me don't don't believe what you are hearing on your news i'm your daughter i'm not lying to you and the reply was no sorry those are just dramatized um videos that you guys are making we know what's the truth and i support our president and um [Music] this is just so wrong now how is it that government's going about doing that things like appealing to an us versus them mentality so it's us and our allies and our enemy and their allies we see simple messaging so simple
signs and slogans things that are easy for people to to grasp onto these are very very simple ideas that again distill these very very complex um geopolitical issues down into something that is memorable and repeatable we see appeals to patriotism so again this idea that supporting the cause is good makes you a good citizen of your country and not supporting these issues makes you a bad citizen or someone who is unpatriotic it's not just putin though a ukrainian soldier who told a russian warship to go after yourself was murdered supposedly the ghost of kiev was
a heroic ukrainian fighter pilot allegedly turns out both were mythical morale boosters it raises the question is it okay to lie or embellish the truth even if it's for a good cause when people talk about this idea of the noble lie there's this concept that there's different kinds of truths that are appropriate for different kinds of people if people want to think about this or read about this idea and why i think this idea of noble deception is a problem read fa hayek um chapter 10 of the road to serfdom is titled why the worst
get on top um those are the types of people who you would have to rely on to carry out this idea of a noble deception we don't have any expectation that you're going to have the right people who are going to provide the quote unquote correct information to the general public we don't have to look to eastern europe and we don't have to look far into the past for examples of how blatant lies led to hundreds of thousands of deaths there was a big push to garner popular support for the invasion of iraq by the
bush administration there was a discussion about things like ties between saddam hussein and al qaeda this was silly on its face by the way saddam hussein was a secularist so the idea that he would have been in bed with a militant islamic group just didn't make any sense but then after the war you also start seeing a different type of propaganda push because when it became clear that it was not going to be an easy victory when it became clear that saddam hussein did not in fact possess weapons of mass destruction then you have to
have a separate propaganda campaign in order to try to justify and then maintain support for the conflict we don't have to look far either for less blatant but still dangerous mistruths even in peacetime a lot of the films that we consume and not just war films but things like transformers or some of the cooking shows that you've watched on tv if you've ever watched a show about modeling on tv there's actually a pretty good chance that the department of defense has had input in that particular program in exchange for using department of defense resources but
when we're talking about the government denying support for films that want to take a more critical approach to studying or to portraying u.s foreign policy or by only offering support to projects that are going to show the military in a positive light you effectively skew the message and you don't give people the opportunity to have or think about critically what it is that the us military or the u.s government is doing part of what makes propaganda so insidious is that often by the time we figure out what was true and what was false the world's
attention has moved on to a new crisis one of the things that's really tricky about studying contemporary propaganda so lots of people have been asking well what about what's going on now in ukraine are we getting the correct information or what information are people in russia getting or what information are people in ukraine getting and one of the things that's challenging about studying propaganda is that particularly in a contemporary context it is incredibly difficult to know what information is true and what information is false in real time here's what we do know in real time
there is a war in ukraine and while propaganda is coming from both sides only one side is actively invading and we also know to view information especially in times of war critically and through the latin phrase qui bono who benefits and so if we're talking about the united states or if we're talking about the russian government or the ukrainian government or whatever government it might be that's putting out this particular information that's the group that stands to benefit and a propaganda campaign is one way to attempt to generate that support so that the civilian population
is going to go along with a particular policy so don't just go along because you're told to support the troops or that we're in this together or whatever those slogans are nothing more than the slightly more grown up version of those condescending words we all hated as kids because i said so [Music] you
