>Believe it or not, Terry, an lot of educated people actually had heard of Guernica ( and Franco, and WWII and Picasso ) before they stumbled across the reference on a polemic website. <s>
>
>"Reports filtering out" do not mean truth. They just as easily mean spin. If you know anything about modern warfare capabilities you surely know if the U.S. military had been targeting civilians in Iraq there would not be any more civilians in Iraq.

Saying that reports "easily mean spin" can also be used as a means of discarding the other voices.

Michael Moore is rich, and was caught exaggerating a couple of times? Whatever he says doesn't need to be verified, and anyone who mentions him can be disregarded altogether.

A website shows us some unfiltered reports? Ummm... let's see, if the name of the site has some "Al-" in its name, then it must be some Arab propaganda, doesn't need to be verified, and anyone who mentions it could be a suspect. Did one of the sentence coincide with a sentence spoken in Kerry's campaign? The whole thing can be disregarded as "liberal blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..." (qv).

I've seen this technique of vaccinating the believers against hearing any voices of dissent applied very efficiently. One of the major reasons why Milosevic won the elections in 1992, and lost only local ones in major cities in 1996 (but won the rest), even though he had lost two wars by that time. There were still too many people who believed what he said.

Another technique which also worked very nicely, was to spread the conviction that "our guys may be qute bad and corrupt, but the other guys are really so much worse you're better off with us". Combine these two with stiff control over about 99% of the media, and you may understand why it took us nine years to get our bastard down.

I'm not trying to compare presidents here. The technique of selective deafness is, however, easy to spot once you went through years of fighting it.

As usually, the problem with brainwashing is not the washing itself, but high-speed spinning tumble drying.

>( This reminds me of the 60s when we stood in the street screaming the government was stifling dissent - rather forgetting that in societies where dissent was really stifled we would have disappeared very quickly.

The methods were very different then, from what I recall. In the East, you couldn't speak unless you were let to, so you could be made a case and someone would get to a higher position by exposing you. In the West, you could speak but had trouble being heard, unless someone could make good money on selling what you say.