Lest we fell pray to the modern day thought crime of whataboutism, of course.
Today's propaganda is hidden as organic voices of different organizations and you need to do some digging to see if org is genuine or someone is pulling the strings.
In retrospect. At the time it was taught as real history at schools. At least according to my mum, she never even found out about all the mass graves and other attrocities until after Yugoslavia fell apart. Partisans being the absolute good guys was just the accepted default.
I think this may be related to slightly different history - Poland was invaded in '39 by Russians as well and suffered fair deal of their atrocities - it wasn't possible just to eradicate knowledge about that.
Hitler then invaded when the new government said they were not going to collaborate.
Then as part of fighting off axis powers, we also fought an internal civil war between the communists and the ... I don't know if they had a real name, we call them the whites. It's details of that civil war that communist propaganda liked to sweep under the rug and talk only about how they singlehandedly saved the country from the nazis.
What kind of history you were taught at home depended primarily on whether your parents were Red or White. My dad for example was told a lot about the bad things the Partisans did because of his family's alignment to the religious, white, side.
In US they had Captain America so it balances out.
It's people like HST, Kurt Vonnegut, black musicians and writers, directors like Cassavetes and Kazan and such that embedded a dose of realism to the popular narrative. But anything really mainstream was always 80% sugary propaganda.
On the contrary, "anti-government" is the official party line in an era when even the President (Reagan), in his inaugural address says: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.""
In the second, the military is actively concealing the existence of live POWs in Vietnam. He ends the movie by threatening a military official.
In neither case can you reasonably call the movie "propaganda", at least not without logic that you could use to connects the dots between any movie, from Bridget Jones Diary to Being John Malkovich, to propaganda.
I'm not arguing that the movies are anti-propaganda. I'd call them neutral in that regard.
There is still a lot of propaganda in media for children. It's just not (obviously) pro government propaganda anymore. But I recall Bubble Guppies including descriptions of police as (my words) grown up hall monitors. No guns. No power of arrest. The monopoly on the use of force is basically the point of police forces. To elide that and teach about sirens and traffic tickets is a bit... overly sanitized.
Right. And Superman is of course built like, well Superman, and commits no war crimes (at least in early DC universe).
Of course there's propaganda on both sides - then and now.
Propaganda is only easy to identify in retrospect. And then we think how could they be so dumb? We're just as dumb now, we just don't know it yet.
A rare opportunity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe is that a lot of us have access to both the pre- and post- truth and can see the difference.
Maybe sometimes? I see a lot of new media with plenty of propaganda built in. Especially in the categories of: pro-arts, pro-environment, anti-violence, pro-diversity, pro-people-with-disabilities, pro-healthy-eating, pro-exercise, pro-sports, anti-bigotry, etc.
Many of those probably seem benign or beneficial, but they all have political implications and definite viewpoints.
I think it's the opposite, at least for the old soviet regimes -- and I've read several accounts that match that. People didn't believe what the party said, and knew perfectly well what was going on, they just pretended to agree (for obvious reasons). They also made jokes (very popular ones) that clearly show a good understanding of the politics and propaganda mechanisms.
Propaganda of that kind only worked at the early years (when it wasn't pure propaganda, but people also legitimately thought, some of the leadership included) that things are going forward in the right direction.
So, when we ask "how could they be so dumb?" the answer is simple: they weren't.
True to some extent. However, while suspecting the party lies, they absolutely had no idea how deep and vast the lies were and that exactly was the truth. I've once heard an anecdote about North Korean woman who fled to South Korea and was asked how she thinks the life in the West is, how she thinks people in countries like USA live. She said she thinks it's a very good life, everybody is rich - everybody can get no less than 800g of rice every day!
The point is that when you live in the environment of a totalitarian state with little to no access to outside sources of information, you can easily deduct you are probably not being told the truth. It is much harder to know what the truth is, especially if you most basic assumptions might be based on the same propaganda you seemingly reject - because you've had nothing else to base them on.
And if you look at Russia now, it is surprising how many people who were alive at Soviet regime feel nostalgic about it and even about figures like Stalin. They experienced all the lies themselves, they knew those are the lies - and ask them now, they'd repeat them anyway.
I don't think it's only nostalgia.
Hence regime fell. Aided greatly by the overarching global political climate of the late 80's.
My generation is pretty sure modern capitalism is the savior and the only way to prosperity.
The cycle continues.
What will our kids believe? Who knows. But it's definitely going to involve the idea that overpriced organic artisanal foods are the only thing worth putting in your body.
Yeah, but note that your grandparents also had life before socialism to compare, and, whatever troubles the regime had, regimes and lives before it weren't that nice in most of the Balkan either. So it might not be that propaganda worked better on them, but that they legitimately thought their conditions had been improved.
It's not like they went from cushy capitalist life to soviet style misery -- it was lots of war, national tensions, conscription, hard village life, culminating of course to the horror that was WWII.
And Tito was a bug war hero (for them, but legitimately too), and did held the country together (way better than his successors did post-socialism, so there's that).
I've read books and comics from the 50s and 60s in Yugoslavia and I can tell you that the Communist Party can do no wrong, the Partisans were all heroes built like Superman and who never ever commited any war crimes, and Tito himself was a poor lad who rose from nothing to ultimate power just because of how awesome he is. And of course we all are equal in everything, if someone feels unequal or god forbid better then they are stealing and robbing and doing bad things.
The history books I was taught from in the 90s and 00s painted a very different picture.