The Anglophone world has negative connotations for the word 'propaganda' purely because our enemies used that word more than us.
The person was pretty clearly talking in the past tense about WWII, not claiming that anyone is your enemy now.
Whether you like it or not, being born on a particular patch of dirt means that you are in fact part of the shared history of people born on that patch of dirt, which includes having had the Germans as enemies at one or two points in the past.
Who is "our" & "us"? If it's not me, am I "the enemy"?
Kindof like the English speaking people of Japanese descent in the Western US circa 1940. Stripped of their property & sent to internment camps. I hope history does not repeat itself in present & future "propagation" efforts. But hope & reality are two different things.
I would love to meet the "we" or "us" that is doing the propaganda. To propagate what I think about their efforts of course.
It's interesting to me that you said "were" instead of "is", we're still seeing exactly the same things played out today (by all nations, not just the "bad" guys), although it doesn't feel like much is being done to fight it, compared to what was outlined in the article.
Or maybe we could call it negative propaganda ("don't believe that") rather than positive propaganda ("believe this").
Aren't those the same thing? An opinion piece about a set of facts is still an opinion. Snopes largely covers political topics. Combined, that's definition propaganda.
In essence, systems like that survive not on the strength of the king but on the willingness of the people to follow him.
One thing I noticed in the article was that all of the rumors being discussed were negative rumors. The goal was to take rumors that might bring down morale and "set them right". I wonder if positive rumors were treated the same way.
It’s a bit like “racism” : I honestly have no idea if the current academic definition is “prejudice + power” or just “prejudice” - but to a significant extent it doesn’t really matter since the common understanding is the one that matters when communicating.
Most of the genocides, eugenics, racism, etc of the US, Britain and Germany in the 20th century was pushed by progressives wielding facts and science as blunt instruments.
Science was central to the genocidal movements in the US and Germany. In many ways, science was the cause of the genocidal movements. Eugenics was a scientific movement championed by scientists. What changed wasn't science. It was culture and politics that changed. The horrors of the 20th century led philosphers, politicians and ordinary citizens to lose their blind faith and trust in science and progress.
The rise of science and social darwinism of the early 1900s is similar to rise of AI and technocracy. Hopefully we won't as foolish to place blind trust on it and history doesn't repeat itself.
I do think it is interesting that this article never uses the word "propaganda" to describe what was being done by the newspapers here. It undoubtedly was propaganda, but in the modern world that word carries a very negative connotation so it is only described as counter- or anti-propaganda.