because propaganda is categorically something my enemy does. i bravely speak truth to power in order to educate the people and expose them to my self-evident correctness.
to which the KGB agent replies 'Thank you we try very hard with our propaganda. But honestly its not in the same league as yours.' The CIA agent looks up from his drink and ask dismissively 'What propaganda?'
You mean the dystopian science fiction where a cadre of rich people send the children from their subjugated territories to kill each other for their own amusement?
Or the dystopian science fiction where the state tells us what to think and then punishes us for not thinking that?
Or the dystopian science fiction where people who are slightly different are forced to live in segregated territories where they are subject to wanton acts of cruelty and occasional campaigns of extermination?
I want to make sure I'm properly read on the subject at hand
Propaganda is about saying slogans over and over again until people believe them.
Only partially correct. She is forgetting that once enough people believe enough in the slogans, these beliefs will then materialize. It's infra-materialism 101.
Also that’s not how it actually works unless you take Goebbels’ word salad at face value.
The industrialists and their petit bourgeois wannabes believed in Nazism because of the material benefit they derived from it, not because they were hypnotically brainwashed by Goebbels’ super special mind-controlling slogans.
Nazi propaganda is actually very mediocre. It’s just that the population was very Nazi.
But also none of the dystopian fiction I read as a child had chanting slogans until you believed them as any sort of a plot point. Like, that just isn't a thing in any of the dystopian fiction I've read, and I've read some amount. I do not know what she's on about here.
She just means newspeak from 1984. But because she doesn't want to say 1984 because she knows she'll be ridiculed for doing so, she attributes it to "dystopian fiction" as a whole.
What is wild to me is that it is rarely the chanting crowds that are supposed to be 'wrong' in your average dystopia sci-fi novel. Only 1984 has that, and they are mandatory rallies in movie theatres, the "Hour of Hate" by the state, not spontaneous protests by the people.
Just say, "Some people here haven't read 1984 in high school and it shows." we know that's what you actually mean.