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Could you give examples where arts and culture are at the service of governments to alienate and manipulate the world opinion? or against them?

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Question added by Olga Lucia Patiño , Secretary Specialist , ALADAA- Latin American association of Asian and African studies
Date Posted: 2014/12/22
Jennifer Akdemir
by Jennifer Akdemir , ESL Teacher , No. 2 High School

I think we need look no further than Hollywood, many of ts films appear to normalise war and colonialism, or even domestic isues like poverty and unemployment and skepticism towards people like benefit claimants and beggars.    Other television shows like the long-running "Friends" for example, was held by my own daughter (before she knew better) to be a representation of how Americans live.    The whole functions like a kind of propaganda machine, smoothing over unpleasantness and giving the American international image a benign hue.

Ola Ibrahim
by Ola Ibrahim , Content Developer , Wilson & Bass

History alone shows us that wartime propaganda, a business all on its own, was delivered through government-approved cartoons, posters, advertisements, radio shows, short and feature-length films, news media, stand-up comedy and satire, revised book publications, pamphlet distributions, military enlistment posters, even reformed school curricula. It's a long list. World War and Cold War historians have devoted great portions of their careers to studying propaganda of the early to mid 1900's. The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was first established under President Woodrow Wilson when he drew the US into World War 1, and since then the independent agency had used every medium available to rally public support for the country's war efforts against Germany. Obviously, the CPI rejected the word 'propaganda' and insisted they were nothing like the Germans with their version of brainwashing. The CPI meant to 'educate' the public, not deceive and terrorize. For this reason, the CPI was composed of government officials, professors, journalists, artists, advertising experts, historians, cartoonists - all of whom worked to create a sensationalist and heroic narrative of the war, as well as to discredit home-based critics of the war as pushers of the German agenda (the communist accusations came much later).

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