Why Is Propaganda Overrated

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George Orwell once said,"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." This simply means that by repeatedly telling a person that their understanding of history is flawed, he will believe you after a while. This is the power that propaganda has. Propaganda is defined as the selective providing of information to the masses, where this information is often biased to the interests of the propaganda makers, so as to alter the people views in their favour. . Finally, overrated is when the perception of something is not as good as it really is. To determine whether it was overrated, one must first find out its effectiveness. Effectiveness will be measured by polls, views of modern historians,…show more content…
The conventional argument is that propaganda was not overrated because it included rewards for the people if they did follow the propaganda. However, propaganda is not effective because it made people believe less in the system sometimes, by using fear and terror. However, the usage of De-Stalinization was effective in removing the influence of propaganda caused by Stalin, thus the propaganda was overrated, but today Stalin is being portrayed as a great leader in Russia by Vladimir Putin. USSr propaganda is seen as effective by many today because of the fact that it included rewards for the people. Historians argue that Stalin's propaganda was effective because it complete in giving the Russians a sense that their lives would be improved if they followed the propaganda. When a person persuaded into doing something, and is given a reward, they would work as hard as they can because they feel it is simply for their best. And there was no shortage in Stalin's part when stating the rewards of following the propaganda. As a result, the Russians worked hard…show more content…
After Stalin's reign, Khruschev took the reins of USSR. He began the programme of De-Stalinization, which sought to remove all Stalin-related influences. One example is the speech given by Khruschev titled 'On the Personality Cult and its consequences', where he announced that Stalin's ideas were in fact not aligned with that of communism all along. Khruschev said things like;"Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion", and "It is clear that here Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power."[7]This resulted in a shocked reaction from the people, where they then removed Stalin's body from Lenin's mausoleum. Such an occurrence shows that the propaganda was ineffective, because it failed to help him when another political leader revealed truths about him. If the propaganda was effective, the people would have still believed in Stalin despite the speech, and not done things like moving his body away from the Lenin mausoleum. Today, president Vladimir Putin is making use of Stalin as a form of propaganda. He promotes his own causes by relating their aims and goals to Stalin's own. This is effective because Russians still view Stalin as a great leader, as seen in a poll conducted in 2014, where 55% of Russians want
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