The book I am talking about is “The Gulag Archipelago”

See the screenshot (marked text) first. If the book has the power to change your memories so you can’t distinguish between what you experienced and what you read, isn’t that basically manipulation?

I know that something similar is possible for example with altered photos of you childhood that can trick your memories of the time, for example some object that you were told to have but you didn’t.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    It confirms that, for the anti-communists, the historical facts are not what is actually important, it’s only the “feeling” they get when thinking about socialism that matters. That they not only try to convince others but even themselves to believe that things happened which never actually did, merely because it validates their emotions.

    This is indicative of cult-like social conditioning, in which you are told to reject even your own memories when they don’t confirm to the cult-endorsed narrative, and replace them with the fiction the cult tells you is what you actually experienced. Unfortunately this is a common phenomenon in post-socialist countries nowadays

    You will encounter people who lived through those times and who were perfectly happy at the time, but who have been so socially and psychologically pressured year after year to accept the narrative that communism was terrible and they were actually oppressed, that eventually they internalize this to a point that it changes their memories.

    It’s a form of mass psychological abuse.

  • optissima (she/her)@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Yeah that has very much so a “this added a narrative I like to my disconnected anecdotal experiences” which makes it easier to recall, warping the original memories. Christianity does this too, adding an easy narrative to the seemingly random suffering people go through.

  • big_spoon@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    2 months ago

    ackchually, it’s not propaganda if it talks about the evuls of gommunism…because they could have happened (and if they didn’t it doesn’t matter)

    • yunah-knowles@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      2 months ago

      Their TotallyTarian Propaganda: Women, men; all are welcome to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialism, the yoke of the bourgeioisie, and we must stay united in this effort: noone can embark alone on this journey.

      Other Equally Bad Evil TotallyTarian Propaganda: All Jews, all Browns, all Blacks, all lesser! Let every woman in your neighborhood become producers of the next pure Aryan nation!

      Our Pure Fact Based Narratives, Funded By Our Free State (the CIA): The last two are equally bad and maybe the first one’s worse, because imagine that guy was like, Hitler, like Stalin was,