 Welcome to the show today, the politics for the people show. And I'm Stephanie stole Dalton. And our topic today which we're going to get right to is the role of propaganda in genocide. Today's guests are here and informed and eager to discuss this topic, and they are Jay Fidel. Welcome Jay. And Tim Apichella. Welcome Tim. We're getting right into it. I wanted to ask you Jay to define for us first just to clarify I'm sure most people know in general but would would you clarify what propaganda is and some of its sentiments false information intended to deceive people intended to change public opinion in a way that you want with lies. I mean, I think implicitly it's lies. It's misinformation misinformation for an intended purpose and intended. I'm sort of making this up intended to reach a lot of people I think that's another implication of it, reach a community, reach a population, reach the whole country. All right, the other question is related to that is about the title the topic and and so, Tim, can you tell me about genocide what what does that mean. Well, genocide is the intended slaughter of a race created or up peoples. I am known as spared it's the entire entire population within a country or countries that you're trying to extinguish religion race color creed. And it's obvious when you see it, and I think we are seeing it unfold in the Russians treatment of the Ukrainians as they advance and retreat from Ukraine. That's really helpful, Tim, and I'm going to switch back to Jay and ask him about the legality of the two terms first of all propaganda. Is that an ordinary enactment of free speech or a conversation or and does it is it lawful propaganda. The first amendment, the answer is, yes, it's lawful. You know, there are very few exceptions to the first amendment in this country, although the exceptions these days seem to be greater. In other countries if you use propaganda, you know, it may be very lawful or it may not be lawful at all, depending on who you are and what message you're sending free speech isn't treated the same way. Right, so there's a there's a little bit difference, but in general, depending on an ideology. If I say that Ukraine and Russia is a war. You know, in Russia, I go to jail for 15 years for saying that if I say it's just a military action. So you can see how free speeches treated differently in Russia. In the US there'd be no, you know, no limit to saying either one of those things that's a much different. And of course we even teach propaganda and disinformation and all of its variations are actually in the curriculum of the US schools because we all remember going through those and I can't tell you what's in the curriculum of the US schools anymore. I think that varies from state to state just as the books do from state to state so I have no level of confidence in what they teach in the US schools these days. That's a good point Jay thank you because it used to be the textbook organizations corporations that drove that but those are approved by the state. And now that's not even making a difference because as we've seen parents have to be involved but I would will tell me ask you about genocide. Is that legal. No. Anywhere. It's illegal until someone can identify and take the steps necessary to take it to the international courts and do something about it but no genocide is not legal. Is war legal. Yeah, I unfortunately it is what what a statement that is to say about the human species is as war is legal, but there's rules of war. I reminded that the, you know, you have the Geneva Convention that kind of a marker about what's legal and what's not legal and war. If I may just for a second get back to get back to the difference between propaganda and persuasion. The time when the term rhetoric was a positive term, believe it or not, and rhetoric is using the techniques and properties of persuasion to unify a population for the betterment of society, betterment of people's lives. That was the term and in use in ancient Greece. You know, back in the day where you used rhetoric to unify and to enhance and improve the society and people's lives. Now rhetoric is a dirty term. And the elevated and to elevate now so there's a difference between persuasive techniques that you use in speech and use at the podium and use to unify a population versus telltale science of propaganda. And the two are vastly different, but but you can mix and match and be very effective. And, you know, I have a list of things but we could talk about those later. Okay. All right, well, your list of things is welcome. I think okay the point is made about the ideology of the country and fluency not the use of propaganda and who uses it. And of course that the genocide is a sin, I think in most cultures but anyway, Jay talked to, can you talk to us about when, whether the US. Do you say genocide is a sin. I was saying that genocide, well can be considered a sin. Some countries that believe in it as a matter of religion. And that religious believe not only is it not a sin dictated by the religion. No, I don't know if it's true statement. I mean to answer that question genocide includes murder. It's murder on a large scale. I think most, most societies treat murder as, you know, a cardinal sin and a capital crime. Yeah. And the question is whether that changes if it's a quality a matter of state policy, a political murder, if you will, murder of a group and if, if the particular state is asking you to do that then certainly that state is not considering it murder. If the state is not asking you to do that then certainly the state would consider it murder. So I think, you know, it's very confused when you have a world in which some states want to have genocide. If a soldier goes to war and the war is an illegal war in that state. That's, that's murder. If, if he's if the state is saying that we don't want you to go to war. We want you to go to war. He wants you to kill Ukrainians. That's not murder. That's war. And as Tim said, you know, that's, that's not illegal. And genocide, of course, is an extension of war war against the people it's killing people. And the question then is who is going to, you know, we were talking about this the other day who was going to say that it's genocide rather than war. And is genocide illegal. Well, I don't, I don't think you find it in the state statutes of Ohio that genocide is illegal. You might find terrorism is illegal or terrorists threatening is illegal or murder is illegal but you wouldn't find a reference to genocide. I doubt that most countries have a statute that prohibits genocide. It's international law, the law of nations that prohibit genocide, but it's, you know, frankly getting pretty sloppy these days. I was going to ask when it's illegal, when it's not illegal, and whether an international law that might prohibit it as war crimes and the like, whether they're in place and enforceable, or whether a country like Russia can get away with it. So I was going to ask about the law of war, which, which you're referring to I think in international law but they are two distinct areas that the law of war, and does genocide. And I don't know that much about the law of war I don't know any of us do but do do you understand or sense that the genocide is unlawful within the law of war so is that perhaps a line, a red line or tipping point, the issue of the the the act of genocide or what can be seen as I don't I can't speak to international law for reasons one is I it's very hard to find it these days. And the second it's just not clear in any event I guess, and also that you know it's not being enforced in the same way that it was before. So, I don't know if that question helps us deal with the title of the show, which is the role of propaganda in genocide, and the vulnerabilities of the human condition that would allow people to be subject to invulnerable to propaganda, and to make them believe on the basis of propaganda that genocide is okay. And I was trying to to push around on those terms to see where there's overlap, or if there was a clear distinction. And of course you're bringing up the point that there's not, and there are many factors involved in that and it's quite confusing. And here we are again in another circumstance where there's enormous propaganda going on and disinformation and also potentially or possibly a genocide. And I was just going to try and, you know, separate things out so we can take one over the other. But I don't, I don't know. Yeah, let's look at what Putin is doing to try to cover up, not only genocide, but the initial war crimes again crimes against humanity. You know, Putin has done the classic things that you often see in propaganda. What's that control the media eliminate any criticism so you control the media stop the criticism stop the newspaper stop the radio. He enacted specific crimes against the the the Russian population from saying war or invasion, or 15 year terms of imprisonment potentially for saying these words. So you're number one you're trying to control the message that's that's a clear sign of propaganda. Number two, you're trying to instill fear. Well he's doing that with 15 year sentences that would get my attention of I was a Russian citizen. Number three is he's one of the, and we saw this Donald Trump, the big lie, you're putting the big lie out there what's the big lie, I have to liberate Ukraine to free the Russian people from Nazis. What's the big lie. And then what do you do with the big lie. Well, as we saw in the Trump administration, you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Also, simplicity slogans the use of a truncated sentence over and over again, so that the human psyche can absorb it. Remember it, and then ingest it. And then it becomes part of their vocabulary. Other things that you have is the appeal to the individuals prejudice, human beings as a sort of prejudice, their prejudice. And if you could tap into that prejudice and amplify it and repeat it and make them agree that they're not wrong in being prejudice. And it's no longer prejudice it's the way things should be that propaganda that's, that's beautifully done by Trump and I Putin, the prejudice of the Ukrainian, the Ukrainian government to abuse Russians. Exaggeration where did we see that the Trump administration, the use of exaggeration. Well, so is Putin Putin. Exaggerating the, the effectiveness of the Russian people, the Russian military, and they're, they're, they're doing great things in Ukraine. He's not going to talk about the 15,000 potentially Russian soldiers that have now been killed in this invasion of his. So there's a whole litany, a whole list of things that Putin is using to basically get away with crimes against humanity and in now this case genocide. Now, well, you know, that's very, very helpful. Tim and Jay, let's go over to the human frailty part of it and the social psychology. What, why are, what, what is it in the human that makes them vulnerable to this kind of question of the day. It's the question of the millennia. For example, arguably religion itself is propaganda. Religion makes makes mythology up and that and that people and that people buy into it on a large scale. And it takes them out of rationality, and it motivates them to do things they wouldn't do. And it is not necessarily moral at all. And so, you know, if you look through history, I'm sure there's there are experts about this, you will find that propaganda and all those techniques that Tim was talking about work. They work. They work. They work over years and years and years. They work for thousands of years in the human condition in one form or the other. And so this is not new that vulnerability is a social psych psychological vulnerability. And it's sorry to say it's here to stay. And the only question is whether the people who understand it, like Putin, and like Trump, whether they will continue to use it for malicious purposes. I think I think that that Putin is really clever in what he has done. I think Hitler was really clever. You take a demagogue and you give him these tools, you give him this understanding of how he can lie to people and get away with it. You give him the, you know, the completely amoral mission of genocide. And you tell him use the tools to achieve genocide. It's doable. You know, they say never again. I guarantee it's going to happen again. It's part of the human condition as much as the way ants make an anthill. We are vulnerable to all of that. And even if we swear off it after a particularly horrible historical experience, it'll be back. It'll happen again. I can't give you a good answer on how to prevent against it. Propaganda is like a verbal induction of hypnotic effect. And I've been hypnotized for entertainment back in college days, it was always fun to go to Belonte, and he would have an audience of 150 people and oh you learn how to collect like a chicken and all sorts of stuff you would do on stage. But I could describe the effect of hypnosis. It feels like a severe compulsion and a loss of social inhibition. You take those two and you kind of make a little patty cake out of it. And that's the effect of hypnosis. But here's the thing. You have to be willing to be hypnotized. And like propaganda, you've got to be willing to say, well, that actually makes sense. And there's something about the human species that shouldn't be allowed to be hypnotized and do things that you would never even think about doing, but you do it. And that is the flaw of the human species and there is no fix for that. But there is a fix to say, when I see these, these symptoms of propaganda, which I now call verbal hypnosis. When I see the symptoms of this propaganda, my red flag should go up and go warning. Someone is trying to hypnotize me while I'm awake. Well, that is a good bit of information on the experience that you've had, Tim, but what about the perpetrator? Let's talk about the perpetrator of this verbal, what are you calling that, verbal hypnosis? I call it verbal induction of hypnosis. Verbal induction. So, all right, so we have people vulnerable due to human frailty to this kind of assault on their mind. Then what about the people who assault them? So, Jay, how does the person that does this to others who is a propagandist who is presenting out disinformation? How did they figure this out? Where did they learn this? What can you say in respect to the people we know that who do it now too? Well, I think Putin is a clever guy. I think Stalin was a clever guy. If you have ultimate power and you see the way people react to your instructions, you learn. You learn on the job, but maybe you also read some books like Mein Kampf and you see how people do it and repeats itself. It repeats itself with all these autocrats and tyrants. I'm sure there are experts on how this works and how you learn it and how you do it. I'd like to say that in Russia, they got a long history of doing this. They know how to do mind games. They know how to change you in prison. They know how to make you buy into something. Using fear and Applebaum wrote about it in the Atlantic and Washington Post. They know how to change your mind. It's done with fear. Sometimes it's done with torture. You know, there's this whole thing about torture never really works. Well, yes, it does. Torture can change your mind. If I put you in the bowels of Ljubljanka prison and I try to change your mind, I will be able to do that. One of the most interesting books was Darkness at Noon by Arthur Kessler. We talked about the techniques in Ljubljanka prison. And one of the things that this maybe goes to what Tim was getting at, one of the things that the Russians did in the dark days of Ljubljanka prison and Cold War. Do we need to warn the viewers of an upcoming atrocity? No. One of the things that they would do is they would ask you over and over again for your name. They would ask you to identify and define yourself. And the implication was not that they wanted to know your name. They knew your name. They wanted you to question whether that was really your name. They wanted you to question whether that was really you. They wanted to depersonalize you. I think that is, if we had a psychologist here, it would be an interesting question to pose to that psychologist. That is, if I depersonalize you, maybe I'm going down this path of induction that Tim is talking about. I think it's a whole bunch of things in the human psychology that make us vulnerable to what was happening in Ljubljanka prison and can change our minds. Depersonalizing someone is how you commit atrocities and genocide. You're not killing human beings. You're killing an entity. Okay, but my question is, how is it that the learning occurs to do this? For example, I mean, there's modeling. Okay, so we have Hitler installing for Putin. I don't know that Trump was, that Trump was. It's out there, Stephanie. If you want to learn it, you could read books. You could try it out. You know, it's trial and error. If I give you a population, do I put you in charge? Let's see what you can do with them, Stephanie. Let's see if you can change their mind to really like you or dislike someone else or get into a war even though it's not, you know, not a good idea. Or to do some genocide or war crimes even though it's not a good idea. You could test it out, trial and error, and Stephanie Stoltolten, as nice a person as she is, could learn it. Tim could learn it. I can learn it. I have to learn it. Tim chooses not to learn it, and you choose not to learn it, but any of us can learn it, and any of us can do it. I choose not to practice it. I've learned it. Tim, that is the case, and we're all familiar with the novels and the documentaries, and we know that this happens. So what we're talking about, Tim, I'm sorry, it's not documentaries, it's what we just lived through the last five years of this administration, the Trump administration. So countless and countless examples of techniques of propaganda. I don't need a documentary. I lived it. I watched it for four years. Will you agree with me that you have to be pathological to spend the time to learn it and exercise it? Well, the really good ones are pathological. Tim, what I want to ask about is Trump and how he learned this, not being a history student or anything like that. That's true that one of the girlfriends said he always, or his former wife, said that he had the mind comp on his night table. Now, but Trump is not a reader. So what is it that he did to attain such an expertise in it? In other words, he did spend time in Russia. What was he doing over there? You know, Trump has been doing techniques of propaganda all his life since he was a child. Listen to his niece. She did well in interviews to describe Trump growing up and all the techniques that he would do to manipulate people were other forms of propaganda. He didn't go to the school of Russia. He didn't read mind comp to learn the dark art of propaganda. What he did was been practicing and then he honed his own experiences into a finer, finer dark art. So what you're saying is this is a man born with it. And so we might suspect that this is the case with Stalin. And as I've mentioned before, you know, there's Roman emperors and people come out with these streets. There's propagandists and there's those propagandists who are really, really good at it. And I would argue that that Putin and Trump are really great, great propagandists. Well, if you want to have a pathological person. Yes, we both do. Avenue is loaded with good propaganda. You can take a very innocent and get them to you. Yes. You can sell soap or you can sell murder. That's right. To sell murder, you have to be a bit of a pathological person. Another important question. And let's go over to, um, let's Jay, how about this? How do you stop it? Well, you know, how do you stop a pathological person is more like the question. They're a leader. I'm not, I'm not sure that we want to talk about how you stop Madison. Have you selling soap? No, we want to, we want to stop a pathological person who has these skills to convince people of things that are not true. Um, and, and, and use those skills to conduct genocide or the Holocaust or whatever you call what Stalin did or what Mao did in China. I know 60 million people died in China because of Mao and so forth. I mean, you know, history is populated. Just loaded with it way back when with, with the propaganda that turned into genocide. How do you stop it is, is a very hard question, especially with nuclear weapons, which, which make, you know, which make the stakes so high. And it's really a question of how you stop a pathological person. And, and I think the answer is, you know, in the practice of law, you'll deal with them in writing. Interesting. You know, can I have a crack at that one, Stephanie? The same question. You might have a crack at it. Well, you're right. You're next after Jay, Jay, Jay was that's a very good point. Jay just made about right. Well, it's, you know, it's health psychology. It's primitive psychology. How do you deal with a kid who is, you know, a problem kid who would like to burn the house down, who might do do exactly that. Burn the house down. You have to put limits on it. You have to say, you know, Obama's red line didn't work, but you have to say can't do that. And if you do that, there are sanctions on you. And I don't mean the kind of sanctions that the US have been doing on Putin. But your point was also made if you did that these people are this way from childhood, so that there might be some ways to be able to see it popping up in childhood. But let's go on to Tim as the month the time is going. Yeah, you know, Stephanie, you actually alluded to it, you said you made an assumption and Jay kind of refuted that assumption and that was, oh, we learn about propaganda in school. So your question is, how do we stop it? How do we stop propaganda, and it's education to recognize it when it occurs as it occurs. And in the case of the Trump administration, I think the media tried to, although late, try to identify techniques of propaganda and what he was doing, and how he was doing it. But that's not enough, because then part of propaganda was Trump was saying that's fake news. Every time that the news is calling him out on propaganda, you just say, I'll discredit the news and I'll call it fake news. And that worked. So the real answer is each citizen has to understand and know when propaganda is being conducted and recognize it and say, I'm not falling for that. So it's education. Sorry, but stay up on Kern's events so that when a propaganda starts to lie to you, you go, I don't think that's true. And then, of course, to stop a propagandist when they crossed the line is enforce the rule of law you have on the books. And if you don't have them on the books, make some laws to stop a propagandist in his tracks. Very good. So you're making the law up just like the propagandist makes up. We're trying to do about the Electoral College. We're trying to amend that now so a propagandist would be autocrat can't use game the system and convince the nation that he's not gaming the system. Okay, one more comment each so we're out of time so Jay can you give us a brief comment to sum this up as to propaganda and to the what well is about the genocide to. Okay. I don't think we've even scratched the surface on this. I'm not, not a chance. This is a very, a very important subject and maybe we should schedule it again. Because because this has not been a deep dive into either the causes or effects or the solutions to the problem. Okay. Jim. I'll just conclude by saying right now, the world. Not just not just the Russians because the Russians are the the subject of propaganda and the lack of information and free press, but the world needs to recognize the propaganda and say no definitively no and start taking active measures to stop. But what Putin is trying to do is whitewash a genocide. And, you know, if that means more harsh military actions and support from NATO and the United States. So be it. This monster needs to be stopped and stopped now. Final comment very good Tim. All right, we are out of time at this point and I'm, I'm your host for this show, the politics for the people I'm Stephanie snow Dalton, and I think Jay find out and Tim up cell for discussing a very complicated set of issues that we barely scratch the surface on, but we are living very deeply within. So thank you. Mahalo and Aloha everyone. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at think tech Hawaii.com. Mahalo.