BBC Dokumentation: USA Propagandafilme aus Zeiten des kalten Krieges
The Silent War Know Your Enemy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvC7xe0EYxs
The Silent War The Russians Are Coming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK7nPMcD-DA
Chinesischer Propagandafilm 2013: Silent Contest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_8lSjcoSW8
Zitat:
Strident Video by Chinese Military Casts U.S. as Menace
The New York Times Blog / Sinosphere / October 31, 2013
A conspiracy-minded 100-minute film produced by the Chinese military that was circulating widely on the Internet Thursday accuses the United States of trying to undermine the Communist Party’s control of the People’s Liberation Army and impose American values on China. Among the American tactics decried in the film are military-to-military exchanges, which Washington has long promoted to improve communications in the event of a crisis. The video, complete with ominous soundtrack, warns instead that such visits are intended to corrupt Chinese officers.
The strikingly hard-line film, titled “Silent Contest” (较量无声), also takes aim at Western nongovernmental organizations, the American and British consulates in Hong Kong, and prominent reformers inside China. It accuses Washington of sponsoring exiled minority leaders such as the Dalai Lama and the Uighur dissident Rebiya Kadeer.
It is not clear if the video was intentionally released online or somehow leaked, but it began disappearing from Chinese websites on Thursday night. Its heavy ideological content and propaganda style suggest it may have been produced to support the work of the military’s political commissars, who are charged with the ideological indoctrination of troops and maintaining their morale, discipline and loyalty. As such, the film appears to offer a remarkably straightforward glimpse into the Cold War mind-set of the Chinese military leadership, as well as the deep suspicions of the United States festering inside one of the most influential institutions in the Chinese political system.
Cutting from crude graphics of American dollar bills to standard shots of the Statue of Liberty to blurry footage of American leaders from George Washington to President Obama, the video bemoans the fall of the Soviet Union and warns that China faces a similar fate if it fails to counter Washington’s nefarious efforts to infiltrate Chinese society.
The General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army is listed as a producer of the film, along with the army’s National Defense University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The university’s president, Wang Xibin, a lieutenant general, appears on camera describing how the United States grooms “friendly forces, so-called democratic forces,” inside China and on the “exterior goes against the party’s absolute control of the army.” He also criticizes visits by American and Chinese military officials to the other’s country, saying that the exchanges will increasingly be used by the United States for “infiltration.”
“We have to take careful precaution and look out for the smallest detail, and build a strong political and ideological line of defense,” General Wang says.
The United States has long urged reluctant Chinese leaders to increase the number of military exchanges, arguing that such visits yield transparency and trust. In recent months, several top Pentagon officers have traveled to China or hosted visits by their Chinese counterparts, a flurry that Washington has described as progress.
“Silent Contest,” produced by the Chinese military, began disappearing from Chinese video-sharing sites on Thursday night, but a copy remained on YouTube. The version of the film available online Thursday was undated, but it contained footage of President Xi Jinping after he took office in March. It makes no mention of Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor with the National Security Agency whose leaks in June about the scale of Washington’s global surveillance presented the Chinese with a propaganda windfall. The video singles out villains in both China and the United States.
In China, nearly a dozen people — scholars, lawyers, disgraced military personnel and dismissed journalists — are accused of having been compromised by the United States. In some cases, lines in their writings are shown and underlined for emphasis. Among those tarred are Mao Yushi, 84, a liberal economist who was awarded the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty at a ceremony in Washington last year, and He Weifang, a prominent law professor at Peking University and an advocate for judicial reform.
On the American side, the video goes after nongovernmental organizations, including the Carter Center, the Asia Foundation, the International Republican Institute and the Ford Foundation. “Nongovernmental organizations are the soft tentacles of Western countries displaying the will of their nation,” the narrator intones. The Fulbright program, which has promoted cultural exchanges between the United States and other countries since the late 1940s, is called an instrument for “America’s cultural invasion.”
The video takes exception to local officials who visited the United States in 2004 to look at the election process as guests of the Carter Center, complaining that the participants were part of “a very meticulous plan” for what the Americans wanted to achieve in China. Sounding alarmed, the narrator points out that one official returned from the visit and wrote a blog post arguing that elections were the legitimate way for a government to gain power in a country.
The film depicts the United States and British consulates in Hong Kong as nests of spies, without actually using the word. “A lot of information suggests that the functions of the two consulates extend to more than what is described on paper,” the narrator says, noting that the consulates together employ more than 900 staff members and accusing them of supporting “subversive” pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Beijing had no comment on the film.
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/...ype=blogs&_r=0
Zitat:
"Silent Contest”: Liu Yazhou’s warmed-over McCarthyism
southseaconversations / November 4th 2013
he latest “leaked” video from the PLA, and its subsequent deletion from the Mainland Chinese internet, has the western China watching community grasping for explanations. Leftist battle-cry ahead of a rightist Third Plenum? Harbinger of an assertive turn in China’s US policy? A glimpse of what the PLA really thinks? My humble addition to this motley list is: powerful statement of self-importance by the CCP-PLA propaganda apparatus?
The video itself is really quite a masterpiece in my view, produced by a master of political warfare, PLA National Defense University Political Commissar Liu Yazhou. It details how America is waging a smokeless war of “political genetic modification” against China, utilizing the permeation (渗透) and “peaceful evolution” strategy that brought down the Soviet Union.
This is far from a radical new attack on America; it elucidates a longstanding politically correct view of US-China relations. For evidence we need only look to the words of the last two Chairmen, Hu and Xi, who have both repeatedly raised the issue of “hostile western forces” trying to undermine CCP rule. The carefully rehearsed on-camera comments from the leaders of important CCP organs including the directors of the MFA and MSS think tanks and CASS, as well as General Liu Yazhou himself, are further testimony to the mainstream nature of the tale being told.
Silent Contest*weaves together striking archival footage and quotes a wild array of personages — from US Presidents to Sarah Palin’s foreign policy adviser,*from turn-of-the-century Iowan educators to Joseph Nye — in the skillful and dramatic style familiar to viewers of Adam Curtis documentaries. Background music alternates between Jaws-style terror (when US things are on-screen) and the shining hope of twinkly pianos (China/CCP).
The highlight for me was the “Ten Commandments (十条戒令)” that the film claims were “added to the China section of a CIA operations handbook during the Clinton Administration”. The list, discussed from 17.25 onwards in Part II, includes:
Using material things to lure their young people, encourage them to despise their leaders and oppose what they have been taught;
Do propaganda work well (做好宣传工作), including TV, movies, books and radio broadcasts to make them desire our things, our forms of entertainment etc., as this will be halfway to success;
Direct young people’s attention towards sports, pornographic books, entertainment, games, crime films, and religious superstition;
Create contradictions and division between ethnicities;
Continuously create news to uglify 丑化 their leaders;
Use all resources to destroy China’s traditional values, exterminate and destroy their self-respect and self-confidence, and attack their hardy spirit…
No one would deny that there are anti-China forces in the US, and understandably from the CCP’s perspective this includes pro-democracy and human rights groups. But this shockingly ruthless “policy” actually turns out be a hilarious fraud: a bit of googling and baiduing reveals it to be essentially the same spurious list circulated by US conservatives in 1946 to smear communists. (This would explain the deep concern with*”pornographic books 色情书籍”). I would like to think the PLA producers of the documentary are enjoying the delicious irony of using warmed-over McCarthyite hysteria against the US in 2013. More likely though, they just ripped it from the Chinese internet, where it has circulated freely in BBS forums for years (e.g. here).
The film’s most important point is to stress the importance of guarding against ideological infiltration as the reform and opening policies continue (and perhaps deepen after this month’s Third Plenum). It does not oppose reform and opening — in fact, on the contrary, it praises it lavishly. So it’s not an attack from the far left, or from a hardline faction, aimed at influencing upcoming major policy decisions.
The most heavily stressed line was this one:
This [USSR collapse] occurred after the end of the Cold War, not before. This is a detail that absolutely must not be overlooked or misread.
That is to say, the USSR collapsed because the Soviet Communist Party stopped fighting. At its core, then, this is a statement of the need for ongoing political warfare, particularly defensive indoctrination.*Above all, it stands as a restatement of the importance of ideology — a message that the CCP-PLA propaganda authorities, of course, have a vested interest in maintaining, since it not only elevates their own importance, it is their reason for existence.
The appearance of the film online raises the question of the likely target audience. The dramatic visuals, music score, and narration style make it look and feel like it’s intended for a mass audience. In China, however, there are many mass audiences, so this could include:
the PLA’s military masses
the masses of CCP cadres
the broad masses (online)
Given that it sat online for at least four days,*I suspect the answer is all of the above. The film was made in June this year, and based on its numerous references to “Chinese Communist Party members”, cautionary tales such as the one about the city-level People’s Congress Standing Committee member who went on an trip to the US to observe the 2000 election and came back praising American democracy and media,*and the arguments it makes about the importance of officials maintaining ideological vigilance, it may have been made to be circulated around to low and mid-level CCP officials.
[UPDATE: a post on a certain email list which im not supposed to see suggests an alternative hypothesis that to me seems more likely, namely, that Silent Contest was made for the increasing numbers of the PLA officers engaging in military-to-military contacts with the US military.]
I don’t buy the notion that it’s a genuine “leak” — meaning someone released it without authorization. It was deleted on October 31, after it had sat online for at least 4 days (and probably longer). But the CCP propaganda authorities have shown they are capable of ordering the removal of content they don’t wish to be there in a matter of minutes. Discussion and searching online has not shown much sign of censorship even now, after the video was deleted from almost everywhere except, of course, YouTube. Then there’s the fact that in general, the CCP just doesn’t leak, presumably because it would be difficult to do without getting caught, given the PRC authorities’ easy access to internet company records information.
http://southseaconversations.wordpre...r-mccarthyism/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5HaFeEgj00
Zitat:
Propaganda Documentary Silent Contest Deleted
The online release of the purported documentary film
"Silent Contest", produced by the Chinese military,
has been the cause of much controversy.
However, a few days after its release, the film has been
blocked by Chinese mainstream media for unclear reasons,
leading many speculate about the cause.
Some analysts say that it's pressure from strong divisions
among senior levels of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP)
that led the Propaganda Ministry to order that
the video be removed.
Some say that the movie is confidential,
and can only be watched within the military organs.
Without the approval, it cannot be played in the public.
The public say the movie is too absurd, or is even a joke, and
the CCP quickly made it disappear in an attempt to save face.
The Chinese military's National Defense University,
the General Political Security and General Staff Departments,
the Chinese Academy of Social Science and China Institutes
of Contemporary International Relations jointly
launched the film "Silent Contest".
The movie was circulated widely for a few days
and then deleted from the mainstream websites.
It aroused public speculation.
Some analysts say that it resulted from
the CCP's internal struggles.
Some people say that the movie was leaked out
"accidentally" by the military.
The most widespread opinion is that the content of the movie
led to negative public opinion and questioning of the CCP,
forcing the Propaganda Department issues an order to remove
the video from the public arena.
The over 90-minute film has stirred up waves online.
The content has been badly criticized.
Some people described it as "brain-dead", "ridiculous",
"absurd" and "wacko".
Some people even picked up on several typos,
saying that the producer is ironic.
Some netizens call the movie as a comedy masterpiece.
The movie used extremely pointed rhetoric
reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
It says that China is being completely infiltrated and
subverted by the US.
The film also classified China's complicated social conflicts,
the CCP officials' corruption, human rights protests,
the spread of Christianity, and people's urging for the launch
of a constitutional government, as a U.S. infiltration conspiracy.
The film condemns the U.S. for allegedly using the means of
bribery and threats to incite Chinese scholars to defect.
The film also says all the mainstream liberal intellectuals
in the society are political traitors, and that these intellectuals
openly published their opinions to oppose the CCP and betray
the country in service of Western interests groups.
Names and photos of well-known Chinese scholars including
Mao Yushi, He Weifang and Xie Yeliang were shown in the film,
provoking dissatisfaction from many intellectuals.
Jing Chu, Guangxi-based internet writer: "These arguments
were likely created by Maoist-leftists.
As they know nothing about democratic values.
They are lying when they claim Chinese officials' corruption
and the people's anger are provoked by the U.S.
Maybe they think they can resolve the country's problems
by shifting them onto the U.S."
A netizen says that the U.S. hopes China can
peacefully enter democracy because undemocratic countries,
like North Korea, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany,
and Japan in the past, all caused serious inhumane disasters.
This netizen suggests Mao Yushi and He Weifang to
sue the film-makers of Silent Contest.
He Weifang, Professor at Law School
of Peking University responded.
He said that a wise nation definitely knows which values
and ideas are really good for them.
He says the wiser just laugh at the groundless claims.
He Weifang says that the Silent Contest is full of Cold War
rhetoric and words meant to incite people.
It demonizes people's expression
of their pursuit for freedom and democracy.
He also says it's extremely ridiculous that the film tells
people that the CCP's corruption, which caused is by lacking
of democratic law, was caused by a U.S. conspiracy.
Not only domestic public opinion, but also foreign news media
questioned Silent Contest.
BBC cited the New York Times saying that "it is not clear if
the video was intentionally released online or somehow leaked."
Radio France Internationale (RFI) says the film's most bogus
claim is that the U.S. subverts the Chinese regime
with the "10 Commandments".
RFI cited a netizen who said that the things spoken of by
the film's narrator cannot be found online,
and can only be seen as a joke and a waste of public money.