 Readers of
the Forces pages will be quite familiar with the campaign of denormalizing
smoking and smokers. It applies a great many techniques, and I will focus my
attention on a specific one.
Propaganda
takes on many forms. The best results are of course achieved if the recipient of
propaganda does not realize that he is being targeted. We shall zoom in on a
specific piece of propaganda that employs exactly this technique.
In the UK,
the National Health Service has launched a hailstorm of advertisements against
smokers. One of them is a short film (commercial) with a ”boy meets girl - girl
smokes and is shunned by boy because she stinks” content.
View it here if you please.
Now what is
exactly going on here? On face value, the commercial is pretending to tell
smokers that their habit makes them 'stink'. Let us consider who is going to
watch this commercial. Since the smoking rate in the UK is around 25 %, we
conclude that 75 % of the audience is going to be non-smokers. Think about
this carefully, and you will begin to realize that the non-smokers are the
primary recipients of this piece of propaganda.
The
non-smokers who view this anti smoking propaganda are being conditioned, or
programmed if you will, to react in a certain way to smokers. They are being
programmed to notice the smell that some smokers have, and shun away from it.
All of this conditioning takes place without non-smokers noticing.
Why?
Because the
commercial pretends to target smokers, the non-smokers who watch it are
unaware that they are being programmed to becoming smoker haters. And that makes
them more receptive to the propaganda loading. That's the whole idea.
The purpose
of all propaganda is to coerce men to act according to the wishes of the
propagandists. The propagandists behind the UK 'smokers stink commercial' want
to coerce non-smokers into hating those of their fellow human beings who smoke
tobacco. The reasoning is, of course, that this hate will eventually cow smokers
into quitting. The non-smokers are being commandeered into the war on smokers,
like so many pawns on a chess board.
Now we can
understand a lot of stuff going on with smoking and smoking related topics.
Warning labels on cigarette packs are printed with large types, so that
non-smokers can read them. Non-smokers will conclude that smokers must be crazy
to smoke, which is the whole idea! The promotion of fire-safe cigarettes
pretends to be a safety measure, but is in fact a propagandistic measure to
exhibit smokers as mass murderers. You can continue the list endlessly. All you
need to realize is that smokers have long since become immune to anti smoking
propaganda. But their non-smoking fellow human beings have not, because they do
not even realize that they are being propagandized.
Yes, the
anti smoking crusade relies on the most sinister and dark sides of human nature.
Much more so than meets
the untrained eye. |
