The magpie barks propaganda: How to read partisan blogs 5

By MALAYSIAN HEART

For this fifth instalment of HTRPB, we'll be looking at a post by blogger Pasquale of Barking Magpie. In the past, he has posted entries titled "When will the Malays learn!!! The Chinese will and can never share power once they ARE in power!", and "CPM stands for Chinese Party of Malaya and they failed to form a Chinese entity in Malaya...cept for Penang!". The post we will be looking at is more recent, and titled "A short note on Anwar Ibrahim by a commenter using the handle "Deacon1957".

In it, Pasquale reproduces in its entirety a comment left at his blog, which accuses Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim (DSAI) (inter alia) of being:

A CIA agent working to destabilise Malaysia;
Responsible (through "his Indonesian network") for the current Indonesian "hatred for Malaysia"; and

Of working to "discredit traditional Islam and plant one of two of America's version of Islam in all Islamic states..."
If the commenter (or Pasquale himself) had any evidence for these accusations, it was not shared there. What I want to focus on are the propaganda techniques used by Pasquale when he uses a photograph to reinforce the accusations against DSAI.

The above photograph is placed at the beginning of the article, captioned as follows:

Flanked by former US President George Bush's most right wing Jewish-Zionist American cabinet members (Cohen and Wolfowitz), and the man in the middle will sell his soul (or already sold) to the Devil, and already betrayed the Malays and will betrayed his mother, and at all cost, even destroying the country just he thinks he can be the next PM! This picture was taken in 1997 in Penang.

What we see here is a classic example of propaganda, i.e.:

"...communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda." (bold emphasis mine)

In just this photograph and its caption alone, Pasquale has managed to use the following propaganda techniques:

Reductio ad Hitlerum (in this case, ad Bushum)
Labelling
Appeal to prejudice
Big lie
Half-truths
Transfer
Name-calling
Appeal to fear

Let's see where and how he uses them. First, Reductio ad Hitlerum:

Read more at: http://malaysianheart.blogspot.com/2009/09/magpie-barks-propaganda-how-to-read.html