You're touching on something interesting, which is the difference between political narrative and politics-as-action.
In politics, narratives are not true or false in the scientific sense. They're created purely for persuasive purposes, as expedient air cover used to justify social actions.
Factually the narratives may be completely true but selectively chosen, partially true and distorted, or even completely untrue.
The social actions - which can be horrific and impossible to justify on their own terms - are sold via narratives to disguise them and make them palatable, with the aim of increasing the power of the ruling group.
Signal is a superb example of creating a selective narrative by copying the style and tone of a successful publication to make it more credible and persuasive to its middle-European middlebrow target audience. Of course all the harsh racism was removed because that was the entire point.
Western academic Marxist theory, on the other hand, is a superb example of failing to understand narrative - which is ironic, because Critical Theory is supposed to be the best tool ever created for narrative analysis.
It isn't, because it doesn't understand its own politics, never mind the practically-oriented opinion management machinery of Capitalism, or the condescending cynical dishonesty of Far-Right Nationalism.
In reality it's intensely tribal and exclusive, and this makes it an incredibly soft and easy target for its enemies.
>In politics, narratives are not true or false in the scientific sense. They're created purely for persuasive purposes, as expedient air cover used to justify social actions. Factually the narratives may be completely true but selectively chosen, partially true and distorted, or even completely untrue.
The people ok with this are what the world religions typically define as Evil, which generally reduces not to violence, but to deception. From what I can tell on the interwebs, post-Marxist thinkers, particularly Gramsci and the social constructivists are the architects of this total deception as politics view.
Atheists may not percieve the difference between what they see as the One Big Delusion, vs. Everything is a Delusion and to them there is only power and solidarity, but the crux of this constructivist view of narrative is a belief that decieving others into committing violence is more politically legitimate than committing it onesself. As though deception were somehow a virtue. Deception is certainly powerful, but not virtuous, except to people who can't tell the difference.
The enemy propaganda in Signal was designed to establish the edges of a wedge to destabilize western social order and make it vulnerable to the chaos that totalitarian movements require for their atomizing hall-of-mirrors effect. Helpfully to them, we have all the ingredients of an unmoored society ready for liquidation. Such interesting times.
In politics, narratives are not true or false in the scientific sense. They're created purely for persuasive purposes, as expedient air cover used to justify social actions.
Factually the narratives may be completely true but selectively chosen, partially true and distorted, or even completely untrue.
The social actions - which can be horrific and impossible to justify on their own terms - are sold via narratives to disguise them and make them palatable, with the aim of increasing the power of the ruling group.
Signal is a superb example of creating a selective narrative by copying the style and tone of a successful publication to make it more credible and persuasive to its middle-European middlebrow target audience. Of course all the harsh racism was removed because that was the entire point.
Western academic Marxist theory, on the other hand, is a superb example of failing to understand narrative - which is ironic, because Critical Theory is supposed to be the best tool ever created for narrative analysis.
It isn't, because it doesn't understand its own politics, never mind the practically-oriented opinion management machinery of Capitalism, or the condescending cynical dishonesty of Far-Right Nationalism.
In reality it's intensely tribal and exclusive, and this makes it an incredibly soft and easy target for its enemies.