There is considerable buzz about a National Review cover that has an eerie similarity to old communist posters. No, it was not done on purpose. They did not deliberately copy the Soviet poster, they copied the style from the whole period. It is just that good propaganda techniques are good propaganda techniques, and they can be used by anyone. (Pam Dewey, the beloved editor here at the prophecy podcast, thinks the Soviet poster was used as a template by the artist.)
In fact, a movie I just saw about advertising, Branded, shows a display in Moscow where various luminaries wrote to Lenin about his marketing skills, and, according to the movie, Lenin’s marketing guys were in great demand in the West. There is something evocative about these old Soviet posters, and they were a reoccuring prop in the movie. While the founder of modern marketing is more correctly viewed as Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, it seems likely that Lenin was also present at modern marketing’s birth. I talk about Edward Bernays in a previous post.
In the movie, the power of advertising causes us as consumers to psychically empower the brands as monsters that feed off our energies, like the old Star Trek episode, "Day of the Dove." In this episode of Star Trek the alien feeds off negative emotions.
One interesting aspect is the obvious fact that fast food providers want us to be fat, as that means more sales. So the fast food industry gets together in the movie and tries to change the culture so that fat is cool.
Only Our Hero Can See The Brand Monsters From The IdWhile I cannot recommend that you pay $10 to go see it in the theaters…it is not doing well—at the 7 PM show there were just 4 of us in the audience…I can recommend that you wait and rent it on Netflix. Just close your eyes when the sex scene in the car occurs. I suppose such scenes are now mandatory in modern cinema.
(In an odd coincidence the climactic scene in the movie, a reenactment of the ancient Hebrew ceremony of the Red Heifer, takes place just outside of Tver, Russia, the city where I met my wife. I am very familiar with the area.)
To my eyes the National Review cover seems almost comical. Regardless of whom you vote for, or don’t vote for, do not be deceived by the propaganda of this election cycle. Whatever you do, do not feed the monsters of the Id that the movie Branded portrayed. If you believe the propaganda, you become a slave to it—which was of course, the whole point of the movie.