Can Truths be Lies?

 

"Crazy anti-vaxxers protesting outside 111 Bourke Street, Melbourne" by avlxyz is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

    Propaganda can be defined as the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols. What this means is the ability to have a collective amount of information and spread the ones that's most favorable regardless of how damaging. An example of this is let's say hypothetically speaking, Bob saved 30 people, but while doing so he let 3 die. A witness who holds a grudge against Bob spoke out and said “that guy murdered 3 people”. He would be saying the truth, but not the whole truth. There is a saying the best lies are the ones with the truth in them.

    A current example we see of blatant propaganda would be the way Donald Trump uses it. For total covid death count in the world, America is first with 252,000 deaths with Brazil second at 165,000. Covid affected America worse than any other country in the world and this looks bad for the president. So the way Trump undermines this is by stating that America has done the most testing then any other country which is why it looks like it's doing the worst. Even if America did the most testing (which it hasn't), there still wont be a correlation with the testing done and the death count. Trump understands the way America handled Corona was poor but he needs to save his public image so he uses propaganda to undermine the severity of the virus. 

Propaganda is a very powerful and dangerous way to spread information. From my own personal experience, the amount of flat earthers, anti maskers, anti-vaxxers I have witnessed is daunting. This probably sounds like I am stood on a high horse calling people naïve for their beliefs but that's not what I am trying to persuade. A belief system I live by, and I’m not saying it's perfect, is before I make an influential statement that can affect someone's belief/livelihood I make sure I am well informed on said topic.