Stubble wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 3:10 pm
When the vans turn into homicidal gas vans or the steam chambers turn into homicidal vacuum chambers or homicidal gas chambers, that's the propaganda. It's misinformation, not malinformation. That's what I would call black propaganda. Like the dead babies thrown out of incubators or weapons of mass destruction propaganda. There was no real basis for it. I'm not saying that Kuwait didn't have a nicu, I'm saying Iraqi troops didn't throw premature infants on the cold floor and leave them to die.
No, black propaganda has a very precise definition, which does not fit the Kuwait incubators example since that came from a Kuwaiti testifying to the US Congress, not from a purported Iraqi government source.
Black propaganda must be passed off as coming from the opposition, end of story. In WWII this was exemplified by Sefton Delmer's Soldatensender Calais, a British run radio station purporting to be a German military radio station in France.
Fake leaflets and fake posters were also used - the Polish underground used these against German troops in occupied Poland. Some of this verged on the humorous, to post up placards mimicking German ordinances with different content.
Attributing a report to a named opposition source (newspaper) even if first publicising it in your own media would verge on black propaganda, but technically still isn't (it is misinformation). One needs to have fully attributed the medium to the other side - which can of course include the famous postage stamps of Himmler put into circulation, these were clearly being purported as proper German stamps
A defector would not count as black propaganda: if someone defects from a country or from one political party to another, they are now speaking out because they switched sides.
A prisoner interrogation isn't black propaganda
A captured document isn't black propaganda.
Roosevelt presented a false map in 1941 supposedly proving Nazi designs on Latin America. That, too, isn't black propaganda because *Roosevelt* presented it, the provenance wasn't from a Nazi mouthpiece.
Note that this example as well as the Kuwaiti incubators testimony shows one can still call out false propaganda and misinformation.
Disinformation in the Soviet KGB sense of
dezinformatsiia tended to be grey propaganda, laundered through non-Soviet mouthpieces.
Neither black propaganda nor disinformation apply to the Holocaust, I'm afraid, since the wartime reports were openly attributable to specific mouthpieces, i.e. the Polish underground, Polish Jewish underground and Soviet underground going to governments (in exile) and NGOs, and were accompanied by numerous other reports through diplomatic, intelligence and religious channels, plus masses of letters, diaries and manuscripts which were not publicised at all.
Since Chelmno was the first reported with gas via gas vans, the fuss over steam chambers is especially stupid, apparently a well thought out 'propaganda' campaign was derailed because of misperceptions and misdescriptions. Occam's razor implies that early reports of steam were simply accounts from a greater distance or less time learning that the gas chambers at Treblinka operated with engine exhaust, since steam
is a gas. The contrary claim that these were 'only' disinfection chambers and that hundreds of thousands of deportees went somewhere else is a more convoluted explanation and lacks corroboration, while failing to account for all other aspects of the reports from Treblinka fugitives mentioning steam, or the other reports from other fugitives which were clearer about gas.
As much as you might like the extra sinister sound of 'black propaganda', please don't be as mentally crippled as Mattogno and stop misusing the term.
