It is public knowledge that in the run up to Sweden joining NATO, its government has set up a "Psychological Defense Agency". The British press quotes Henrik Landerholm (head of the PsyDA), as saying that "This is not the Ministry of Truth or a State Information Board like we had during the Cold War,' he said. 'We want to protect freedom of opinion in our country." That the public are told up front this new agency is not the Ministry of Truth speaks volumes.
Allegedly this Psychological Defense Agency was set up in order to counter "Russian Propaganda", the perennial boogey man of the paranoid Swedish political right. While it is correct to say that RT (Россия Сегодня) and Sputnik News are news agencies that disseminate Pro-Putin propaganda; the same can be said of Swedish State media and Swedish corporate press in their dissemination of propaganda that supports the Western narrative, as is the case with Fox News or the New York Times; which are instruments of American propaganda disguised as "objective news reporting".
Analysis of both how Western propaganda works, and of the political-economy of the infrastructure that supports Western propaganda; has been the subject of many studies. Most experts agree that the three main components of Western propaganda are : (1) narrative simplification, (2) cropping the picture and (3) pre-emptive negation.
Elsewhere in this weblog I have adressed cropping the picture (the main way Western media and Western State spokespersons lie) and narrative simplification (the manipulation of language to create a simplistic image of the situation in the mind of the target).
When Henrik Landerholm says that The Psychological Defense Agency "...is not the Ministry of Truth or a State Information Board like we had during the Cold War,...", he is engaging in classic pre-emptive negation; he is a priori negating potential objections to the simplified narrative he is trying to pitch in order to sell his agency as a harmless actor working to "protect freedom of opinion". If the political government of The Swedish State is so respectful of "freedom of opinion", then why are they so upset that 10% of Swedes look a Sputnik News? Are not the "opinions" of those Swedes to be respected the same as all others?
Clearly the Swedish State Psychological Defense Agency is engaged in classic "shaping of public opinion" here. This Western propaganda technique is as old a William Randolph Hearst who famously said : “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” in the run up to the Spanish American War of 1898.
The real purpose of the Swedish State Psychological Defense Agency to engineer matrixes of opinion contained inside an echo chamber of messages it controls and that are amplified in State and corprate media so as to distract attention and/or control behaviour. To control what can and cannot be said.
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| The Swedish public psychological propaganda agency portrays itself as an anti-psychological propaganda agency... |
Do not be fooled by sophisticated Swedish State propaganda. If you want REAL news analysis from inside Sweden that is NEITHER subservient to Western capitalist and United States imperialist interests, or that parrots Putin propaganda; look at the press of the Swedish revolutionary left:
