Internet propaganda warfare

Sabine claims to be a 40-year old woman from Australia (according to her YouTube profile). She claims to have received the video from a couple of North Korean defectors while she was in South Korea (she suspect the ''defectors'' were actually working for North Korea). They apparently gave her the video on the condition that she would translate it and put it to distribution over the internet. Sabine claims that she suspects that the video was not made for use in North Korea but directed towards western people. However it’s very unclear who this Sabine is. And the makers of the video itself are also left to guesses.

That's all the information we have to go by.

It’s an astonishing video. The objective of the video appears to be to criticize the western countries use of propaganda. Using utterly strong wordings calling the western people ‘’consumer slaves’’. A long lasting theme in the video is to attack corporative industry and western governments. Questioning whether corporations have too much power through ‘the control of mass media’. They are also using a few political science theories such as ‘’the clash of the civilizations’’ by Samuel P. Huntington. There’s also hints to Edward Bernays who is considered the father of modern propaganda. The video provides a mix of facts and lies systematically mixing up truth with lie. There’s a long list of actual quotes by politicians and historical figures. But these quotes are out of context and used to strength the argument of the video itself.

The verdict is that the video is clearly propaganda in its nature. As it is very one-sided and there’s not a hint of an objective analysis. There’s a clear attempt to influence opinion of the viewer. And the video uses cleverly slogans such as ‘’we are the 99% and against the 1%’’ (a slogan we have become familiar with by the world wide occupy movement). One can get a hint of the purpose of this video at the end of it. The makers of the video suggest revolution to overthrow the apparently corrupt western governments. The general strategy of the video seems to be to support conspiracy theories and the strategy of fear.

We can count this to one of the latest examples of internet propaganda. It’s odd that this ''Sabine'' wants so eagerly to promote the video. For example there’s a FB page for it. There’s several trailers on YouTube. Apparently the video is also uploaded on pirate bay:

http://thepiratebay.ee/torrent/7442509/PROPAGANDA___FULL_ENGLISH_VERSION_(2012)_

Warning this video is graphic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI

(Here you can also read ''Sabines'' explenation)

I have encountered  an interesting phenomenon in internet propaganda warfare which is the use of internet commentators. There’s always those sketchy comments and ‘’thumbers’’ that somehow show up to promote or unpromote certain online material. It’s of course speculation to get to know who are doing these things. But if somebody wants to find answers for such questions the only way to answer them seem to be to try to get information by service providers.

You can see how much it has been ''liked'' and favorited.
Most viewers seem to be from Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand.