[The distinction between my perspective to date and Grover's is that he claims
that some "truths" about the Soviet Union are excluded by this propaganda
system, leaving even the relatively-aware of us in the dark and thus
susceptible to anti-communist propaganda. I'm open to this possibility, given
that I have not seen the Slavic studies literature (etc.) that he cites; so I
plan to investigate this further. It's just that the claims seem SO contrary
to things I have read by people I trust, that I approach them with skepticism.]
A related piece of this propaganda system, and one that I am writing about
these days (with an eventual book in the offing, I hope), is the way the
combination of (a) ideological propaganda that has sought out the craziest
excesses of the 60s and used these as a way of demonizing, blaming, dismissing
the 60s and winning converts to that position, and (b) the overall mass media
system's often-trivial, sentimental, ahistorical, and decontextualized
treatment (& commodification) of 60s movements (see, for example, Renny's
recent posting about the Vietnam war cashmere sweaters), has virtually erased
the truly oppositional, democratic, and radical meaning of the 1960s from
public consciousness (it remains only in private memory, exchanges like this,
and the largely marginalized academic/left books on the era. The potentially
empowering lessons of the 60s are therefore obscured for today's young and the
disenfranchised & oppressed.
Ted Morgan