π§΅The views today's propaganda embeds in people will be hard if not impossible to change. Neurologically, we tend to hold on to what we first come to believe - about ourselves & about others. #StopTheBoats will do lasting damage by planting & cementing deeply flawed convictions.
2/ My German nan, born in 1914, was a profoundly unpolitical person, her interests entirely elsewhere. She wasn't a great intellect, but equally not ignorant. In the 30s, she worked in an office & had an English boyfriend whom she visited in the UK in 1938.
3/ She also lived through Nazism as a young adult. She fled the GDR w/ her (German) husband in 1953 & felt at home in West Germany, for economic reasons more than political conviction. She took times as they were & adapted. A comfortable life, travel, clothes, that was her focus.
4/ I had never heard her utter an antisemitic or anti-foreigner sentiment ever ... until one day, in the late 1980s, we were watching a Saturday evening entertainment show. The (reasonably young) host made his entrance & she said, almost casually, "Look at his nose, he's a Jew."
5/ My brother & I were shocked, we'd been taught about antisemitism & Nazism all our lives. We argued against it, told her it was a terrible thing to say, factually wrong, Nazi propaganda. She was somewhat astounded. I don't think this had occurred to her. For her, it was a fact.
6/ It is a tiny example. Clearly she had soaked up this propaganda as fact, information, believed it, & despite decades of life experience never questioned or changed it. I don't think any research or statistic I had put in front of her would have. She *thought* this was true.
7/ Today's lies of asylum seekers being illegal, not genuine, a threat, a wave, once believed, might become just as unshakeable. Once accepted as factually right, they often remain. They poison people's minds. The antidote: immediate contradiction. Once believed, they might last.
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