I haven't ignored any of that. It simply wasn't relevant to the particular point I was making.
Compliance enforcement and propaganda are separate (albeit often complementary) things.
Strictly speaking you may be right, but in practical terms they are effectively two closely tied means of achieving the precise same end.
The latter can make the former easier to accomplish, but they are nevertheless distinct efforts.
I see why you might view it that way. I'm of a more "holistic" view on that particular matter. The latter, when well accomplished, makes the former nearly irrelevant.
Compliance is effectuated by means of order-following goons with guns, not by means of propaganda.
Now there I must depart a bit. Consider the "pandemic". Few goons in evidence for the purposes of enforcement there. The terror campaign was quite sufficient, and I'd call it 99.9% so.
Propaganda does not serve to enforce compliance - it is used to isolate, dishearten, "drown out", and neutralize opposition to compliance.
This seems very much a distinction sans difference.
And yet, skepticism of and opposition to the official narrative was nevertheless not only endemic but also grew apace, much to Theire distress, dismay, alarm, and outrage, and despite Theire every effort to the contrary.
Agreed, but so far as I can see, this was the result of pooching the propaganda. For one thing, I think the campaign was ill-conceived in the first place due to the lies being so wildly outrageous that Theye were unable to keep lids on them. The truth got out, I would estimate, largely because those who at first may have been on board with the general plot, upon seeing that it was not what they'd initially thought, chose truth over being implicated in the lies that resulted in many deaths. I'm thinking that the lower echelon sorts who'd signed on only due to the deceit, decided at one point not to be further associated due to either moral issues or the fact that they didn't want to find themselves behind the cross-hairs in case it all blew up, which it basically has.
In time, even the relatively ill-endowed intellect of the meaner began in many cases twigging to the scandalous truths that were coming to light. I'd call the pandemic a grossly mismanaged affair, if appearances are to be taken as sound at their cores, which I cannot quite bring myself to do. But assuming it, Theye pooched this in a huge way, I assume not at the result so much of ineptitude, but of miscalculation based on a level of hubris no in line with the reality. It seems to me Theye got too big for their panties and assumed we, the useless eaters, would swallow anything they chose to place before us. It certainly went that way for a good year or more, but the truth has a funny way of leaking out. I think in this case it could not be contained, due in large part to far too many inconsistencies and other flaws. Stupid and corrupt as he may be, even the meaner has his limits, and I'm thinking Theye leapt and bounded right past that line at some point and the campaign failed.
As to the failure, I cannot quite accept the apparent story that it was just fuckup upon fuckup. If you recall, back in '19 or early '20 I speculated that what might be going on at that time was a grand setup to maneuver us into committing suicide en masse. My twisted idea was that the current situation was intended to make people so weary of the whole notion of the plague and to so utterly destroy any trust in institutions such as CDC, that perhaps several iterations down the road, people just stop listening. At that point, the real bug(s) is/are released and the
nth wave of dire warning, a la Chicken Little, are issued with perhaps even real and actual vaccines now suddenly available for all. The billions fed up and in the regalia of full-throttle distrust ignore the warnings, refuse the treatments, and die off quickly and in vast legion. At the end of that day, Theire mouthpieces get to wag their fingers at the naughty disobedient who failed to do as commanded and nobody holds a plausible basis for blaming Themme. "Hey, you were warned and the remedy was there for your taking at no charge. This is 100% on you, so STFU and get lost before I loose the dogs on your stupid, worthless and sorry asses." It may all seem silly-contrived, but were it to prove out I would not be in the least surprised.
For example, the greater mass of people did not comply with COVID mandates because of COVID propaganda. They complied because they would be punished or otherwise disadvantaged if they did not. IOW: In the face of enforced mandates, compliance was the path of least resistance. But ceteris paribus, if there had been no enforced mandates, but only the propaganda, then the greater mass of people would not have complied, because that would have been the path of least resistance. The purpose of the propaganda was not to effectuate compliance (that's what the mandates were for) - the purpose of the propaganda was to suppress and undercut resistance and opposition to compliance. For this, it did not need to be persuasive, but only ubiquitous.
What you claim may be so, but it is undemonstrated in any conclusive way and the event is past and the opportunity to know lost, if ever it even existed.
All that said, it is clear that we speak of a stick and carrot game here, which is long and well proven to be greatly effective.
I don't know how old you are or what your experiences may be. I just turned 66 on 2/1 and spent considerable time behind the "iron curtain", visiting family when I was a child. I can attest first hand to the ridiculous nature of soviet propaganda. It was so embarrassingly absurd, I hardly have the words to describe it. That's not to say it didn't have its effect, it did, but the efforts was a grand waste of energy IMO, especially when considered vis-à-vis the American propaganda machine, which operated with far greater subtlety and effect. The people of the communist bloc nations all knew the propaganda was bullshit and they rolled their eyes, however quietly, when in sufficiently safe quarters. Americans, OTOH, revelled in the utter bullshit of the distortions of what it meant to be an American. I grew up witnessing this before my own eyes and I know it to be so as the experience spanned many years and was not the product of a sample population of one.
The Chinese, by all appearances, were no better. Perhaps we are speaking the same language here and I'm just too thick to see it. The propaganda in these cases were the message to the people of what to think. The men with guns were the quality assurance instruments to ensure that that thinking was in evidence. This is a gross misapplication of propaganda effort. The real and proven goal there is to get people to get on board with your agenda so that you don't need to use your men with guns, which is always the riskier path forward. Once again I bid you examine our America as it now stands - hundreds of millions of corrupt blood who comply with damned nearly every fiat tossed at them, no matter how criminally absurd. It is testimony itself.
As I have already indicated, propaganda has nothing to do with "persuasiveness".
Ill-conceived propaganda brought forth by those who fail to understand the instrument follow the path you suggest. Those who
do understand work on Madison Avenue or DoD, etc., and the people are left thinking that their world views are in fact their own.
Soviet propaganda was not at all persuasive (nor was it particularly "polish[ed]"). It didn't need to be (and if it ever was, that was just "icing on the cake") - and it was never actually meant to be. Not really. Rather, it was meant to broadcast the party line and put everyone on notice as to what constituted proper and acceptable "goodthink", and thereby to smother all (publicly visible) criticism of or divergence from the party line. They didn't really care whether people believed it; they only cared whether people pretended to believe it (and then acted accordingly). In this, it was extraordinarily effective - and far, far more effective than anything the American regime has ever been able to accomplish. (The closet anything in America has come to being an exception to this is war-time jingoism.)
The soviets lacked any subtlety. Their "leaders" were a raft of clumsy, but very cleverly treacherous vermin who mishandled propaganda precisely because they were so very obtuse. What strategy lacks can be compensated with sheer and utter terror. The problem there is that the moment you sail past a point with beating a dog, he loses his fear. Having nothing to lose, he starts biting. Granted, the soviet people were not quite at that point yet, they were heading there. Perhaps Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall. We will never know, but my surmise is that had they continued, the time may well have come when Revolution Part Deux would have erupted and those at the top would have enjoyed fates similar to those of the Romanovs. Perhaps Gorby baby saw this and was only endeavoring to save his own bacon. Maybe he loved his people and didn't want such a conflagration to beset them, having seen the reality of the past war. Who can say? But the bottom line is that the soviets misapplied propaganda in a grossly clumsy way such that the end of the Soviet Union was all but a foregone conclusion. Who, in that day, would have seen the end of the French aristocracy in 1789? Those at the top surely didn't, and I daresay the same would have inevitably bitten the soviets precisely because their propaganda failed them with such utter misery, along of course with the deformed nature of their socio-economic and political architectures.
I don't think we're that far apart in our views on the question and I'm not sure any of it really matters in any event. We're in shit to our eyelids and it is going to take nothing short of a miracle to get us out.