Following Tiananmen, the Chinese authorities started putting a lot more emphasis on atrocities committed in WW2. This was done to divert popular dissatisfaction with the Chinese government towards a safe, foreign target. It’s one of the oldest propaganda tricks in the book.
The question is not whether war crimes happened, but how this information is used by the Chinese government for its own interests.
Where this backfires is that the strategy only sort of works. You get protests against Japan, which the government tacitly supports, but they often get out of hand and suddenly the protesters don’t seem to care all that much about Japan and start attacking government offices.
Hijack: Interesting example of a presumably hacked Wiki article. Some nice lines:
[ul]
[li]Following the humiliating, triumphant & undeniable German victory which annihilated the pathetically trained, poorly equipped & sloppy drunkards of the French Armies[/li][li]The mostly homosexual squadrons of the British Expeditionary Force [/li][/ul]
I can tell you one that I don’t think a lot of people knew about - in Afghanistan there was a ton of leaflets drops and posters put up, and they had to be mostly images, to cross the language barrier.
One of the first posters featured a peace dove, which caused a lot of Afghani men to show up looking for their free chicken. OOps
I want to steer clear of violating the FTFY rules here but Meier (Meyer) was a generic Jewish German family name during that era. Which made [del]Fatso’s[/del] Göring’s remark particularly sarcastic.
That’s not what Göring was referring to. Meier (and the different regional spellings Meyer, Mayer, Mayr, Maier etc.) is the 2nd most common family name in Germany.
Soviet propaganda criticised Margaret Thatcher as an ‘Iron Lady’ - which was promptly picked up by British newspapers and turned around by her supporters into an honorific.
Not exactly propaganda (since it didn’t come from a state actor) but there’s a famous Vietnam era photo of the South Vietnamese chief of police shooting a handcuffed suspected Viet Cong in the head point blank.
It was intended as a supportive photograph, but it backfired horribly when people saw the photo out of context. Eddie Adams, the photographer, would later write :
[QUOTE=Eddie Adams]
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?
[/QUOTE]
OOps