Obama supporters are outraged that the president is called a socialist or a fascist by many of his detractors. But the reason for this just doesn’t just flow from his policies, which often follow the template of a statist dictator’s power grabs.
What’s disconcerting about these NEA revelations is they clearly show the administration trying to use NEA artists for propaganda means. Not
artistic propaganda. Propaganda isn’t art. It’s an advertisement for an agenda.
PROPAGANDA (according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary)
1. the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
2 ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect
Now look at the NEA’s description of themselves from their own website.
The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Endowment is the nation’s largest annual funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.
Nothing about propaganda. It’s supposed to be independent of the government. But obviously, the administration doesn’t care about that. It’s trying to use the agency to create it’s own “Joe Camel” type ads to push its products. Only these are more toxic than cigarettes.
These are the kind of tactics employed by communists and other statist dictators. One thinks of all those billboards with Saddam’s face on them, or Kim Jong Il, or Castro in Cuba. Or all those communist posters of the past extolling the virtues of the state and the party. One wonders how soon it’ll be before we start seeing billboards in every city telling us about our “great leader Obama” and his five year plans.
As many artists tend to be left wing, it’s a soft sell to get them to do work promoting the Obama agenda. And while it’s true that the US employed propaganda in previous times, it was progressive statists like Wilson and FDR who used them to promote their agenda and to prosecute a war.
Obama’s attempts are similar. Except this war is on the American tax payer and our economy. Many of Obama’s plans are already bankrupting us, and he keeps piling them on like some spoiled teenager with their daddy’s credit card.
Our tax dollars and our agencies are not there for the President and his collective of incompetents to ram his failure bound statist policies down our throats.
The public needs to ramp up their outcry. Add this one to the bonfire of Obama’s vanities.