From mass manipulation to psychological warfare, history's darkest propaganda campaigns have left an indelible mark on society. Join us as we explore the most chilling examples of state-sponsored messaging that aimed to control, deceive, and sometimes destroy entire populations.
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00:00For three generations, it has looked to the future.
00:03The existence of Unit 731 was only acknowledged in 2002.
00:08Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at historical propaganda campaigns that'll send chills down your spine.
00:14At 7.30 a.m. on April 17, 1975, the war in Cambodia was over.
00:22The Four Pests Campaign.
00:24The repression of the rightists removed all opposition and opened up the way for the great leap forward.
00:30The Communist Party was able to do what it wanted without any resistance, because no one dared speak out anymore.
00:35Mao Zedong's great leap forward was a ruthlessly ambitious plan to modernize China and pull it into the 20th century.
00:42Carried out from 1958 to 1962, Mao attempted to reform virtually every aspect of Chinese life
00:48in a forceful, unprecedented rapid-fire industrialization process.
00:52One major element of Mao's grandiose plan was the Four Pests Campaign, which targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
00:58In an extraordinary campaign, Mao identified a new enemy.
01:04Sparrows were accused of eating the crops.
01:08The Chinese were called out in their millions to prevent the birds' landing.
01:12As a result, the sparrows died of exhaustion and gave way to a new enemy.
01:18Insects.
01:19Representative of Mao's plan to recalibrate China's ecological order, the campaign was a dismal failure,
01:25and contributed significantly to the Great Chinese Famine that lasted from 1959 to 1961.
01:31The famine is reported to have killed as many as 55 million people in that time.
01:35When the train stopped in the station, I saw crowds of starving people stretching their hands through the windows to ask for food.
01:43Everyone was suffering from hunger at that time.
01:45All those people were fleeing the famine.
01:49Children, old people.
01:51They all ran around the train to beg food from the passengers.
01:54Islamic State Recruitment Videos
01:56On his phone, 90 ISIS propaganda videos.
02:00And it seems for years now we have been talking about men like these.
02:04Their terror, radical jihad.
02:06A disturbingly modern propaganda machine, the Islamic State Militant Group has utilized social and mass media to great effect since their 2014 rise to global notoriety.
02:16Originally employing social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram,
02:20the Islamic State propaganda videos are now limited to Telegram, among other more protected sites.
02:25Twitter enabled ISIS.
02:27Okay?
02:28Twitter enabled ISIS.
02:30I saw with my own eyes Twitter allowing these things to happen.
02:34Mubeen Sheikh knows, because he was a recruiter.
02:38Oh yeah, definitely jihadist.
02:39Trolling Twitter and Facebook.
02:41Seems to be a sympathizer.
02:43To find targets ripe for the picking.
02:45The videos often depict the organization's tactics and spread their message of Western hate as a means of radicalizing and shoring up potential recruits.
02:52A 2022 study by the peer-reviewed Journal of Politics determined that,
02:57Propaganda conveying the material, spiritual, and social benefits of joining ISIS increased online support for the group,
03:03while content displaying brutal violence decreased endorsement of ISIS across a wide range of videos.
03:08As opposed to before, we'd have to travel or have to know the right people.
03:13The sort of barrier for participation is lower than it's ever been.
03:17And you can sort of access those groups in a matter of minutes.
03:20Duck and cover.
03:21There was a turtle by the name of Bert.
03:24And Bert the turtle was very alert.
03:28When danger threatened him, he never got hurt.
03:31He knew just what to do.
03:34He duck and cover.
03:38Duck and cover.
03:40As difficult as it can be to admit it,
03:42there is no one on Earth who is fully immune to the purposefully intoxicating effects of propaganda.
03:47However, it probably goes without saying that children are perhaps most susceptible to it.
03:52That was abundantly clear in the case of the 1952 quote-unquote social guidance film Duck and Cover.
03:58We have safety rules that car drivers and people who are walking must obey.
04:03Now, we must be ready.
04:05Produced by the U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration,
04:08the nine-minute-long video colorfully provides detailed instructions as to what to do in the event of a Cold War-era Soviet nuclear strike.
04:14Although the effectiveness of the titular method has been debated over time,
04:18what's inarguable is Duck and Cover's enduring eeriness.
04:22Older people will help us as they always do.
04:24But there might not be any grown-ups around when the bomb explodes.
04:28Then, you're on your own.
04:31Remember what to do, friends.
04:33Now tell me right out loud.
04:34What are you supposed to do when you see the flash?
04:37Law!
04:39And law!
04:40USSR Anti-Religious Campaign
04:42Dominating one-half the world,
04:45communism stands solidly opposed to the Western concept of democracy.
04:50With over 750 million people under communist rule,
04:54nearly one-third of the population of the earth,
04:57Soviet Russia holds a commanding position in the future destiny of the world.
05:01Possibly the most disturbing element of this campaign against organized religion,
05:05particularly the Russian Orthodox Church,
05:07was the fact that it wasn't the first time such a discriminatory boycott had been launched.
05:11In 1928, Joseph Stalin determined that the initial campaign,
05:15which was launched in 1921, didn't go far enough.
05:18Joseph Stalin was the central figure around whom Russia revolved.
05:22Once he grabbed the reins of power in the Soviet Union, he was never to relinquish them.
05:27With unswerving purpose, he welded the party government into a solid block of steel
05:31that crushed any opposition in its path.
05:34Other Russian politicos dared not even breathe a challenge in his direction.
05:38Purge after purge had proved such a move fruitless and fatal.
05:42Furiously cracking down on the practice of religion,
05:45Stalin portrayed those who actively practiced as immoral and subhuman
05:48and responsible for contemporary crises in Soviet society.
05:52Even educational textbooks in school attempted to sow the seeds of hate against believers.
05:57All the while, the USSR adhered to its official policy of denying the persecution.
06:01On one hand, the martyrs gave their lives, and it seemed that the mission had ended.
06:06Hundreds and thousands of churches and almost all of the monasteries in Russia were destroyed.
06:11But on the other hand, it was their victory.
06:14No one could break their spirit.
06:15No one.
06:16Not even the huge totalitarian Soviet state.
06:19Radio-television libre des mille collines.
06:21This Rwandan radio station's name translates to
06:34Free Radio and Television of the Thousand Hills in English,
06:37deriving from a historical nickname for the East African nation.
06:40Beginning its transmissions in July of 1993,
06:43the station was supported by public broadcaster Radio Rwanda
06:46and was intended to spew hate against victims of the Hutu regime.
06:49These included Belgians, the UN, and crucially, the Tutsi.
06:53Refer to them as snakes.
06:55They were trying to sort of objectify them and distance Rwandans from one another.
07:05The RTLM benefited tremendously from Rwandans' lack of newspapers and televisions,
07:10and its ubiquitous presence was successful in its mission of encouraging violence against Tutsis.
07:15The RTLM's leaders were eventually handed down harsh prison sentences
07:18for their roles in inciting the Rwandan genocide.
07:36Chinese Struggle Sessions
07:38While propaganda usually consists of some kind of communications transmission,
07:45that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
07:48Take, for example, the aforementioned Mao Zedong's, quote,
07:50Struggle Sessions, which appeared most prominently during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976.
07:57In these bizarre, hard-to-watch public spectacles,
08:00supposed dissidents were beaten, humiliated, and sometimes even tortured to death.
08:05Those subject-to-struggle sessions were almost always considered to be one of the five black categories,
08:24which included landlords, counter-revolutionaries, and those with political beliefs considered right-wing.
08:29A means of convincing the public that loyalty to the state superseded loyalty to one's peers,
08:35Struggle Sessions were eventually banned in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution.
08:39Obscuring the true horrors of Unit 731.
08:55It's very possible that you've never heard of this biological and chemical warfare research facility.
09:09Operated by the Imperial Japanese Army in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War,
09:14Unit 731 was an atrocity on par with the crimes of Nazi physician Josef Mengele.
09:19Chinese prisoners were subjected to depraved human experimentation,
09:41which included such war crimes as purposeful infection with diseases,
09:45vivisection, organ harvesting, and more,
09:47which will spare you the gory details of.
09:49The official cover story was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill,
09:53and prisoners were even referred to as logs.
09:55Even more chilling is the fact that those responsible for operating Unit 731
09:59were never brought to justice,
10:01and were even granted immunity by the American government
10:04in exchange for their cooperation.
10:06The U.S. Secret Service reports that certain Japanese biological scientists
10:10are offering the data from their experiments,
10:13but are afraid of being prosecuted.
10:17But MacArthur starts to negotiate.
10:20He has to stop the Russians getting hold of the scientists and their data.
10:24Year Zero.
10:25A horror began almost immediately.
10:28Phnom Penh, a city of two and a half million people,
10:31was forcibly emptied within hours of their coming.
10:34The sick and wounded being dragged from their hospital beds,
10:38dying children being carried in plastic bags,
10:41the old and crippled being dumped beside the road,
10:43and all of them being marched at gunpoint into the countryside
10:47and toward a totally new society.
10:50Widely regarded as one of the most brutal and inhumane dictators in history,
10:54Pol Pot's despotic regime, known as the Khmer Rouge,
10:57was directly responsible for the deaths of as many as 2 million people
11:01during the Cambodian genocide.
11:02As part of his campaign of horrors,
11:04Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge devised the Year Zero political doctrine,
11:08which aimed to erase Cambodian culture and history
11:10to make way for a supposed agrarian utopia.
11:13Books were burned, schools and universities were shut down,
11:16and anything that bore the mark of Western society was shunned.
11:19Year Zero was perhaps best summed up by Australian journalist John Pilger,
11:23who described its ethos as, quote,
11:25"...only work and death."
11:27The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 Year Zero,
11:32the dawn of an age in which there would be no families,
11:35no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief,
11:37no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books,
11:42no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money.
11:49Der ewige Jude
11:51If you've learned anything about Nazi Germany,
12:08it's likely that Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels
12:11were fervent adopters of propaganda to advance their genocidal agenda.
12:14Exploiting Germans' low national morale amidst a deflated economy,
12:18Hitler found a common enemy to invigorate the nation,
12:20the Jewish people of the world.
12:22Jewish home life reveals remarkable lack of creative ability to civilize.
12:32In plain language, Jewish dwellings are filthy and neglected.
12:37As such, Minister of Propaganda Goebbels
12:39personally oversaw the production of The Eternal Jew,
12:42a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film
12:44that described Jewish people as being greedy,
12:46manipulative, and parasitic, among other disturbing charges.
12:49Even its director, German filmmaker Fritz Hippler,
12:53later described his film as being, quote,
12:55the most disgraceful example of anti-Semitism.
12:57The most common expressions in the jargon of international gangsters and criminals
13:01stem from Hebrew and Yiddish words.
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13:22Life unworthy of life.
13:24The entire Nazi philosophy was based on who deserved a place in this world and who didn't.
13:28In contrast to the supposed superiority of the Aryan master race,
13:32the Nazis designated those with disabilities as being, quote,
13:35unworthy of life.
13:36Their solution was to advocate a sort of Nazi eugenics,
13:39which would systematically eliminate those that the Third Reich deemed inferior.
13:43In a disturbing snowball effect that eventually led to the establishment of World War II concentration camps,
13:48the Nazis deemed disabled people and the mentally ill as, quote,
13:52empty shells of human beings.
13:54This propaganda campaign demonstrates the power that public messaging can hold
13:57in terms of eroding human rights.
13:59Which propaganda campaign creeped you out the most?
14:02Be sure to let us know in the comments.
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