Sex and Psychological Warfare
I haven't had a chance to read all the text, but images in Sexual images in psychop warfare are fascinating. Really really interesting. Too bad the scans aren't bigger to see more detail (and not just about the naughty bits; it would be fascinating to see some of the detail esp. on the faces of our enemies.
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I only took a glance at these images, but I was disappointed in their lack of Irony. It's my fault, of course: when I saw that Roughgroove was talking about sexual imagery in psychological warfare, I somehow managed to think that he was talking about psychological warfare in the home, not on actual battlefields, during actual wars.
In the real world, there is no irony, only cynicism and kitsch, people who proffer garish and extreme rhetoric even when they don't believe it (cynicism) and occasionally when they do (kitsch). Although irony is presumed to be characteristic of the upper classes (or, worse, the French), I can assure Roughgroove and his readers that it thrived in my middle-class home.
If cynicism and kitsch are the recourses of the aggressive, then irony is the weapon of choice of the passive-aggressive. Sometimes irony is nice: you insult on the surface, you give warm fuzzies underneath (my favorite version of that is when you see people say incredibly filthy things to giggling infants, but since you say them with the right tone of voice and affection it doesn't make any difference that what you're saying is "How's everyone's favorite engine of destruction? You darling little shit machine! You embolism! Google-ee-goo!")
Alas, so much more often the weapon of psychological warfare is the ostensible praise, couched so that both people know that it is a wicked, wicked criticism. Under a regime of such language, even sincere pieces of praise from people who were not brought up that way are treated as potential land mines: "Hey, you're here early, great!" "Why are you always harping on my punctuality, I was only late those two times, you bastard!!"
Now, a long essay on the sexual imagery in passive-aggressive psychological warfare, that would be fascinating--
3:13 PM
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