Comment by rbanffy
1 day ago
Nor is soft power.
The factbook was much more a tool for propaganda than anything else. While you could trust most of the numbers, you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships, while it would always be exceedingly kind to countries with US sponsored dictators.
I'd be interested to see concrete examples of this, if they exist.
by "this"... that the current US govt isn't interested in soft power?
They wanted examples of propaganda in the World Factbook probably.
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I would also like to see a comparison to prove the point.
> you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships,
The World Fact Book doesn't have this kind of commentary. For example read the entry on North Korea. I've excerpted the most critical parts here, and I think they are a long way from your characterization:
> After the end of Soviet aid in 1991, North Korea faced serious economic setbacks that exacerbated decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation.
> New economic development plans in the 2010s failed to meet government-mandated goals for key industrial sectors, food production, or overall economic performance. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, North Korea instituted a nationwide lockdown that severely restricted its economy and international engagement.
> As of 2024, despite slowly renewing cross-border trade with China, North Korea remained one of the world's most isolated countries and one of Asia's poorest
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation, as well as its isolation. Yep, that's a classic trick with State Department propaganda. There are never any huge whoppers, instead the lies they tell are through omission and the subtle shifting of blame ("If Venezuela didn't want to be bombed, they should have given us their oil", etc) in order to craft a narrative that's incongruent with reality.
>Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation
The catastrophic humanitarian situation IS the cause for the sanctions.
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While that is true, the current government makes heavy use of propaganda too.
True, but they have abandoned the subtlety of the factbook.
The suggestion that obvious propaganda is somehow better than "subtle" propaganda is itself propaganda.
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Yep. This seems somewhat similar in motivation to the cuts to USAID.