It would help if Mr. Apple read _The Cunning of History: the holocaust and the American future_ by Richard L. Rubestein - where Rubenstein convincingly argues that the state has the capacity to make people do _anything_ including digging their own graves. In that context, swaying the public opinion is small beer - nothing to brag about.
There are three main reasons for that:
1. Organizational asymmtery - the state is highly organized and public is not. Thus the state can selectively apply large resources against isolated pocket of resistence. This strategy works particularly well when society is atomized and compartmentalized and th eonly organized collectivity they know is the state. However, as Gramsci (and Trotsky) aptly observed, and organized "civil society" can provide alternative to state forms of organizations - but the danger is that even civil society can be hijacked and "switched off" by the state (as the fascit movement in Italky and germany illustrates).
2. Information asymmetry - most people are concerned mainly about their own private affairs and have little incentive or resources to find accurate information about public affairs that do not directly affect them. Therefeore, they are eager to accept the most easily available information that provides satisfactory explanation of of such affairs that register in their consciousness. That means accepting government propaganda that is deliberately designed for the ease of consumption - like fast food for thought.
3. Groupthink - accepting or expressing opinions that markedly differ from those thought to be "common knowledge" or a "politically correct" view carries considerbale personal cost in form of social ostracism, shunning, or even hostility - but the personal benefits of expressing such opinions are close to nil. This is particularly true of people who are not professional symbol manipulators for whom "being right" iand "not being fooled by popular perceptions" are important virtues that enchance their profesional status. Most ordinary people have little to gain from "being right" but much to loose from being perceived as outsiders or transgressing the group norms. Stanley Milgram's "obedience experiments" are a painflul illustration of it.
For these reasons, government propaganda, no matter how shoddy, will almost always win against even best constructed alternative arguments. The only circumstane that may cause people look for alternatives is when their own personal experience is blatantly inconsistent with government propaganda, for example, they may not be as eager to "liberate" other counrties if they or their children are about to be drafted to the army that is to do the :liberating."
However, even uder those circumstances rejecting government propaganda is not assured - especially when accepting alternatives is painflul or no alternatives are available. If a parent is told that his kid just got killed in Iraq - the government propaganda gives that parent at least consolation that the kid's death was for a good cause, while accepting an alternative means admitting that the kid died for nothing. Along the same lines - if collaboration with the Nazis to exterminate ones' own people will bring at least temporary reprieve from suffering and death, some will do it even if at the end of the road they will be digging their own graves.
Wojtek
>
> "But the antiwar forces, who have had to contend from the
> start with the
> widespread belief that their position is unpatriotic and
> unsupportive of
> American troops engaged in deadly combat, must now bear the
> additional
> burden of arguing with success. American losses are
> relatively small: 96
> dead to date, compared with 200 a day at the height of the
> Vietnam War. ..."
>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/09/international/worldspecial/09BUSH.htm
l>
Carl
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