How Propaganda Turns Neighbors Into Enemies

Human beings divide the world into “us” and “them” in countless ways: family and outsiders, friends and strangers, neighbors and foreigners, people we trust and people we fear.

Some boundaries are obvious. Others are invisible until something happens that makes them suddenly important.

But there is something more unsettling than the existence of boundaries:

The boundary can move.

And when it does, people who were yesterday part of “us” can become “them” without changing their language, ancestry, religion, appearance, or even their relationships with us.

One of the most powerful mechanisms for moving that boundary is propaganda.

The Boundary Can Move

What happens when people who were clearly part of our “us”—friends, colleagues, neighbors, even family members—suddenly appear to be on the other side of a moral or political boundary?

Were those relationships artificial?

Was the previous sense of belonging merely a pretense?

The relationships may have been completely genuine. What changed may not have been the people.

What changed was the boundary.

This is one of the central questions explored in my Us vs. Them series:

Part I: The Psychology of Belonging

Part II: When Belonging Becomes a Boundary

Part III: Living With “Them”

The series asks how we create “us” and “them,” how boundaries of belonging become social and political institutions, and how we can live together despite our tendency to divide the world into groups.

But there is an important complication: every person belongs to multiple groups simultaneously.

A person can be Jewish and American. Muslim and French. Russian and Christian. Secular and Israeli. A colleague, a neighbor, a friend, a parent.

These identities coexist. Yet in any given situation, one identity can become more important than the others.

Who decides which one matters?

That is where propaganda becomes powerful.

It can determine which difference matters—and therefore which boundary becomes relevant.

The Soviet story of Pavlik Morozov provides a particularly disturbing illustration.

Pavlik was presented to generations of Soviet children as a heroic boy who denounced his father to the authorities. The official narrative transformed an act of family betrayal into an act of political virtue: loyalty to the Soviet state was placed above loyalty to one’s family.

The historical reality was far more complicated than the Soviet legend. But that almost makes the example more useful.

The important thing was not what actually happened to Pavlik.

It was what the story taught.

It taught children that the relevant boundary was not:

loyal citizen vs. ideological enemy.

The father could........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)