Welcome

Welcome to the Website for the Analysis of United States Foreign Policy Propaganda - wausfpp.org.

This is a website dedicated to studying patriotism about US foreign policy as it exists in texts.

We think there are two main types of patriotism:

Patriotized morality expresses preferences or stances. It talks about right and wrong, who we should support or oppose, or who we identify with.
Patriotized history creates events, eliminates events, or changes events.

We study both types, but we think patriotized history is much more important, so we give it most of our attention. The five core myths of patriotized history say that the actions of the US government in other people's countries are self-sacrificing, benevolent, defensive, freedom-pushing, and law-abiding. These five falsehoods are the basic assumptions of almost everything that people in the US hear, read, or see about US foreign policy. This is true of many people outside the US as well, because US propaganda is pervasive in many areas of the world.

Version

This is the second version of wausfpp.org. The new version refines the diagram for analyzing patriotism in texts.

Offerings

First, please read our introduction. It explains what we are trying to do.

Analysis of Patriotic Texts and This Website's Offerings

The central offering of our website is a system for analyzing the patriotism in texts. We call this The Delivery and Contrast of Patriotism, because it shows how each text delivers its meaning, and how that meaning contrasts with unpatriotized information. In it we examine the patterns that you can expect to find when you turn on your TV or read your newspaper, and we provide many examples from texts to illustrate. We present a standard diagram for analyzing a text, and show how the common elements fit into the diagram. This is our attempt to produce a complete categorization scheme for almost any text you might see or hear. Using the standard terms and diagram, you can look at a text and identify its patriotic change, its patriotic message, its technique, and, if it is patriotized history, its core myths. We hope that people will get used to expecting a systematic change between what has happened and what they see in patriotized texts, and will learn to identify the patterns in the texts that they encounter. Entering the website through The Delivery and Contrast of Patriotism section will enable you to approach the study of patriotism in a top-down, theory-centered way; you will begin by looking at the theoretical concepts, and work your way down to the examples of each.

Or, if you prefer to start at the bottom, with examples of patriotic texts, and work your way up to the analytical concepts, you can enter the site throught the Today's Patriotic Text Examples page. Doing so will take you to examples of patriotic texts, grouped by date and article. From here you can work your way up to the theoretical analysis.

Unpatriotized history project

Starting in October 2007, we will be (slowly) building a set of unpatriotized histories, country by country. This set will eventually cover all countries where the US government has acted. We will be adding to it every few days. Our goal here is to recount the US actions that violate the five myths of patriotized history, with a focus on the freedom-pusher myth. Once this collection is complete, we will use it to create a color-coded map of the different degrees of US dictatorship over the people of each country in each year, around the globe. Thus, for example, direct US control of who lives and dies will be coded differently than a US puppet system, which in turn will differ from a US-dominated clientship, etc. While our focus will be on the status of the country-year, we will also cover the key events that led to the status changes, such as US overthrows of democratic systems, establishment of US influence over the armed forces, etc, in each country. To begin we will have only a few countries, but we expect this collection to grow quickly as the information is readily available despite being erased in most news stories. This collection is (very!) incomplete, but you can check our progress on it by clicking the link: Unpatriotized History Sketches Page.