Ministry of Propaganda Reminds Everyone to Always Get Their Propaganda from a Reliable Source
Ministry of Propaganda Reminds Everyone to Always Get Their Propaganda from a Reliable Source
Hast thou fact-checked thy propaganda lately?
As the Kingdom’s news sources art increasingly imbued with lies and deceit aimed at downplaying The King’s Flawless Perfection as the Divine Ruler of All Things, the Royal Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness hath reminded all subjects to always get their propaganda from reliable sources.
“‘Tis important that we protect the fundamental rights of all subjects to be exposed only to information that fawningly praises The King and His Court, whilst also reminding peasants that they are base and disgusting and their lives doth not matter,” spake Chief Truthistician Trumannus Wærloga. “Anything that sayeth otherwise wast clearly not approved by the Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness and thus is objectively false according to Truth Law.”
Fake propaganda hath always plagued the Kingdom’s vast information highway of woodcut pamphlets, carrier crows, and guys who stand in the towne square shouting the news. But Truthfulness magistrates are now taking heightened manœuvers to stamp out unofficial disinformation.
“To ensure the transparency of our efforts, we vow to publickly humiliate and/or execute any soul whomst is caught spreading lies,” spake Wærloga. “Except, of course, in cases where we deem it in the interests of the publick to execute them in secret.
“This Ministry is so dedicated to protecting ye facts that I doth not care whomst we have to coerce into silence or murder to do so.”
Wærloga sayeth much of the negative propaganda cometh from peasants and disgraced nobles who hath illegally taught themselves how to read and write. ‘Tis a difficult situation to remedy, he sayeth, because simply blinding all peasants and removing their hands proved logistically infeasible.
Whilst Ministry-approved studies hath found that its efforts to curb unapproved propaganda are “wise, just, and superbly beneficial to all the peoples of the Realm,” somme fear they set a dangerous precedent.
“The bureaucratic approval process actually maketh it harder to praise The King,” spake peasant journalist Rufus Bardolph. “I used to be able to prance through the streets shouting, ‘I love The King! He is so very wise and handsomme!’ whenever I wanted. But now I need to submit an application to my local propaganda office and wait two or three fortnights just to get permission to do so.”
Efforts to project pure thoughts directly into subjects’ minds with the use of dark sorcery hath proven challenging, and even The King’s vast network of Tonguecutters cann’t get to every tongue before it speaks an untruth. But Wærloga remains dedicated to his task.
“I shall see to it,” spake he, “that either we all speaketh the Truth, or none of us speaketh a’tall.”
The Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness hath released a list of trusted sources of propaganda from which all subjects shouldst obtain their information. Obtaining propaganda fromme any other sources is a cryme punishable by many tortuous methods, up to and including death.
The Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness’s Trusted Sources of Propaganda
The Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness
Personal blögges of high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness, with prior review and approval for all blögge postes
Proclamations spoken directly from The King’s Mouth or via verified Royal Herald (Note: all verified Heralds shall bear a seal upon their breast containing a blue and white checkmark)
Royal Decrees, and Decrees of the Ministry of Propaganda and Unerring Truthfulness
Any subject’s words, deeds, or thoughts that slavishly praise The King and His Rule (with prior approval by local propaganda office)
Ye Olde Tyme News, the Kingdom’s only independent and unbiased source of King-vetted and approved news
The Church
Addendum: The Maker of Rainbows
The above image comes from a story titled “The Buyer of Sorrows,” from The Maker of Rainbows, and Other Fairy-tales and Fables (1912), written by Richard Le Gallienne and illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green. The full collection can be read at Project Gutenberg. Below is the story “The Maker of Rainbows.”
It was a bleak November morning in the dreary little village of Twelve-trees. Nature herself seemed hopeless and disgusted with the universe, as the chill mists stole wearily among the bare trees, and the boughs dripped with a clammy moisture that had nothing of the energy of tears.
Twelve-trees was a poor little village at the best of times, but the past summer had been more than usually unkind to it, and the lean wheat-fields and the ragged orchards had been leaner and more ragged than ever before—so said the memory of the oldest villagers.
There was very little to eat in the village of Twelve-trees, and practically no money at all. Some of the inhabitants found consolation in the fact that at the Inn of the Blessed Rood the cider-kegs still held out against despair.
But this was no comfort to the gaunt and shivering children left to themselves on the chill door-steps, half-heartedly trying to play their innocent little games. Even the heart of childhood felt the shadows that November morning in the dreary little village of Twelve-trees, and even the dogs and the cats of the village seemed to be under the same spell of gloom, and moved about with a dank hopelessness, evidently expecting nothing in the shape of discarded fish or transfiguring smells.
There was no life in the long, disheveled High Street. No one seemed to think it worth while to get up and work. There was nothing to get up for, and no work worth doing. So, naturally, in all this echoing emptiness, this lack of excitement, anything that happened attracted a gratefully alert attention—even from those cats and dogs so sadly prowling amid the dejected refuse of the village.
Presently, amid all the November numbness, the blank nothingness of the damp, deserted street, there was to be seen approaching from the south a curious little figure of an old man, trundling at his side a strange apparatus resembling a knife-grinder's wheel, and he carried some forlorn old umbrellas under one arm. Evidently he was an itinerant knife-grinder and umbrella-mender. As he proceeded up the street, he called out some strange sing-song, the words of which it was impossible to distinguish.
But, though his cry was melancholy, his old puckered and wizened face seemed to be alight with some inner and inextinguishable gladness, and his electrical blue eyes, startlingly set in a network of wrinkles, were as full of laughter as a boy's. His cry attracted a weary face here and there at window and door; but, seeing nothing but an old knife-grinder, the faces lost interest and immediately disappeared. The children, however, being less sophisticated, were filled with a grateful curiosity toward the stranger, and left the chill door-steps and trooped about him in wonder.
A little girl, with tears making channels down her pale, unwashed face, caught the old man's eye.
"Little one," he said, with a magical smile, and a voice all reassuring love, "give me one of those tears, and I will show you what I can make of it."
And he touched the child's face with his hand, and caught one of her tears on his finger, and placed it, glittering, on his wheel. Then, working a pedal with his foot, the wheel began to move so swiftly that one could see nothing but its whirling; and as it whirled, wonderful colored rays began to rise from it, so that presently the dreary street seemed full of rainbows. The sad houses were lit up with a fairy radiance, and the faces of the children were all laughter again.
"Well, little one," he said, when the wheel stopped whirling, "did you like what I made out of that sad little tear?"
And the children laughed, and begged him to do some other trick for them.
At that moment there came down the street a poor old half-witted woman, indescribably dirty and bedraggled, talking to herself and laughing in a creepy way. The village knew her as Crazy Sal, and the children were accustomed to make cruel sport of her. As she came near they began to jeer at her, with the heartlessness of young, unknowing things.
But the strange old man who had made rainbows out of the little girl's tear suddenly stopped them.
"Stay, children," he said, "and watch."
And, as he said this, his wheel went whirling again; and as it whirled a light shot out from it, so that it illuminated the poor old woman, and in its radiance she became strangely transfigured. In place of Crazy Sal, whom they had been accustomed to mock, the children saw a beautiful young girl, all blushes and bright eyes and pretty ribbons; and so great was the murmur of their surprise that it drew to the door-steps their fathers and mothers, who also saw Crazy Sal as none of them had ever seen her before—except a very old man who remembered her as a beautiful young girl, and remembered, too, how her mind had gone from her as the news came one day that her sweetheart, a sailor, had been drowned in the North Sea.
"Who and what are you?" said this old man, stepping out a little in front of the gathering crowd. "Are you a wizard, that you change a child's tears into laughter, and turn an old half-witted woman back to a young girl? You must be of the devil...."
"Give me an ear of corn from your last harvest," answered the old knife-grinder, "and let me put it on my wheel."
An ear of corn was brought to him, and once more his wheel went whirring, and again that strange light shot out from it, and spread far past the houses over the fields beyond; and, lo! to the astonished sad eyes of the weary farmers, they appeared waving with golden grain, waiting for the scythe.
And again, as the wheel stopped whirring, the old man who had remembered Crazy Sal as a young girl spoke to the knife-grinder; again he asked:
"What and who are you? Are you a wizard that you change a child's tears into laughter, and turn an old half-witted woman back to a young girl, and make of a barren glebe a waving corn-field?"
And the man with the strange wheel answered:
"I am the maker of rainbows. I am the alchemist of hope. To me November is always May, tears are always laughter that is going to be, and darkness is light misunderstood. The sad heart makes its own sorrow, the happy heart makes its own joy. The harvest is made by the harvestman—and there is nothing hard or black or weary that is not waiting for the magic touch of hope to become soft as a spring flower, bright as the morning star, and valiant as a young runner in the dawn."
But the village of Twelve-trees was not to be convinced by such words made out of moonshine. Only the children believed in the laughing old man with the strange wheel.
"Rainbows!" mocked their fathers and mothers—"rainbows! Much good are rainbows to a starving village."
The old maker of rainbows took their taunts in silence, and made ready to go his way; but as he started once more along the road he said, with a cynical smile:
"Have you never heard that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?..."
"A pot of gold?" cried out the whole village of Twelve-trees.
"Yes," he answered, "a pot of gold! I know where it is, and I am going to find it."
And he moved on his way.
Then the villagers looked at one another, and said over and over again, "A pot of gold!"
And they took cloaks and walking-staves and set out to accompany the old visitor; but when they reached the outskirts of the village there was no sign of him. He had mysteriously disappeared.
But the children never forgot the rainbows.