Survival: Something a former Soviet propagandist can believe in (Vladimir Pozner: the useful idiot)

Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times Talk show host Vladimir Pozner. He outlived the Soviet era to become a study in the disorientation that comes from having a fervent ideology and losing it. COLUMN ONE Survival: Something a former Soviet propagandist can believe in Vladimir Pozner Email Picture Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times Talk show host Vladimir Pozner. He outlived the Soviet era to become a study in the disorientation that comes from having a fervent ideology and losing it. Vladimir Pozner, who is quick to apologize for the ideology he sought to spread to the West, knows a thing or two about makeovers. He outlived the Soviet bureaucracy to become a talk show superstar. By Megan K. Stack March 5, 2009 Reporting from Moscow -- The state television center looms like a Soviet phantom from the winter mists of Moscow, a drab, massive relic that nobody has bothered to renovate.

The facade is faded, but the corridors inside hum with young careerists making bright, government-sanctioned television for broadcast to all 11 Russian time zones. Vladimir Pozner, remodeled Soviet relic in his own right, strides the shining hallways, a television superstar with sharp-cut clothes, gleaming head and quick, fox-like darts of the eye.

a study in the disorientation that comes from having a fervent ideology and losing it.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation.
It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them.

For everyone who wants to know how to understand and use this in debate with a liberal and in life:

if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know, particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge, they are likely to resist the new learning.
Even Carl Rogers recognized this.
Accommodation is more difficult than Assimilation, in Piaget's terms.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps,if learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are less likely to concede that the content of what has been learned is useless, pointless or valueless.
To do so would be to admit that one has been "had", or "conned".
link

From Wikipedia (linked references at the website):

Vladimir Vladimirovich Posner

Vladimir Vladimirovich Posner (also spelled "Pozner"; in Russian, Владимир Владимирович Познер), born April 1, 1934, is a Russian journalist best known in the West for appearing on television to represent and explain the views of the Soviet Union during the Cold War[1]. He was a memorable spokesperson for the Soviets in part because he had grown up in the United States and spoke flawless American English with a New York accent.

He worked as chief commentator for the North American service of the Radio Moscow network. In the early 1970s, he was a regular guest on Ray Briem's talk show on KABC in Los Angeles. During the 1980s, he was a favorite guest on Ted Koppel's Nightline. Posner was the host of Moscow Meridian, an English-language current affairs program focusing on the Soviet Union; the show was produced by Gosteleradio, the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio, and broadcast on Ted Turner's Satellite Program Network[2]. He also often appeared on The Phil Donahue Show; in 1986, the two co-hosted A Citizen's Summit, a bilateral, televised discussion (or "spacebridge") between audiences in the Soviet Union and the US, carried via satellite.[3]

In 1980 he called for arrest and extradition of Andrei Sakharov, an act for which he apologized in his 1990 autobiography Parting with Illusions.[4] He also wrote Eyewitness: A Personal Account of the Unraveling of the Soviet Union, and the introduction to the Bantam Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto. Posner also worked for the Institute of the United States and Canada, a Soviet think tank.

In a 2005 interview with NPR's On the Media, Posner spoke openly about his role as a Soviet spokesman, stating bluntly, "What I was doing was propaganda."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Posner

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