Harrison Bergeron Propaganda Essay

The fictional short story by Kurt Vonnegut entitled Harrison Bergeron takes place in a dystopian future. Vonnegut chooses to make the story a satire in order to raise questions concerning how desirable social equality is within this world and how far society will go to achieve it. Like many dystopian, bleak, futuristic worlds, Vonnegut presents very clear aspects of how society is influenced by propaganda and the extent to how powerful a tool propaganda can be. After reading and analyzing this story, I will attempt to explain how Kurt Vonnegut’s life could have influenced his position on propaganda found within this short story. Furthermore, these elements will be matched to those common propaganda strategies discussed in this class and relate how this may impact any modern society.

Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a defiant influence on his work. He served as a private and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. He was chosen as a leader of the POWs captured because he spoke a little German. After telling the German guards "what [he] was going to do to them when the Russians came,” he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away. Vonnegut was one of the lucky ones to survive an attack in a meat locker used by the Germans as a detention facility. Vonnegut said that the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration and central theme for many of his other books including Harrison Bergeron. The Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.

Harrison Bergeron is what seems to be a negative po...

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...y to show just how absurd a life living with handicaps can be. The handicap system is a metaphor that tries to bash the ideas of communism that he undoubtedly incorporated from history using Hitler’s Germany and Cold War Russia as examples of how this system is flawed. The satire is further enforced by the elements of propaganda that he uses in the story. The television is the medium in which all people in society use to get their information. It is a powerful tool and Vonnegut has the entire story’s setting be only around the television to show just how much people rely on it. He also shows how propaganda has conditioned people to follow what the State wants them to do by appealing to the people’s logic that no one person should be than another. A good idea in principle, but in action, it causes a lot of harm and only benefits the State or the people in control.