• Schmoo@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    That’s a connotation it has gained, but is not the literal definition.

    The term originated from religious missions using it to refer to propagating the faith, and was later adopted by revolutionary leftists to describe their attempts to spread their ideology. It gained a negative connotation, ironically, from anti-communist propaganda. Communist states used the term openly and neutrally to refer to both their own propaganda and that of their enemies’, while capitalist states used it derogatorily only to refer to communist propaganda and not their own (they tended to use various euphemisms to refer to their own propaganda without calling it that explicitly).