User talk:Shelf reader

Zytolik A mid-twentieth century political and/or social term used to describe people groups in Western and Eastern European countries and the complex historical nature of anti-Semitism within the European populace. Also used as a pejorative term to describe certain European people groups regarding an inability to formulate independent thoughts and who are easily subjected to propaganda due to a lack of moral fortitude. Origins In the aftermath of WWII, Soviet controlled Eastern European countries required significant oversight the of the population in order to maintain authority and dissuade any populist movement or rebellion. Following the 1956 Hungarian Uprising the Soviet Union employed both heavy handed approaches as well as more nuanced methods to control its citizenry. The idea of Zytolik was conceived when the Soviet hierarchy concluded that the common dominator in most of the newly annexed countries was that each country regardless of culture, language or religious background had deep anti-Semitic roots. Further research concluded that anti-Semitism in these countries, especially those with a minimal Jewish presence was largely a byproduct of arbitrary generational bias which became the cultural norm in many of these countries over the centuries. The Soviets sought to exploit this by reasoning that if basic anti-Semitic tendencies and latent biases were not called into question within the population a whole then new ideas could just as well be introduced without any critical thought or oversight from said population. The theory was that a general population base with an inferior cognitive base leaves an inherent vacuum which could easily be exploited to cultivate pro-Soviet and anti-Western propaganda. Zytolik did not seek to address anti-Semitism but rather to uncover the genesis behind such behavior in order to manipulate the population at will.