"It is more profitable to invest one dollar in the press than ten dollars in weapons: weapons are unlikely to speak at all, and the press does not close its mouth from morning to night" - R. M. Nixon.

Often, propaganda is understood only as political or ideological propaganda, carried out with the aim of forming a certain political worldview among the masses. Political propaganda can be considered as a systematic influence on the consciousness of individuals, groups, and society to achieve a certain result in the field of political action." It is unlikely that political propaganda can benefit society.

Unfortunately, the Yazidi people are also subjected to political and ideological propaganda, and even religious propaganda. The mechanism of propaganda against the Yazidis continues for several centuries. As we know, our people often called the devil-worshippers (to this day, some continue to call us so) - this is religious propaganda and it led to the persecution of the Yazidis from our native lands to slavery, and eventually to genocide.

The second model of propaganda is political. As we know, in the USSR, due to political gain, they decided to call the Yazidis who lived in the Soviet space-Kurds. This led to the fact that some Yazidis already in the post-Soviet space have since considered themselves and called themselves Kurds. Also, this method of the USSR led to ideological propaganda, when the same Yazidis who call themselves Kurds began to prove that calling themselves Yazidis is wrong, which is naturally a lie.

Then, there was another victim, political and ideological, we are talking about those who call themselves Yazidi Kurds, those who could not choose how to call themselves Yazidis or Kurds and ended up somewhere in the middle, which is nonsense.

Currently, the term "propaganda" is increasingly associated with the media. With the development of journalism, with the beginning of the development of print media (and subsequently the creation of online publications), the press began to be considered a serious lever of influence on the consciousness of the audience. Recently, even the press has begun to give way in the propaganda race, and social networks have become the leaders. Bots, Internet trolls, and even an "ordinary grandmother" with a smartphone, become propaganda mechanisms.

I would like to draw your attention to these very mechanisms-methods of propaganda. This is well described by the sociologist and psychologist V. Sorochenko in his book "Encyclopedia of propaganda methods". Below I provide two methods of propaganda, the most used against our people-the Yazidis:

1. "Everyday story". "This technique allows the media to maintain the illusion of objective coverage of events, but, at the same time, devalues the significance of what happened, creates a mass audience's idea of this event as something insignificant, not worth special attention and, moreover, public evaluation." That is, serious and terrible incidents are reported by journalists quite calmly and casually: "if you need to tame people to violence, blood, murder, atrocities of all kinds, then a good-looking TV presenter with a calm face and an even voice, as if casually, informs you daily about the most serious crimes."

2. "Rewriting history". The name of the method is telling. To form a certain opinion in society, historical events are simply presented incorrectly. This method is effective when you need to gradually change the opinion of a certain individual mass. Unfortunately, this separate mass is our people. Every Yazidi is often confronted with the fact that he hears a different story of the origin of our people, religion, language, etc., this banally leads to a census of history.

We, as a small nation, think that propaganda bypasses us, but in fact this is not the case. Huge amounts of money are invested in propaganda against us, and it works. If we ask every third Yazid (according to the author, i.e., me) who he is, a Yazid or a Kurd, he will think, and it will be difficult for him to answer. I would like to note that sometimes propaganda against our people comes from our own people, sorry for the tautology, because frequent civil strife leads to the propaganda of one or another opinion that is not in favor of the Yazidis.

You will ask the question: "Why do the propaganda mechanisms against our people work so successfully?" The answer is very simple, but it has a big root of the problem, and the problem in turn is that we are passive degraders who look at how slowly but surely our people will end up in the annals of history rewritten by the enemy.

Author-David Babaev