Propaganda

PROPAGANDA

“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.”

–Noam Chomsky

Definition

“Propaganda—I am here deliberately excluding purely religious or commercial propaganda in the form of advertising—is a distinct political activity that can be distinguished from cognate activities like information and education. The distinction between them lies in the purpose of the instigator. Put simply, propaganda is the dissemination of ideas intended to convince people to think and act in a particular way and for a particular persuasive purpose. Although propaganda can be unconscious, I am concerned here with conscious, deliberate attempts to employ the techniques of persuasion to attain specific goals. Propaganda can be defined as the deliberate attempt to influence public opinion through the transmission of ideas and values for a specific persuasive purpose that has been consciously devised to serve the self-interest of the propagandist, either directly or indirectly. Whereas information presents its audience with a straightforward statement of facts, propaganda packages those facts in order to elicit a certain response. Whereas education—at least in what I take to be the liberal notion of education—teaches us how to think in order to enable us to make up our own minds, propaganda dictates what one should think. Information and education are concerned with broadening our perspectives and opening our minds, whereas propaganda strives to narrow them and (preferably) to close our minds. The distinction, in short, lies in the ultimate purpose or goal of each.”

“History has indeed proved to be an invaluable source of propaganda.“

“We need to think of propaganda in much broader terms: wherever public opinion is deemed important, someone will attempt to influence it. Propaganda can therefore manifest itself in the form of a building, a flag, a coin, or even a government-mandated health warning on a pack of cigarettes. Goebbels maintained that “in propaganda, as in love, anything is permissible which is successful” (Welch 2002).”

–Nicholas John Cull Propaganda & Mass Persuasion (2003)

Propaganda Edward Bernays –Full Text

http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

Culture of fear

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

Propaganda

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

Social control

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

Why were propaganda films so prevalent during this time?

1930s communism

http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/pinckney.shtml

Rise of Modern Propaganda

http://mason.gmu.edu/~amcdonal/Rise%20of%20Modern%20Propaganda.html

One difference between past and present societies is how we view persuasion and rhetoric. Our modern society is untrained in persuasive techniques. In contrast to earlier cultures that were schooled in the principles of rhetoric, our society knows little about the techniques of persuasion and understanding how they work. Modern media constantly assails us with information. "Everyday we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda" (Pratkanis and Aronson 9).

Modern propaganda is distinguished from other forms of communication by its deliberate and conscious use of false or misleading information to sway public opinion. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century gradually made it possible to reach large numbers of people. But it was not until the nineteenth century that state governments began to employ propaganda for political purposes to any wide degree deliberately aimed at influencing the masses. The invention of radio and television in the twentieth century made it possible to reach even more people. The development of modern media, global warfare, and the rise of extremist political parties provided growing importance to the use of propaganda.

The term propaganda began to be widely used to describe the persuasive tactics used by both sides during the world wars and by later tyrannical political regimes of the twentieth century. Propaganda was used as a psychological weapon against the enemy and to bolster morale at home.

It is not surprising that the word "propaganda" appeared as a separate entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica for the first in 1922 right after the end of the World War One.

Adolph Hitler bluntly discussed the use of propaganda in his book, Mein Kampf, in which he shared Machiavelli's low regard for his audience's intellectual capabilities:

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be." (qtd. in Smith 38).

Another passage, also from Mein Kampf, repeated Hitler's contempt for the masses:

"Its [propaganda's] effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous." (qtd. in Pratkanis 250).

Joseph Goebbels succeeded Hitler to become the master propagandist for the Nazi regime. With great skill Goebbels began building the myth of Aryan supremacy. He always maintained that some element of truth was necessary in propaganda to provide a means of escape if his statements were questioned. In Propaganda. The Art of War,

Rhodes said: "Goebbels openly admitted that propaganda had little to do with the truth. 'Historical truth may be discovered by a professor of history. We, however, are serving historical necessity. It is not the task of art to be objectively true. The sole aim of propaganda is success" (qtd. in Rhodes 19).

In order to use propaganda effectively, one has to have great command of language and recognize the power of persuasive speech. George Orwell, the author of the postwar novel, 1984, realized the dangers of propaganda and the power of persuasion. In his essay "Politics and the English language," Orwell maintained that fighting propaganda meant fighting mental laziness.

The government [in 1984 novel]used a complicated doublespeak language to convey contradictory meanings in order to obscure the truth. The population was taught the language of Newspeak where every concept was expressed in only one word in order to hide nuances and prevent the people from thinking discriminately. The political party in power rewrote the past in order to control the present. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

PROPAGANDA MODEL

The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that states how propaganda, including systemic biases, function in mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are propagandized and how consent for various economic, social and political policies are "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda.

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

ARCHIVAL PROPAGANDA VIDEOS

Are you a commie or a citizen?—lecturer, use of model to demo ideas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w86QhV7whjs&feature=related

He May Be A Communist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWeZ5SKXvj8&feature=related

Old Homosexual Warning video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3S24ofEQj4&feature=related

Girls Beware

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fAKo-i4jpQ&feature=related

Birth of a Nation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSBLcKa85rk