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Propaganda is typically associated with authoritarian regimes and dictatorship. Soviet propaganda denounced the West for its decadent culture and lifestyle. North Korean propaganda glorifies the country's leader. The West is the free and democratic world, hence there is no propaganda here. If you wholehartedly agree with the last statement you may have swallowed a successful piece of Western propaganda.
The subject is a large one, so I'll divide it into separate shorter posts. Let's begin by looking at some preconceived and largely shared ideas.
A book review published in Mediapart discusses some received notions of propaganda that are not necessarily accurate. The book in question is Propagande. La manipulation de masse dans le monde contemporain, by David Colon. I haven't read the book itself, but I will briefly summarise the review.
First point: Propaganda is an inextricable part of how societies are ruled, be they autocratic or democratic. It is a means to achieve acceptance for the ideas and enterprises of the ruling class. This was also a key point brought forth by Ed Bernays.
Second point: Propaganda is not limited to politics in the strictest sense, there is also a broader kind of sociological propaganda that aims for the cohesion of the society (this is one of many points where Jacques Ellul is quoted from his book Propagandes). An example of this type of propaganda could be the concept of "the American way of life".
Third point: One often imagines that the goal of propaganda is to change public opinion, but this is generally not the case. Instead, it is much easier to reinforce existing opinions than to make someone change their mind, and anyway, the purpose is often less to convince the public than to distract them.
An often used tactic of distraction is to turn criticism around, such as when, in 1935, Goebbels responded to articles in the British press about persecution of Jews by pointing to the British treatment of Irish catholics. A more recent example (not taken from the book review) is when a BBC journalist asked the Azerbaijani president Aliyev about press freedom in his country. The president turned the question around, arguing she had no right to criticise him given the treatment of Julian Assange in her country.
Fourth point: Propaganda, according to received wisdom, is carried out through lies and disinformation. However, before the post truth era lies were not at all prefered by propagandists. Once exposed, they would destroy the propaganda effort. And, again quoting Ellul, when the propaganda tells the truth, the individual exposed to it becomes convinced that it is no longer propaganda.
Fifth point: The received idea that less well educated and less informed people are more susceptible to propaganda is not true. The rural population is less exposed to propaganda than the urban population.
C’est sur ces dernières que la propagande d’intégration, qui vise à conformer les attitudes et à stabiliser le corps social, s’exerce le mieux. Car, contre toute attente, la propagande répond à un besoin fondamental : plus l’individu instruit et informé réalise la complexité du monde qui l’entoure, plus il accède à une information riche et variée, et plus il a besoin d’un cadre explicatif simple.
(It is on the latter group (i.e. the urban population) that the propaganda which tries to shape their attitudes to conformity and to stabilise the social body works best. Because, contrary to expectation, propaganda responds to a fundamental need: the more the well-informed individual realises the complexity of the surrounding world, the more access he has to rich and varied sources of information, the more he needs a simple explanatory framework.)
Mediapart review: propos de la propagande
Many of these points hark back to Ellul, such as the distinction between propaganda of agitation and propaganda of integration, the latter being the long term efforts to unify the world views of the population. Dissenters are directly harmful to such efforts and need to be silenced, made invisible, forgotten, or at least discredited.
Shufei has written a brilliant piece about the feeling of "unity" after the 9/11 events of 2001, which was of exactly the kind that doesn't tolerate differing points of view, and how it got used to drum up support for all the interventions in the years since.
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/shufei/phlog/20210913-Pol-Anniversaries.gmi
There is some overlap between propaganda and public relations, marketing, and advertisement. Selling a product, as Ed Bernays realised, is best done by selling a lifestyle. If you want to sell more pianos, to take an example from his classic book Propaganda, you should begin by introducing the idea that every home should have a music room. Establishing that idea would take considerable effort. To begin with, Bernays suggests, arrange an exhibition of historic music rooms, and make a spectacular event by inviting some famous violinist to play a concert, then convince influential architects that every house should have a music room. Then, for those who have a music room the idea will appear spontaneously, and as if it were their own idea, that they should have a piano there.
All those indirect steps towards a distant goal. Propaganda techniques as of 1928, when Bernays' book was first published, were by no means trivial. Today we can expect even more sophistication.
Part six (this page)
Seventh part (information flow)
Part eleven (internet censorship)
Part twelve (conspiratorial thinking)
The Oxymoronist Media Guide is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This part first published on September 29, 2021