Sorting Out Propaganda

by John Thompson

05/18/04

Propaganda--is any other word as misused as this one? So many people are prepared to automatically dismiss any argument or fact they disagree with as ‘propaganda’, and it is hardly ever true.

It is true that propaganda exists, and has certainly been used in the 20^th Century. It is also used today, but--despite what sundry ‘Progressives’ and Noam Chomsky myth addicts (or what my fellow conservatives who insist the media is entirely dominated by the ‘Left’) believe, it is simply not possible for propaganda to develop in a liberal democratic society.

Yet propaganda does exist in the modern world, and it is as ugly as it ever was. What got me thinking about the subject was a collection of editorial cartoons from sundry Arab (and even a couple of European) newspapers. Propaganda normally revolves around the use of symbols and some really ugly ones have re-appeared almost 60 years after Hitler’s prime hate-monger was executed for being the swine that he was.

There is really only one classic book on propaganda, and not too many people are familiar with it. Jacques Ellul’s 1961 masterpiece Propaganda and the Formation of Men’s Attitudes came highly recommended by some real experts--Soviet instructors inside the USSR’s schools for Foreign Communist Party members praised the book quite highly, and some of the Western World’s greatest experts on psychological warfare embraced Ellul’s principles as they sought for means to undo propagandistic conditioning.

Nowadays, 40-year-old books by European intellectuals only tend to get looked over by the most obtuse eggheads [such as this columnist, ed.], which is a shame. So, for all those bibliophobes out there, Ellul pointed out the essential characteristics of propaganda.

First, propaganda has to be total. There can be no escaping the message as it is prevalent on all forms of media, and throughout society--where teachers, preachers, union leaders and all manner of social organizations are harnessed to the propagandist’s service. Secondly, propaganda has to be seamless, in that no discontinuity or effective counter message can seep through within the propagandist’s system.

It is also crucial that the target audience (whom the propagandist must know full well) become self-acting, and capable of screening out contrary messages for themselves. This usually means that the propagandized citizens must already be partial to the thrust of the message and willing to listen to it, and that those who dislike the message will remain mute.

Finally, propaganda works best when it prepares symbols that the public will understand, and then manipulates those symbols to achieve a desired effect.

Noam Chomsky’s desperate arguments notwithstanding, it is impossible to conduct a propaganda campaign inside a country with full press freedom. Actually, it isn’t quite impossible--the Western democracies did undertake a propaganda campaign for the ‘home front’ during the First and Second World wars, but this required the voluntary cooperation of the media. This prerequisite is extremely difficult to achieve except during matters of national survival. Inside the Western World, we normally operate with continuous acrimony and debate between all sectors of society; so say what you like about ‘spin doctors’ and ‘massaging the message’, it is still not propaganda no matter how much you dislike the Bush Administration, or Greenpeace, or whomever.

So, if you want to look for propaganda--look for societies where the Press is not free, where governments (or society itself) can use official censorship or the threat of harm to keep newspaper columnists and television spokespersons under some sort of control. Look for societies where particular symbols are easily accepted, it is there that you will find propaganda at work.

In Nazi publications and German newspapers, newsreels, posters, ‘educational’ materials, etc), much use was made of cartoons from Julius Streicher--the Nazis’ vitriolic and foremost hate monger. These depicted Jews as hook-nosed greasy fellows with grasping hands, and always engaged in some act of villainy or other. They had the effect first of dehumanizing Jews (particularly after Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels directed his film crews to look for Jews who came closest to the Streicher stereotypes), and then made the Holocaust possible.

I’ve just seen numerous examples of the Streicher ‘Jew’ back in action--in the editorial pages, television cartoons and posters of parts of the Islamic World. Again, these figures are all duplicitous, cruel, grasping and wicked; unconsciously inviting those exposed to them to think that all Jews are this way all the time. But then, look at the television news from the Arab World, the newspaper columns and the voices of intellectuals, all repeating similar messages. There is propaganda in the world, and it is not coming from us…

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca