What Is Propaganda? (1944)
historians.org
historians.org
> To give an illustration, the American attitude toward Germany was not bitterly hostile in the early months of World War I. But when the Lusitania was torpedoed in May 1915, with loss of 128 American lives, anger against the Central Powers mush roomed overnight.
This is claimed to be an example of events overruling propaganda. That isn't the right way to think when critically evaluating propaganda:
1) The idea that these 128 lives are different from any other 128 lives in, say, Central Africa is precisely a result of propaganda. Arguably the beneficial kind.
2) The US is perfectly capable of absorbing ~100 odd deaths and then just moving on. The idea that they aren't is propaganda.
3) The US population has demonstrated relatively little ability to control the military's adventurism. It may have been different pre-WWI, but we should at least suspect someone important thought that they would profit from the US being involved and was trying to fire people up. The US, as in all democracies, have some wickedly effective propagandists who work ceaselessly to shape public opinion.
We know for a fact that the media can't cover most events. Historians don't know about most events. Choosing the events that will be admissible in the public conversation is one of the key tools of propaganda.
That is the kind of relativism that doesn't hold water. To make it very simple: I value my life higher than yours or mostly anyone else's life. Or with different words I care for my life more than I care for yours. No offence!
You can expand that to my family vs some other family, then going on to "tribe" and to country/race, whatever. The further away you get the less I care and doing otherwise involves propaganda. That is also obvious since you need to focus your care.
It is en vogue to pretend otherwise and to care for some people you know the least which involves the inversion of care. You care for people you don't know more than you care for people close(r) to you. In a certain environment this is actually easier, but it involves this kind of propaganda, since people are acting against their own good.
> We know for a fact that the media can't cover most events. Historians don't know about most events. Choosing the events that will be admissible in the public conversation is one of the key tools of propaganda.
This is what I mean with "care more/less". You can't cover all events and therefore you're concentrating on matters closer to you, but with media this comes with a twist of course since they are the carrier of propaganda (intentional or not and true for any).
We're not talking about people caring more about their family and neighbours than someone in Central Africa (or England, since we're talking about WWI) though. We're talking about people being extremely angry about people born hundred or even thousands of miles away that they would never have met dying even further away in circumstances they'd never find themselves in, because the news points out that unlike the much larger number of fellow white English-speaking Christians that might be very distant relatives dying in the same faraway conflict (and on the same boat) they're American...
Germans and Poles are more similar to each other than Indians and Colombians.
Even that there is the result a couple centuries of propaganda. Again, propaganda isn't false, just promoting a certain viewpoint or perception. That you share anything with people living hundreds of miles away in one direction, but not in another, is not a conclusion you came to without help.
(I say this as a Brit who thinks that the US speeding up the end of the conflict was a good thing, Fwiw)
The sinking of a passenger liner with 128 lives lost is going to be news with or without higher direction, and we are always tuned to the unusual and particularly gruesome even if the actual harm is minimal in the grand scheme of things. See an airplane crash vs the daily deaths on our roads.
The US public on mass are regularly revealed to be completely horrible. They've looked past countless tragedies because it would be inconvenient to acknowledge them. It happens almost weekly; there is a lot going wrong in the world that the US kinda shrugs off. Much of it their fault to a first or second order approximation. They are totally capable of overlooking 100 murders if they don't also think that there is something to be gained by sending the army out.
Consider the situation vs. Iraq as an example. Powerful people wanted the war. As soon as there was a half-plausible narrative they sent troops in. It wasn't the narrative that led to the going in, the narrative removed a blocker to stopping the political forces that were trying to trigger the war. That is very much the layer of the world where propaganda happens.
EDIT And just to try and articulate myself a bit more clearly, because I distracted myself with the interesting story in [1] - the US has well developed propaganda systems for building these events up into a justification for war that may, or may not, spin up depending on the assessed need of whoever organises the media. The fact that the German propaganda system was inferior to the Anglosphere propaganda system on its home turf doesn't tell us much about the limits of propaganda. The Germans were dealing with an aggressive society [2] that was extremely good at finding a cause for war and then broadcasting it. But nevertheless the underlying cynicism of the English speaking world is very clear if you look for it - the official "why we are doing this" is almost always propaganda over the top of "this will be a profitable venture for the people making the decision to go to war".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 "shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor" -> "All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Larry McDonald, a United States representative" -> "Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on September 15, 1983, to revoke the license of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines to operate flights to and from the United States". No war broke out. via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
[2] I mean, seriously, the British had the empire that the sun never sets on, the US has the Not An Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets They Are Just Random Military Bases and if you ask they got it by a continuous series of defensive moves. One shudders to think what it would be called if the same thing was done by people with the wrong passport.
The exact opposite is true. Every organism on this planet instinctively cares about itself and its family/close relations more than the abstract concept of its species – if it even has such an abstract concept to begin with. Universalism is a viewpoint that has spread, or propagated, however.
Their genes could not have detected they were supposed to get angry about those 128 people as opposed to 128 random Europeans. A lot of US people probably had more in common with the Germans than the ship's passengers, given the US's large contingent of ex-Germans at the time.
The idea that some people have a magic label that makes them important is, 100%, due to propaganda. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying it is unreasonable, but it takes a lot of social effort expended to maintain the label.
[0] Although I will acknowledge a lot of hand-waving given the state of US citizenship law around WWI, but I think the point about propaganda is solid even if that is accounted for properly. The US is not defined by people with a long shared history, or close family ties. And if it is, at the time we're talking the roots of those things led back to Europe.
You'll find that you haven't actually addressed that point. Unless you are suggesting that the US was so inbred that all of them were close family members and relations of the people onboard the ship [0]. There isn't any way to know that you're in the same group as those randoms without some serious social legwork explaining that the group exists to everyone, slowly, multiple times, over an extended period. The technical term for that explaining is propaganda. It isn't a truth of natural law, it is very much a social construct.
[0] And, even if they were, there'd still be a lot of connection to other European countries like Germany by similar logic.
Again, I really, truly, have absolutely no clue as to why this is so difficult to understand. People can feel a connection to others that they share characteristics with, without it being a deliberate, top-down propagandistic effort.
And as I said in my original comment, the opposite thing (universalism) is actually what must be propagandized [1] in order to spread, as tribalism is, for lack of a better word, the "default."
1. I'm not using the word in a negative sense here, as I generally think it's a good thing.
English, the language of England? European culture, with a heavy and detectable German tradition? Population with a history of maybe a century or so in America and millennia of habitation mainly on the Eurasian landmass + Africa?
It probably took a lot of propaganda to forge an independent US identity out of that and make it care enough about a small number of deaths to take it personally instead of just interpreting it as more-or-less-the-same-people squabbling violently. The only thing your argument that it occurred naturally has going for it is geography - and the US is damn huge so I don't think that is persuasive.
I mean, we all love the US sense of togetherness. But it took (and takes) a lot of work to make it happen and it is purposefully nurtured and backed up by a lot of organised propaganda.
How the mighty have fallen.
OK, maybe not sports and weather. Everything else, though.
Same as "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
Edward Bernays opening wiki paragraph:
> Edward Louis Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.
> "Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are."
«Сила правительства держится на невежестве народа, и оно знает это и потому всегда будет бороться против просвещения.» Лев Толстой (1896)
It's not about tzarism in Russia and not about XIX century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publicity_Department_of_the_Ch...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Propaganda_Department_...
In the case of the article, Assata Shakur's "nobody will give you the education you need to overthrow them" applies, where it's just enough info about propaganda techniques to manage them, but not enough to fight or make them yourself.
And for that matter, it's not like propagandists are dumb, any more than pop musicians are bad musicians. It's absolutely possible for one for formulate an original idea in the service of propaganda.
Original ideas can be in service to propaganda, but preferring them imposes a cost that is higher than what most propaganda needs for scale. Your argument is misleading and neutralizing noise and not a counterpoint. Innoculating people to propaganda with humour and dead ideas is probably the most practical way to mitigate its more pernicious effects.
Of course great musicians can be employed to make pop, but when the message is the same, it's like using IMAX to produce porn. See any music awards show.
"Tank man" is a great example. In nearly 35 years it hasn't lost it's lustre, and it regularly gets trotted out to drum up sentiment against China.
They have the critical thinking skills but lack the desire to use them in some circumstances.
There are other people who lack education who also lack critical thinking motivation and all variations of this matrix. I'm just saying it's a huge mistake to assume intelligent, educated people are somehow immune from propaganda.
Only book that ever gave me nightmares.
What I can agree is any information shift your beliefs. I can agree that any update of beliefs is beneficial for some entity. I can probably agree that any source has an agenda and tries to shift your beliefs for someone's benefit.
But if we conclude from that that everything is propaganda it would be a loser's thing to do.
Facts are meant to shift your beliefs. Beliefs are meant to be shifted by facts. The trouble when your beliefs are manipulated so they lose coherence with a reality. While they reflect reality without major mistakes, they are good.
So I'd say that propagandness of a source is a measure of my cognitive efforts needed to not let my beliefs to slip from a good enough picture of a reality while consuming information from that source.
It is not rigorous enough definition, but it is a good starting point.
Pick a few sources and stick with them. Pick carefully, they must be a professional media. They must separate opinions and facts. They must avoid emotional arguments and judgements. They must check facts and communicate the quality of their checks if they are not completely sure.
If you watch them over a prolonged period of time, you'll learn their biases. You'll learn their tricks and systematic failures. In some cases you can even learn biases of individual reporters. When you know biases you can correct them, either by thought alone or by a few google queries.
You need a big overpowering emotion first. Therefore...
Step 1 is fear. Scare everybody.
Step 2 is the actual propaganda. A story about what to fear, who to fear, why you are feeling this fear, etc.
Maybe you've seen this pattern before.
> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”[2]
> Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
> Interestingly, several of these features run directly counter to the conventional wisdom on effective influence and communication from government or defense sources, which traditionally emphasize the importance of truth, credibility, and the avoidance of contradiction.[3] Despite ignoring these traditional principles, Russia seems to have enjoyed some success under its contemporary propaganda model, either through more direct persuasion and influence or by engaging in obfuscation, confusion, and the disruption or diminution of truthful reporting and messaging.
* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
This has been picked up by some other folks:
* https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzxqj/steve-bannon-jan-6-tr...
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...
For a history of propaganda, the book Munitions of the Mind by Philip M. Taylor may be of some interest (the third edition was published in 2003, so covers up to 9/11):
I think the use of inconsistency and outright contradiction 'works' not so much in pushing a specific message but by making all messages seem equally suspect to people who don't have time to check every claim. The more contradictory messages out there, the more people just disbelieve everything and disconnect -- which may be the goal.
That can invalidate a lot of assumptions.