Propaganda

The American Historian Howard Zinn wrote - If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

In this day and age we are exposed to lots of amount of propaganda some of which is used for the purpose of manipulating us into thinking and acting in ways which only furthers the interest of small minorities.

Propaganda can be defined as a type of persuasion tactic which displays three general characteristics:

1) Propaganda is deliberately made by an individual or group of individuals called propagandist for the purpose of manipulating individual into adapting certain ideas and behaviour.

2) Propaganda never presents an issue in clear and unbiased manner. Instead propaganda attempts present one side of an issue as if it were a absolute truth.

Adolf  Hitler with the help of his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels implemented one of the most massive propaganda campaign of 20^th century captures this characteristics with the following words-

The function of propaganda is not to make an object study of truth and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its taste is to serve our own right always and unflinchingly.

3) Propaganda tends to use psychological manipulation tactics and play on the emotions and prejudices of individuals so as to convince to that the ideas, actions or attitudes they adopted was one they chose through their own personal volition.

This last feature of propaganda is what can make it specially dangerous

Jacques Ellul provided a chilling description of the individual whose personality has been thoroughly molded by the porpogandists. He says – When he recites his propaganda lesson and says that he is thinking for himself, when his eyes see nothing and his mouth only produces sounds previously stencilled into his brain, when he says that he is indeed expressing his judgment – then he really demonstrates that he no longer thinks at all, ever, and that he does not exist as a person.”  

It should be noted that as a persuasion tactic propaganda is value neutral or in other words neither good nor bad.

The 20th century propaganda theorist Harold Lasswell wrote that “ Propaganda as a tool is no more moral or immoral than a pump handle”

While propaganda is merely a tool, moral judgements can be made regarding the ends for which the propaganda is used and it is because propaganda has so often being used for various purposed, today it is considered as end in end of itself.

Philip Taylor differentiates Education and propaganda. Propaganda tells people what to think while education teaches people how to think.However as education system have long being used to disseminate propaganda the distinction between education and propaganda is often blurry. As a persuasion tactic propaganda is one form or another been used for virtually the entire course of human history.

20th century is considered important turning point in the history of propaganda as it was during this period that the so called modern propagandist emerged.

What differentiates modern propagandists from all early forms of propagandist is the use of mass media as example radio, tv as a medium to disseminate propaganda.

One of the most present types of propaganda is the political propaganda. Political propaganda is used by a political organisation or state to achieve for the purpose of altering the ideas and behaviour of individuals in order to achieve certain political or economic ends. All propaganda is vertical propaganda in the sense that it is made by a propagandist who creates and implements propaganda which  stands over and above ignorant people.

People usually assume that political propagandists mainly consist of lies fabricated and extreme distortion of reality. But Ellul pointed out that although political parties sometimes consist of big lies, but modern political propagandist more often than not are committed to use of true facts. In other words, true facts are chosen and provided to the public yet onlt for the purpose of supplementing and substantially false and distorted interpretation of events.

The reason behind this tactic is that at no one questions the interpretation put forth by the propagandist, the propagandist can provide evidence that the facts they presented were true and therefore fool the public into thinking that their interpretations must also be true.

We will conclude by citing Ellul.

“Propaganda is necessarily false when it interprets it and colours facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretence and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with the fact”