Propaganda is easy to defeat. Sunlight is all it takes. Once a person is aware that something is propaganda, it loses its effectiveness. Therefore, much of the battle in American politics is about credibility – propaganda has to look like real news. Crude attacks and distortions have to have a credible basis.
Americans are swimming in propaganda, blissfully unaware. But that’s another story. It doesn’t do any good to talk about it, because Americans also think that we are sterile like an operating room, and that propaganda is done by evil people in other lands. So it’s interesting to watch the propagandists at work, plying thier trade. It’s amazing how good they are at it. It’s instructive and disheartening all at once.
Sidenote: It’s also interesting how the science of propaganda is not taught on any college campus. Insiders like Rove and Luntz did not study propaganda in college. They learned on the job. But it’s an organized body of knowledge that is passed on from one generation to the the next and improved upon. It originated under the Wilson Administration to build support for our involvement in World War I. Practitioners were themselves surprised at how effective it was – there were riots in American towns, Germans, like current Muslims, cowered in fear.
The latest gimmick in the arsenal of the propagandist is the viral video. It has advantages – like catching a cold, by the time the host is aware of it, the virus has already taken hold. They spring up out of nowhere. No one starts them, but every blog and bored emailer spreads them. They can be as ugly and evil as they please, as no one is accountable, especially not the people who spread them.
I’m referring, of course, to the current video making the rounds of Barack Obama’s pastor having a royal rant. It’s hurting him – hurting him badly. And he can’t do a damned thing about it.
I’d be very surprised if the video wasn’t put out from one of two sources: the Clinton campaign, or the Republican Party that prefers to run against Clinton over Obama. But that’s another advantage of the viral video – deniability. Neither group needs even remotely be associated with the attack.
That’s American politics. We’re not a thoughtful lot. Most of us, when we vote, haven’t anymore than a vague collections of impressions about the candidates we support. In 2004 most people voted for either Kerry or Bush thinking that they held positions completely opposite their actual stands. We are the Paris Hilton of democracy – we look good, but there’s no meaningful mental activity registering.
The art of politics is to make impressions. Fleeting impressions – people aren’t going to be swayed by logical analysis or principled stands. They won’t take the time. So it doesn’t do any good that Obama put up a thoughtful reply to the viral video. Few will read it.
Well, I’m here to do my part. Here’s some information being put out by Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain:
John McCain was a legacy – he didn’t earn his way in the military. It was handed him on a platter by his grandfather and father. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. He lost a total of five aircraft while piloting, three due to pilot error. He spent a total of 20 hours in combat in Vetnam, and for that was awarded a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals. Most grunts passed through the military in far more danger, and got nothing in return save a dose of Agent Orange.
There are suspicions that McCain was given preferential treatment while in captivity in Vietnam due to his royal lineage (the Vietnamese thought they could use him as a bargaining chip), and that the Russians have evidence of this. Therefore, if elected president, Medvedev will have him over a barrel.
There. True, there’s no evidence beyond testimony of a shadowy group called Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, not officially connected with any campaign. McCain might be able to put up information to counter everything above, but in so doing he calls attention to it and gives it credibilty. The only thing he can hope to do is ignore it and hope it has no effect.
Like Kerry did.
Piece of Mindful 
Are these “viral videos” staged falsehoods filmed in some blacked theater, much like our landing on the moon?
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One quibble: I think the Wilson Administration itself learned the art of propaganda from previous generations. Wilson merely absorbed the lesson of the perfect textbook case less than two decades earlier: William Randolph Hearst, the destruction of the Maine in Havana’s harbor, and the power of yellow journalism–the talk radio of a bygone era–in spreading propaganda. And that wasn’t even the start; propaganda in American politics goes as far back as the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party. While the party didn’t survive, its language of virulently racist, anti-immigrant (and ultimately anti-union) sentiment lasts to this day and is successfully used by Republicans like Tom Tancredo to win elections.
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Tom Tancredo used to film fake border jumpers crossing the Rio Grand by his ranch outside of Gunnison Co on the Colorado River.
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A couple of points:
“Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations.” (Propaganda, by Jacques Ellul, circa 1960.) So Bush’s campaign to get us into Iraq using symbols and archetypes and manipulating our fear was classic propaganda. That’s different from just lying, which people do all the time though not in an organized fashion to manipulate other people and control behavior.
Rebecca – To be really effective, propaganda needs mass media. So Hearst could to it, and Wilson could do it becuase they had tools at their disposal. That really wasn’t possible in the early hisotry of our country. Propaganda as a an organized science didn’t really come into existence until George Creel headed the Committee on Public Information. A certain individual in jail in Germany admired Creel’s work and sought to expand upon it and refined it even further.
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I respectfully disagree. Anytime you have a group of people who want power, and a well-connected segment of the population in agreement with their ideals, certain notions about the way the world works will spread like a virus through the community. Maybe early political efforts (pamphlets, gatherings on the town square or in hired halls for the evening) are not the tidy, textbook definition of propaganda. However, they’re related in the same way the wheeled cart led to the automobile; they’re both vehicles for manipulation.
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Your comments got me ot re-reading Ellul’s “Propaganda”. I have a couple of interesting snippets which I will cite below.
Anyway, what you say is probably true, but it is like comparing a camp fire to a forest fire. People can be manipulated, governments manipulate them, always have, always will. But the science of propaganda, like advertising, was not studied, rigorized, quantified, and applied until the 20th century. Before that time, it was just smart people acting out their instincts.
Here’s a couple of snippets that caught my eye:
“Integration propaganda aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it. It is thus the preferred instrument of government, though properly speaking it is not exclusively political propaganda. Since 1930 the propaganda of the Soviet Union, as well as that, since the war, of all the People’s Republics, has been the propaganda of integration. But this type of propaganda can also be made by a group of organizations other than those of government, going in the same direction, more or less spontaneously, more or less planned by the state. The most important example of the use of such propaganda is the United States. Obviously, integration propaganda is much more subtle and complex than agitation propaganda. It seeks not a temporary excitement but a total molding of the person in depth. Here all psychological and opinion analyses must be utilized, as well as the mass media of communication. … Let us note one final aspect of integration propaganda: the more comfortable, cultivated, and informed the milieu to which it is addressed, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda.”
“Propaganda must be continuous and lasting – continuous in that it must not leave any gaps, but must fill the citizen’s whole day and all his days; lasting in that it must function over a very long period of time.”
Note that is not possible without mass media.
“The confusion between judgment of fact and judgment of value occurs at the level of these qualifications of fact and interpretation. For example: All bombings by the enemy are acts of savagery aimed only at civilian objectives, whereas all bombings by one’s own planes are proof of one’s superiority, and they never destroy anything but military objectives. Similarly, when another government shows good will, it is a sign of weakness; when it shows authority, it wants war or dictatorship.”
“The propagandist is never asked to be involved in what he is saying, for, if it becomes necessary, he may be asked to say the exact opposite with similar conviction. He must, of course, believe the cause he serves, but not in his particular argument.”
That last one is interesting, because when watching the Bushies on Iraq, and as one lie after another fell apart, they merely moved on to new lies. They never really believed in WMD’s or Saddam-as-ultimate-evil, but they did believe in their cause, and would advance any argument to further it.
Read the book – fascinating – it’s been years ago for me, but I think I’m due to re-read it. It reminds me of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” in that it is a frank and unapologetic analysis of how governments and leaders use tools at their disposal to control thier subjects. It’s completely amoral. “Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”, by Jacques Ellul, 1966. He studied the three major propaganda centers at that time – China, the USSR, and the US. As a Frenchman, he had detachment from all.
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I think this quote was the most interesting of all the ones you cited:
Let us note one final aspect of integration propaganda: the more comfortable, cultivated, and informed the milieu to which it is addressed, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda.
It makes me think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and America’s popular distaste of nerds, geeks, wonks, and eggheads. Journalists (yes, even those liberal mainstream media ones, for any Republicans reading this) all liked Bush; he wasn’t an “intellectual”, he wasn’t pretentious. He was the guy you could hang out with on Air Force One. Al Gore? They made it seem like he was the kid who was deservedly hung by his underpants from the nearest coat hook back in school and, given a chance, most American adults would want to do that to him again.
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Aha! We are in agreement.
Ellul was adamant that intellectuals were the most susceptible to propaganda. They feel a strong need to have an opinion on everything. They indulge in constant self-education – they literally need propaganda and self-indoctrinate. But they are also drawn to power. They feel a need to separate from the rabble. Their greatest fear is to be one of us.
All that said, the men behind (Reagan and) Bush are well aware of the public’s disdain for pointy-heads. They looked long and hard for a man like Bush – he had many drawbacks, but in the end they thought him affable and charming enough to pull it off. Democrats unknowingly shoot themselves in the foot when they castigate Bush for being stupid. It plays right into their hands.
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Not to be contrary again, but I should probably finish my thought about China’s Cultural Revolution. To achieve his goal, Mao murdered many of the country’s intellectuals and sent the rest to work on farms in the rural provinces as part of their “re-education”. Surely this example disproves Ellul’s theory about intellectuals and the spread of propaganda?
Mao was successful and he used the peasant class. I understand China is part of Ellul’s work, but its example runs counter to the behavior of cultures and governments that are central to (or in the case of Russia, exposed to) Western civilization. The Chinese have a long tradition of revering their scholars and listening to their teachings; Mao knew this, and was very nearly successful in eradicating this class as a whole. On the other hand, Euro-Americans are attached to the notion of the “noble savage”, from romanticizing members of the Native American tribes we conquered or, as in modern politics, allowing corn farmers in Iowa to determine the issues at the start of a presidential campaign cycle. We loves ourselves some peasants!
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That’s really interesting. What was Mao doing when he consigned the intellectuals to the farms if not re-indoctrinating the intellectuals? But I think he was ham-handed – propaganda in tyrannical states is much more blunt than in more liberal countries. In China and Russia peasants could look at their shoes and know they were being lied to and go about their business anyway. It was danerous not to. The intellectual classes glommed on to power just as they do here, and Mao took them to task for becoming too fancy.
Here in our country, we really have to believe in who we are and what we do. So integration propaganda is critical to our existence. We are schooled from birth on the superiority of our way of life – it comes to us from our teachers, our entertainment, and for those with higher-minded ideals, from the intellectual centers. Americans really believe their propaganda, and that is a real accomplishment. Ours is a most sophisticated system of indoctrination.
Maybe we aren’t communicating in that I don’t think it necessarily takes intellectuals to spread propaganda. They could be a hindrance, and some (though damed few) are. As a class they need to be controlled, just like the peasants. Ellul’s point was that they were much easier to control than peasants. He refuted the notion that education was the antidote to propaganda – he said it was its most cherished vehicle.
Anyway, propaganda must align itself to the society in which it is bred – American propaganda would not have worked so well in China under Mao. They were not accustomed to the illusion that they thought for themselves. Mass applications worked well there. The thing that changed both China and Russia was mass communication – they simply became aware of the way other people lived, and wanted something better for themselves. The Russian dictatorship evaporated due to sunlight (and cheap oil).
A most enjoyable discussion. You seem well-versed on Mao and China. I’ve read a little about it – I at least know what the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution were all about. That’s about it.
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BTW – I read your bio. Very interesting person. And my birthday present last year from my oldest daughter was a trip to see a live David Sedaris performance. The guy’s priceless.
And let the record show that I am one who gloms on to just about everything I can read, and am highly susceptible to propaganda. I’m the most likely victim, though I am not by any means an intellectual. So I talk about “them” with great caution.
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I met Sedaris when he came to Missoula for a reading a few years ago and, predictably, I made an ass of myself.
“Seem” would be the key word there about my knowledge of Mao and China. Now that I know our pal Checker 5 graduated with a summa cum laude in history, I’m depressed. You see, I did too. I guess the degree’s only worth the paper it’s printed on. Either that, or she’s full of it. My money’s on the latter.
Joking aside, if you want to learn more about Mao and 20th century China, read fiction. Seriously. Ha Jin is one of the country’s (and modern lit’s) best writers. His award-winning work explores the impact of communism and the Cultural Revolution on both society and the individual.
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