Propaganda

[ilbegone]

Propaganda.

It quite often rears its head in many places.

Governments, movements, campuses, causes of every stripe - from the far right to the far left, both extreme sides of the immigration issue, places where only one point of view is tolerated.

The most recent attempt is all that obvious bald faced lying coming out of both the administration and its departments caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. Somehow they just can't come clean.

And no, there is not a white racist under every rock just as not everyone with a brown skin and Spanish last name is an illegal alien.

PROPAGANDA

Propaganda is the child of conflicting belief, and of people's determination to spread their own doctrines against all others... It is in essence biased, being most successful when it appeals to hatred and prejudice. It is the antithesis of all honest education and information.

To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed informational arena, it can mobilize all means of communication - printed, spoken, artistic, and visual - and press its claims to maximum advantage...

In the 20th century, the scope for propaganda was dramatically expanded by the advent of new media, such as film, radio, and TV: by the techniques of marketing, mass persuasion, commercial advertising, and 'PR': by the appearance of utopian ideologies; and the art of 'the Big Lie' was pioneered by the Bolsheviks. Lenin, after Plekhanov, distinguished between the high powered propagandist, who devised strategy, and the low level agitator, who put it into practice. Where Soviet agitprop led, the Fascists were quick to follow.

Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:

1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation of "Good and Bad", "Friend and Foe".

2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.

3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.

4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one's viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star performers, by social pressure, and by 'psychological contagion'.

5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same message in different variations and combinations.

From page 500 (hardback) EUROPE, a history book by Norman Davies, Oxford Press.