Propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.
Beginning in the twentieth century, the English term propaganda became associated with a manipulative approach, but historically, propaganda had been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions, ideologies or concepts.
A wide range of materials and media are used for conveying propaganda messages, which changed as new technologies were invented, including paintings, cartoons, posters, pamphlets, films, radio shows, TV shows, and websites. More recently, the digital age has given rise to new ways of disseminating propaganda, for example, in computational propaganda, bots and algorithms are used to manipulate public opinion, e.g., by creating fake or biased news to spread it on social media or using chatbots to mimic real people in discussions in social networks.
Etymology
Propaganda is a modern Latin word, the neuter plural gerundive form of propagare, meaning 'to spread' or 'to propagate', thus propaganda means the things which are to be propagated. Originally this word derived from a new administrative body of the Catholic Church created in 1622 as part of the Counter-Reformation, called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or informally simply Propaganda. Its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.From the 1790s, the term began being used also to refer to propaganda in secular activities. In English, the cognate began taking a pejorative or negative connotation in the mid-19th century, when it was used in the political sphere.
Non-English cognates of propaganda as well as some similar non-English terms retain neutral or positive connotations. For example, in official party discourse, xuanchuan is treated as a more neutral or positive term, though it can be used pejoratively through protest or other informal settings within China.
Definitions
Historian Arthur Aspinall observed that newspapers were not expected to be independent organs of information when they began to play an important part in political life in the late 1700s, but were assumed to promote the views of their owners or government sponsors. In the 20th century, the term propaganda emerged along with the rise of mass media, including newspapers and radio. As researchers began studying the effects of media, they used suggestion theory to explain how people could be influenced by emotionally-resonant persuasive messages. Harold Lasswell provided a broad definition of the term propaganda, writing it as: "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." Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell theorize that propagandaand persuasion are linked as humans use communication as a form of soft power through the development and cultivation of propaganda materials.
In a 1929 literary debate with Edward Bernays, Everett Dean Martin argues that, "Propaganda is making puppets of us. We are moved by hidden strings which the propagandist manipulates." In the 1920s and 1930s, propaganda was sometimes described as all-powerful. For example, Bernays acknowledged in his book Propaganda that "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
NATO's 2011 guidance for military public affairs defines propaganda as "information, ideas, doctrines, or special appeals disseminated to influence the opinion, emotions, attitudes, or behaviour of any specified group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly". More recently the RAND Corporation coined the term Firehose of Falsehood to describe how modern communication capabilities enable a large number of messages to be broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels without regard for truth or consistency.
History
Primitive forms of propaganda have been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. In the New Kingdom of Egypt's military ideology, the concept of a "Clean Victory" functioned as a strategic form of state propaganda, emphasizing the preservation of Ma’at rather than faithfully recording the realities of war. Egyptologists observe that temple reliefs were carefully regulated to omit depictions of violence against non-combatants, instead framing the Pharaoh as an ideal masculine protector whose disciplined forces avoided the chaotic excesses seen in contemporary Near Eastern records. This sanitised record was often paired with the active rewriting of history, most notably in Ramesses II's accounts of the Battle of Kadesh, where a tactical stalemate was re-imagined as a unilateral triumph achieved through the King’s sole divine intervention. To reinforce this hierarchy, artists utilised hierarchical scaling, depicting the Pharaoh as vastly larger than both his enemies and his own troops to visually manifest his supreme authority. Ultimately, these displays functioned as symbolic warfare; iconic motifs like the smiting of the enemy, are associated with the Pharaoh's role in crushing chaos and preserving the Egyptian state.The Behistun Inscription detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne is viewed by most historians as an early example of propaganda. Another striking example of propaganda during ancient history is the last Roman civil wars during which Octavian and Mark Antony blamed each other for obscure and degrading origins, cruelty, cowardice, oratorical and literary incompetence, debaucheries, luxury, drunkenness and other slanders. This defamation took the form of uituperatio which was decisive for shaping the Roman public opinion at this time. Another early example of propaganda was from Genghis Khan. The emperor would send some of his men ahead of his army to spread rumors to the enemy. In many cases, his army was actually smaller than his opponents'.
Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I was the first ruler to utilize the power of the printing press for propaganda – in order to build his image, stir up patriotic feelings in the population of his empire and influence the population of his enemies. Propaganda during the Reformation, helped by the spread of the printing press throughout Europe, and in particular within Germany, caused new ideas, thoughts, and doctrine to be made available to the public in ways that had never been seen before the 16th century. During the era of the American Revolution, the American colonies had a flourishing network of newspapers and printers who specialized in the topic on behalf of the Patriots. Academic Barbara Diggs-Brown conceives that the negative connotations of the term "propaganda" are associated with the earlier social and political transformations that occurred during the French Revolutionary period movement of 1789 to 1799 between the start and the middle portion of the 19th century, in a time when the word started to be used in a nonclerical and political context.
File:LeafletToTampere1918.jpg|thumb|left|A 1918 Finnish propaganda leaflet signed by General Mannerheim circulated by the Whites urging the Reds to surrender during the Finnish Civil War.
The first large-scale and organised propagation of government propaganda was occasioned by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. After the defeat of Germany, military officials such as General Erich Ludendorff suggested that British propaganda had been instrumental in their defeat. Adolf Hitler came to echo this view, believing that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918. In Mein Kampf Hitler expounded his theory of propaganda, which provided a powerful base for his rise to power in 1933. Historian Robert Ensor explains that "Hitler...puts no limit on what can be done by propaganda; people will believe anything, provided they are told it often enough and emphatically enough, and that contradicters are either silenced or smothered in calumny." This was to be true in Germany and backed up with their army making it difficult to allow other propaganda to flow in. Most propaganda in Nazi Germany was produced by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels mentions propaganda as a way to see through the masses. Symbols are used towards propaganda such as justice, liberty and one's devotion to one's country. World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, building on the experience of WWI, by Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive, as well as the United States Office of War Information.
In the early 20th century, the invention of motion pictures gave propaganda-creators a powerful tool for advancing political and military interests when it came to reaching a broad segment of the population and creating consent or encouraging rejection of the real or imagined enemy. In the years following the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet government sponsored the Russian film industry with the purpose of making propaganda films. In WWII, Nazi filmmakers produced highly emotional films to create popular support for occupying the Sudetenland and attacking Poland. The 1930s and 1940s, which saw the rise of totalitarian states and the Second World War, are arguably the "Golden Age of Propaganda". Leni Riefenstahl, a filmmaker working in Nazi Germany, created one of the best-known propaganda movies, Triumph of the Will. In 1942, the propaganda song Niet Molotoff was made in Finland during the Continuation War, making fun of the Red Army's failure in the Winter War, referring the song's name to the Soviet's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov. In the US, animation became popular, especially for winning over youthful audiences and aiding the U.S. war effort, e.g., Der Fuehrer's Face, which ridicules Hitler and advocates the value of freedom. Some American war films in the early 1940s were designed to create a patriotic mindset and convince viewers that sacrifices needed to be made to defeat the Axis powers. Others were intended to help Americans understand their Allies in general, as in films like Know Your Ally: Britain and Our Greek Allies. Apart from its war films, Hollywood did its part to boost American morale in a film intended to show how stars of stage and screen who remained on the home front were doing their part not just in their labors, but also in their understanding that a variety of peoples worked together against the Axis menace: Stage Door Canteen features one segment meant to dispel Americans' mistrust of the Soviets, and another to dispel their bigotry against the Chinese. Polish filmmakers in Great Britain created the anti-Nazi color film Calling Mr. Smith about Nazi crimes in German-occupied Europe and about lies of Nazi propaganda.
The John Steinbeck novel The Moon Is Down, about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was presumed to be about Norway's response to the German occupiers. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
The West and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, television, and radio programming to influence their own citizens, each other, and Third World nations. Through a front organization called the Bedford Publishing Company, the CIA through a covert department called the Office of Policy Coordination disseminated over one million books to Soviet readers over the span of 15 years, including novels by George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, and Pasternak in an attempt to promote anti-communist sentiment and sympathy of Western values. George Orwell's contemporaneous novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four'' portray the use of propaganda in fictional dystopian societies. During the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro stressed the importance of propaganda. Propaganda was used extensively by Communist forces in the Vietnam War as means of controlling people's opinions.
During the Yugoslav wars, propaganda was used as a military strategy by governments of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Croatia. Propaganda was used to create fear and hatred, and particularly to incite the Serb population against the other ethnicities. Serb media made a great effort in justifying, revising or denying mass war crimes committed by Serb forces during these wars.