Background: If you have seen a clip of Goebbels speaking, it is likely the conclusion to this speech, taken from Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 rally, Triumph des Willens. Goebbels gave a speech each year at the Nuremberg Rally, often focusing on propaganda. Here he presents Nazi propaganda as the model for the rest of the world, calling it the "backgroud music" to government policy.

The source: Der Kongress zur Nürnberg 1934 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), pp. 130-141.

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Goebbels at Nuremberg — 1934

by Joseph Goebbels
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It is difficult to define the concept of propaganda thoroughly and precisely. This is especially true since, in past decades, it was subject to unfavorable, and in part extraordinarily hostile, definitions, on the part of us Germans. First, then, we must defend it. Those abroad sometimes claim that in the past we Germans were particularly knowledgeable in this area, and knew how to apply it, but that unfortunately is not consistent with the facts. We learned the consequences of our neglect all too clearly during the World War. While the enemy states produced unprecedented atrocity propaganda aimed at Germany throughout the whole world, we did nothing and were completely defenseless against it. Only when enemy foreign propaganda had nearly won over the greater part even of the neutral states did the German government begin to sense the enormous power of propaganda. It was too late. Just as we were militarily and economically unprepared for the war, so too with propaganda. We lost the war in this area more than in any other.

The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing. Even today, large parts of world opinion are convinced that the typical characteristics of German propaganda are lying, crudeness, reversing the facts, and the like. One needs only to remember the stories that were spread throughout the world at the beginning of the war about German soldiers chopping off children's hands and crucifying women to realize that Germany then was a defenseless victim of this campaign of calumny. It neither had nor used any means of defense.

The concept of propaganda has undergone a fundamental transformation, particularly as the result of political practice in Germany. Throughout the world today, people are beginning to see that a modern state, whether democratic or authoritarian, cannot withstand the subterranean forces of anarchy and chaos without propaganda. It is not only a matter of doing the right thing; the people must understand that the right thing is the right thing. Propaganda includes everything that helps the people to realize this.

Political propaganda in principle is active and revolutionary. It is aimed at the broad masses. It speaks the language of the people because it wants to be understood by the people. Its task is the highest creative art of putting sometimes complicated events and facts in a way simple enough to be understood by the man on the street. Its foundation is that there is nothing the people cannot understand, but rather things must be put in a way that they can understand. It is a question of making it clear to him by using the proper approach, evidence, and language.

Propaganda is a means to an end. Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the tasks and goals of a superior leadership. If propaganda is to succeed, it must know what it wants. It must keep a clear and firm goal in mind, and seek the appropriate means and methods to reach that goal. Propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.

Propaganda must be creative. It is by no means a matter for the bureaucracy or official administration, but rather it is a matter of productive fantasy. The genuine propagandist must be a true artist. He must be a master of the popular soul, using it as an instrument to express the majesty of a genuine and unified political will. Propaganda can be pro or con. In neither case does it have to be negative. The only thing that is important is whether or not its words are true and genuine expressions of a people’s values. During its period of opposition, the National Socialist movement proved that criticism can be constructive, indeed, that in a time which the government is in the hands of destructive powers it may be the only constructive element.

The concept of public enlightenment is fundamentally different. It is fundamentally defensive and evolutionary. It does not hammer or drum. It is moderate in tone, seeking to teach. It explains, clarifies, and informs. It is, therefore, used more often by a government than by the opposition. The National Socialist state, growing out of a revolution, had the task of centrally leading both propaganda and education, uniting two concepts that are related but not identical, molding them into a unity that in the long term can serve the government and people.

Even during the time when we were in the opposition, we succeeded in rescuing the concept of propaganda from disfavor or contempt. Since then, we have transformed it into a truly creative art. It was our sharpest weapon in conquering the state. It remains our sharpest weapon in defending and building the state. Although this is perhaps still not clear to the rest of the world, it was obvious to us that we had to use the weapon with which we had conquered the state to defend the state. Otherwise we faced the danger that we could lose the people even though we had power, and that, without the people, we would lose power. We put what we had learned during our attack on the November pseudo-state in the service of our state. The great wealth of ideas and never failing creativity of our propaganda, proven during our struggle for power, was perfected to the last detail. Now we turned it to serve the state itself, to find meaningful ways and flexible forms to influence the people's thinking. The people should share the concerns and successes of its government. Its concerns and successes must therefore be constantly presented and hammered into the people so that it will consider the concerns and successes of its government to be its concerns and successes. Only an authoritarian government, firmly tied to the people, can do this over the long term. Political propaganda, the art of anchoring the things of the state in the broad masses so that the whole nation will feel a part of them, cannot therefore remain merely a means to the goal of winning power. It must become a means of building and keeping power.

This requires alert attention to the events of the day, and a trained and lively creativity that must include a complete knowledge of the soul of the people. The people must be understood in its deepest depths, or intuitively understood, for only then can one speak in a way that the people will understand. Propaganda must be the science of the soul of the people. It requires an organized and purposeful system if it is to be successful in the long run.

That is what we lacked during the war. That is where our enemy was superior to us. We must make up for that. We must take the techniques and dominance of the other side's opinion apparatus. Which is all they really had, and fill it with the fire of the soul and the glow of new ideas.

Propaganda, too, has a system. It cannot be stopped and started whenever one wishes. In the long run, it can only be effective in the service of great ideals and far-seeing principles. And propaganda must be learned. It must be led only by people with a fine and sure instinct for the often changeable feelings of the people. They must be able to reach into the world of the broad masses and draw out their wishes and hopes. The effective propagandist must be a master of the art of speech, of writing, of journalism, of the poster, and of the leaflet. He must have the gift to use the major methods of influencing public opinion such as the press, film, and radio to serve his ideas and goals.

This is particularly necessary in a day when technology is advancing. Radio is already an invention of the past, since television will probably soon arrive. On the one hand successful propaganda must be a master of these methods of political opinion, but on the other it may not become stale in using them. It must find new ways and methods every day to reach success. The nature of propaganda remains the same, but the means provided by advancing technology are becoming ever broader and far-reaching. One need only consider the revolutionary impact of the invention of radio, which gave the spoken word true mass effectiveness. The technology of propaganda has changed greatly in recent years, but the art of propaganda has remained the same.

Understood in this sense, propaganda has long since lost its odium of inferiority inherited from the past. It holds first rank among the arts with which one leads a nation, It is indispensable in building a modern state. It is something of a connecting link between government and people.

All propaganda has a direction. The quality of this direction determines whether propaganda has a positive or negative effect. Good propaganda does not need to lie, indeed it may not lie. It has no reason to fear the truth. It is a mistake to believe that the people cannot take the truth. They can. It is only a matter of presenting the truth to people in a way that they will be able to understand. A propaganda that lies proves that it has a bad cause. It cannot be successful in the long run. A good propaganda will always come along that serves a good cause. But propaganda is still necessary if a good cause is to succeed. A good idea does not win simply because it is good. It must be presented properly if it is to win. The combination makes for the best propaganda. Such propaganda is successful without being obnoxious. It depends on its nature, not its methods. It works without being noticed. Its goals are inherent in its nature. Since it is almost invisible, it is effective and powerful. A good cause will lose to a bad one if it depends only on its rightness, while the other side uses the methods of influencing the masses. We are, for example, firmly convinced that we fought the war for a good cause, but that was not enough. The world should also have known and seen that our cause was good. However, we lacked the effective means of mass propaganda to make that clear to the world. Marxism certainly did not fight for great ideals. Despite that, in November 1918 it overcame Kaiser, Reich, and the army because it was superior in the art of mass propaganda.

National Socialism learned from these two examples. It drew the correct practical conclusions from that knowledge. The ideal of a socialist national community did not remain mere theory with us, but became living reality in the thoughts and feelings of 67 million Germans. Our propaganda of word and deed created the conditions for that. Mastering them kept National Socialism from the danger of remaining the dream and longing of a few thousand. Through propaganda, it became hard, steely everyday reality.

That which we only imperfectly and inadequately understood during the war became a virtuously mastered art during the rise of the National Socialist movement. Today one can say without exaggeration that Germany is a model of propaganda for the entire world. We have made up for past failures and developed the art of mass influence to a degree that puts the efforts of other nations into the shadows. The importance the National Socialist leadership placed on propaganda became clear when it established a Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda shortly after it took power. This ministry is entirely within the spirit of National Socialism, and comes from it. It unites what we learned as an opposition movement confronting the enemy and under persecution from an enemy system, sometimes more from necessity than desire. Recently some have tried to imitate this ministry and its concentration of all means of influencing opinion, but here, too, the slogan applies: "Often imitated, never equaled."

The organizational union of mass demonstrations, the press, film, radio, literature, theater, etc., is only the mechanical side to the matter. It is not so much that all these means are in one hand. The important thing is that this hand knows how to master and control them. Establishing a central office is not difficult. What is difficult is finding people who are experts in an area previously not a concern of the state.

We could not have done that ourselves if we had not been through the great school of our party. She was our teacher. During 14 years of opposition we gathered an enormous amount of knowledge, experience, wisdom, and ability. This made us able to use the wide-reaching methods of government propaganda without running the risk of losing the spirit behind them. Effective propaganda avoids any form of bureaucracy. It requires lightning-fast decisions, alert creativity and inexhaustible inventiveness. The machinery of the organization would remain lifeless and rigid if it were not constantly driven by the motor of the spirit and the idea.

It is, therefore, also wrong to think that a ministry could replace what the movement alone is able to do. Cooperation between the party and the government was necessary for the major successes that we are proud of. Only when all means of propaganda are concentrated and their unified application assured is it be possible to carry out major educational and propaganda battles, as we did before 12 November 1933 [the referendum Hitler called to approve Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations] or 19 August 1934 [the referendum called to approve Hitler's absolute power after the death of Hindenburg], which were of true historical significance.

If such an art of active mass influence through propaganda is joined with the long-term systematic education of a nation, and if both are conducted in a unified and precise way, the relationship between the leadership and the nation will always remain close. From authority and following will develop that type of modern democracy for which Germany is the model for the entire world in the twentieth century.

That is also the basic requirement for any practical political activity. A government that wishes to be successful over the long term cannot ignore it. Its projects and plans would fail were they not supported by the people. But the people must understand them in order to accomplish them.

One can but smile when one looks over our borders at the efforts of parliamentary-democratic parties that are all concerned with this: "How can I tell my child?" A fear of the people is the characteristic of liberal government theory. It has set the people free, and now does not know what to do with them. The hunt for popularity usually leads to nothing other than concealing the truth and speaking nonsense. One dares not say what is right, and what one does say leads to disaster. But that is presumably what the people want. One no longer has the courage to say unpopular things, much less do them. The result is that major European problems are lost in useless debates while political, economic, and social crises of unprecedented magnitude face the nations.

There are times when statesmen must have the courage to do something unpopular. But their unpopular actions must be properly prepared, and must be put in the proper form, so that their peoples will understand. The man on the street is usually not as unreasonable as some think. Since it is he who usually has to bear the heaviest burdens that result from unpopular policies, he at least has a right to know why things are being done this way and not that way. All practical politics depends on its persuasiveness. It is no sign of wise leadership to acquaint the nation with hard facts over night. Crises must be prepared for not only politically and economically, but also psychologically. Here propaganda has its place. It must prepare the way actively and educationally. Its task is to prepare the way for practical actions. It must follow these actions step by step, never losing sight of them. In a manner of speaking, it provides the background music. Such propaganda in the end miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government's most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses.

Propaganda is therefore a necessary life function of the modern state. Without it, seeking great goals is simply impossible in this century of the masses. It stands at the beginning of practical political activity in every area of public life. It is its important and necessary prerequisite.

Let me give several recent examples. I need only sketch the details. They are too fresh in our memories to require elaboration.

There are no parliamentary parties in Germany any longer. How could we have overcome them had we not waged an educational campaign for years that persuaded people of their weaknesses, harms, and disadvantages? Their final elimination was only the result of what the people had already realized. Our propaganda weakened these parties. Based on that, they could be eliminated by a legal act.

Marxism could not be eliminated by a government decision. Its elimination was the end result of a process that began with the people. But that was only possible because our propaganda had shown people that Marxism was a danger to both the state and society. The positive national discipline of the German press would never have been possible without the compete elimination of the influence of the liberal-Jewish press. That happened only because of the years-long work of our propaganda. Today, particularism in Germany is something of the past. The fact that it was eliminated by a strong central idea of the Reich is no accident, but rather it depended on psychological foundations that were established by our propaganda.

Or consider economic policy. Does anyone believe that the idea of class struggle could have been eliminated only by a law? Is it not rather the fact that the seeds we sowed in a hundred thousand meetings resulted in a new socialist structure of labor? Today employers and workers stand together in the Labor Front. The Law on National Labor is the foundation of our economic thinking, realizing itself more and more. Are not these social achievements the result of the long and tireless labor of thousands of speakers?

What about the shortage of foreign currency? This affects the people in serious ways. Propaganda once again is the key to dealing with the problem.

The Hereditary Farming Law, the idea of the Reich Agricultural System, market regulations in agriculture, all these need propaganda to show the people their importance, which is necessary if they are to succeed.
We could eliminate the Jewish danger in our culture because the people had recognized it as the result of our propaganda. Major cultural achievements such as the unique "Kraft durch Freude"* are possible only with the powerful support of the people. The prerequisite was and is propaganda, which here too creates and maintains the connection to the people.

The Winter Relief last year raised about 350 million marks. This was not the result of taxation, but rather many gifts of every amount. Everyone gave freely and gladly, many of whom in the past had done nothing in the face of similar need. Why? Because a broad propaganda, using every modern means, presented the whole nation with the need for this program of social assistance.

45 million Reich marks of goods and services were provided. 85 million Reich marks worth of fuel were distributed. 130 million Reich marks worth of food were given out. Ten million Reich marks worth of meals were provided, and 70 million Reich marks worth of clothing.

Some of these achievements were the result of donations in kind, others the result of cash donations. Street collections, donations of a part of paychecks, contributions from companies, and gifts subtracted from bank accounts resulted in cash totaling 184 million Reich marks. 24 million marks alone were the result of “One Pot Sundays.” [On some Sundays, people were encouraged to have a simple meal at home, donating the money saved to the Nazi charity.] The Reich itself added 15 million marks to the contributions of the people. The railway system provided reduced or free shipping with a value of 14 million marks.

Of our population of 65,595,000, 16,511,00 were assisted by the Winter Relief. There were 150,000 volunteers. There were only 4,474 paid workers, of whom 4,144 were in the 34 regional party offices, and 330 at the national headquarters.

Propaganda and education prepared the way for the largest social assistance program in history. They were the foundation. Their success was that, over a long winter, no one in Germany went hungry or was cold.
Over 40 million people approved of the Führer's decision to leave the League of Nations on 12 November 1933. That gave him the ability to speak to the world in the name of the nation, defending honor, peace, and equality as the national ideals of the whole German people. The issues of disarmament were put on firm and clear foundations. Once again, propaganda was the foundation for the nation's unity on 12 November, and therefore of the freedom of action that the Führer had in foreign affairs.

Each situation brings new challenges. And each task requires the support of the people, which can only be gained by untiring propaganda that brings the broad masses knowledge and clarity. No area of public life can do without it. It is the never resting force behind public opinion. It must maintain an unbroken relationship between leadership and people. Every means of technology must be put in its service; the goal is to form the mass will and to give it meaning, purpose, and goals that will enable us to learn from past failures and mistakes and ensure that the lead National Socialist strength has given us over other nations will never again be lost.

May the bright flame of our enthusiasm never fade. It alone gives light and warmth to the creative art of modern political propaganda. Its roots are in the people. The movement gives it direction and drive. The state can only provide it with the new, wide-ranging technical means. Only a living relationship between people, movement, and state can guarantee that the creative art of propaganda, of which we have made ourselves the world's master, will never sink into bureaucracy and bureaucratic narrow-mindedness.
Creative people made propaganda and put it in the service of our movement. We must have creative people who can use the means of the state in its service.

It is also a function of the modern state. Its reach is the firm ground on which the state must stand. It rises from the depths of the people, and must always return to the people to find its roots and strength. It may be good to have power based on weapons. It is better and longer lasting, however, to win and hold the heart of a nation.

Hitler on Propaganda
In chapter six of Mein Kampf, Hitler reviewed the use of propaganda during World War I. In the course of his criticism of the German effort, he included comments on the function of propaganda in general. His statements offer insight into the methods used by the Nazi Party.
Source: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943.
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resour...nt/DocPropa.htm

The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.

Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda in be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.

Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?
We would only shake our heads.

Exactly the same applies to political advertising.

The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

“The reason I tell you the truth is so that when I lie, you will believe me.”

New intel report reignites Iraq arms fight
By KATHERINE SHRADER,
Associated Press Writer
Yahoo News

WASHINGTON - Hundreds of chemical weapons found in Iraq were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and probably are so old they couldn't be used as designed, intelligence officials said Thursday.

Two lawmakers — Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., and House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. — on Wednesday circulated a one-page summary of a military intelligence report that says coalition forces have recovered about 500 munitions with mustard or sarin agents, and more could be discovered around Iraq. "We now have found stockpiles," Santorum asserted.

But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.

They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.

He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.

"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.

And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.

Asked about the potential danger to U.S. troops, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said: "They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found."

The newly declassified military intelligence report was released Wednesday by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Santorum and Hoekstra had urged him to release report this week during congressional debates on Iraq.

The senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee questioned the timing of the report's release. "What worries me is that the intelligence community — Ambassador Negroponte in particular — may be playing a partisan role in the 2006 election," California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record) said.

Hoekstra said the document is not a "smoking gun." But he hinted that the chemical agents could be significant because they may have been added to the discovered artillery shells after the first Gulf War. He noted that one of the declassified findings says the munitions could be lethal.

"David Kay says anything produced prior to 1991 is not lethal anymore, so what is the discrepancy here?" Hoekstra said. "I am 100 percent sure if David Kay had the opportunity to look at the reports that describe these things, he would agree with the finding that ... these things are lethal and deadly," Hoekstra said.

Intelligence officials said the munitions were found in ones, twos and maybe slightly larger collections over the past couple of years. One official conceded that these pre-Gulf War weapons did not pose a threat to the U.S. military before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were not maintained or part of any organized program run by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

There is no evidence that insurgents have found the chemical munitions. But one official said that insurgents have improvised conventional weapons, so they could apply similar creativity with the vintage weapons.

Former Bush Spokesman Urges Newspapers to Run Pro-War Stories by Former Vets With GOP Ties
democracynow.org

The Buffalo News has revealed that a former spokesman for President Bush has been encouraging U.S. newspapers to run news stories from Iraq written by two combat veterans who are now embedded reporters in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: John Stauber joins us now from Madison, Wisconsin. John is Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and co-editor of the publication PR Watch. He’s co-authored several books, including Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

JOHN STAUBER: Thanks, Amy, it's great to be on.

AMY GOODMAN: John, can you talk about this group, Vets for Freedom, and what it means, what their connection to the press is?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, Vets for Freedom is a very interesting organization. I call it a Republican front group. It might be more accurate to call it a Republican-financed, pro-war group geared toward helping the Republicans keep control of Congress and the Senate this November. It portrays itself as a nonpartisan organization of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are very concerned about the way the media has distorted the image of the war here in the United States and who want to set that record straight. Its founders have been vigorously attacking Democrat John Murtha for his position advocating withdrawal from Iraq. And as the Buffalo News reported just this Sunday, Terry Gross [sic], who was a spokesman for President Bush until last year and is now a P.R. operative and who managed the 2000 Florida debacle for the Republicans, managed their media in the Florida recount --

AMY GOODMAN: Taylor Gross?

JOHN STAUBER: Did I say -- Taylor Gross, correct. He approached the Buffalo News way back in April, trying to place a couple of the founders of this Vets for Freedom organization as embedded reporters for the Buffalo News. Those two Vets for Freedom members were, and are, Wade Zirkle and David Bellavia. They're now in Iraq, reporting on the Vets for Freedom blog. Apparently at least one of them will soon be back in the United States. So I think what we've got here is a pro-war organization.

Its financing is very mysterious. I suspect that, like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, with which it shares a consulting firm, the Donatelli Group, if we knew who was really funding this organization, it would probably be well-heeled people within the Republican Party. I think it's also very possible that this is part of the bigger propaganda campaign that has received hundreds of millions of dollars of public money over the last few years, money that's gone to organizations like the Lincoln Group and other P.R. firms to sell the war.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited on Vets for Freedom to the program, but the group's vice chairman, Owen West, said that no one could join us today. I want to play a clip of the group's founder, Wade Zirkle, speaking on the Hugh Hewitt Show, explaining why he formed the group. Zirkle is a former Marine lieutenant, who served two deployments in Iraq.

WADE ZIRKLE: You know, when I came home, I was injured. And I came home, and, you know, I was watching on TV and on the radio, listening to politicians do their grandstanding spiel, and I realized that, you know, what is being reported to the American people is not what I know from firsthand experience what's going on in Iraq. And I felt like no one was speaking for us.

AMY GOODMAN: John Stauber, your response?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, this is part of the line that this organization has, that we have to stay the course, we have to support the Bush administration's global war on terror, we have to push forward, that we owe it to the veterans who’ve died and who’ve suffered so much, and that the only patriotic course is one of total support for the Bush administration's global war on terror.

I think there was a really important part of the puzzle regarding Veterans for Freedom and what their role is in this election year provided by the New York Times last week, when last Wednesday, in a front-page article, the New York Times reported that the Republican strategy for winning in November is going to be to strongly embrace exactly this pro-war position of Vets for Freedom. And Vets for Freedom is represented by a very sophisticated Republican public relations firm that Taylor Gross founded, called the Herald Group. I think what they understand is that getting vets out as advocates for staying the course, as critics and attackers of anyone who says we should withdraw troops from Iraq, is going to be a very powerful card to play.

AMY GOODMAN: The Vets for Freedom website now features dispatches from Iraq written by these former soldiers who were in Iraq as embedded reporters. The top story on their blog is headlined "Positive Development from Down South." It was written by Vets for Freedom's executive director, Wade Zirkle. Last week the group's vice chair, David Bellavia, wrote about being embedded with the Iraqi military in Ramadi. He describes the experience like this: “Seeing these men in action is amazing. The people of Ramadi trust them. They give them bread and tea. Kids are playing soccer and riding donkeys in the street.” This description of Ramadi stands in stark contrast to the other reports coming out of Ramadi, which Iraqis fear will be the site of the next Fallujah. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that thousands of families are reportedly trapped in the city and facing a mounting humanitarian crisis. Food and medical supplies are running low.” John, your response to these reports?

JOHN STAUBER: I think these so-called "news reports" coming from David Bellavia, one of the Vets for Freedom founders, is exactly what this organization is all about. When Bush's former spokesperson, Taylor Gross, pitched the Buffalo News and the New York Post and other papers to have Zirkle and Bellavia of Vets for Freedom reporting for them as embedded journalists, I believe this was an effort to be able to portray these pro-war Republican advocates as journalists. And again, they state clearly on their website, which is maintained by the Donatelli Group, the same organization that provided similar services to the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they maintain on their website that they are all about changing the media coverage of the war in Iraq to make it pro-war, pro-mission coverage, now, we see, even to the point of trying to portray themselves as embedded journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know of any news organization who has taken their reports?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, I think it's interesting that there was no real reporting about Veterans for Freedom until we at Center for Media and Democracy began looking at them this month. And then the Buffalo News came forward and broke this big story on Sunday, about how the former Bush spokesperson, Taylor Gross, was pitching them back in April to make these guys embedded reporters for the Buffalo News. As far as we know, according to Taylor Gross in the Buffalo News article, no paper used them as embedded journalists. That's a good sign.

But it's interesting to note that when Taylor Gross was pitching these guys, he didn't say to these papers, “Hey, I'm Taylor Gross. I was a spokesperson for President Bush until last year.” He simply said, “I've got some brave vets, and they can provide nonpartisan, unbiased coverage for you on the cheap from Iraq. Would you like them as embedded reporters?” So I think that was really an effort -- remember, this was back in April -- again to be able to have these Vets for Freedom, pro-war advocates say, “Not only are we combat veterans.” And these are guys, many of whom were very wounded in combat. There's no questioning their valor or personal passion or commitment, but I think this effort to embed them and get them reporting for papers like the New York Post and the Buffalo News was actually an effort to provide them a veneer of journalism. And it's all fallen apart, because the Buffalo News has revealed it.

What I think is extremely disturbing is that except for this report right now on Democracy Now!, no other national news media has picked this up. There's been no legs to the Buffalo News story, no wire services have picked it up. And yet, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, have all run op-eds from these guys, without any reporting on who they actually are.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's interesting. This is what we call engaging in trickle-up journalism. Maybe viewers, listeners now, people who are reading the transcripts, will call their news organizations to ask for more coverage of this. John, I also wanted to ask you about video news releases, a follow-up. Your organization, Center for Media and Democracy, revealed in April that at least 77 TV stations around the country have been caught airing corporate-sponsored propaganda disguised as news. The report accuses of TV stations of actively disguising the content to make it appear to be their own reporting, even though the spots were actually paid for by companies like General Motors, Panasonic and Pfizer. What's been the response to the study since you put it out and we broadcast it?

JOHN STAUBER: The response has been extremely heartening, because the Federal Communications Commission, based on our fake TV news report, has launched a formal investigation of these 36 stations that we caught red-handed airing corporate propaganda disguised as news stories. What the result of that investigation will be, of course, we don't know. But that was a tremendous development. And now, we're urging people to contact the FCC and to demand that the FCC enforce regulations on the books that require the -- [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: John Stauber, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Looks like we just lost that satellite feed, but we do want to thank Public Television in Madison, Wisconsin, WHA-TV, Channel 21, for hosting John today. John is co-editor of the publication, PR Watch, and has written a number of books, including Weapons of Mass Deception.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. ...it unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself....such propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discouragement and despair. Therefore, specialists in agitation propaganda break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one. There is a period of pressure to obatain some result, then a period of relaxation and rest....
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul, page 72.

Wash Times' Fails to Correct Fabricated Abraham Lincoln Quote -- Now a Congressman is Using It
By E&P Staff
February 15, 2007 10:00 PM ET

NEW YORK More than two days after an inflammatory quote used by a regular Washington Times columnist was shown to be fabricated -- it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln, no less -- the newspaper still has not removed it from the article, nor carried a correction.

Perhaps that's one reason Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) cited the quote on the floor of the House today in the debate over the Iraq war "surge." He took it to be true, apparently. Rep. Young added, referring to Lincoln: "He had the same problem this President has, with an unpopular war. The same problem with people trying to redirect the commander in chief."

On Wednesday, E&P and some political blogs pointed out that conservative Frank Gaffney, Jr. opened his latest column on Tuesday morning with this: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged." — President Abraham Lincoln.

He continued: "It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated — let alone applied — today. Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to 'damage morale and undermine the military' while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war."

One problem: Lincoln never said it. But that hasn't stopped the newspaper, and Gaffney, from refusing to correct the record.

Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org, the Annenberg Public Policy Center group, had studied the sudden appearance of the quote last August. Why? He had found that his Web search "brought up more than 18,000 references to it."

He reported: "Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale in wartime 'are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.'

"Republican candidate Diana Irey used the 'quote' recently in her campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.

"But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln's. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor [at the magazine Insight] for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote."

Jackson later provided this update: "Candidate Irey retracted the quote and apologized hours after this article appeared."

Waller wrote to Jackson concerning the 2003 article: "Oddly, you are the first to question me about this. I'm surprised it has been repeated as often as you say. My editors at the time didn't think it was necessary to run a correction in the following issue of the magazine, and to my knowledge we received no public comment."

Jacques Ellul on Sociological Propaganda.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1966. 62-68.

Political Propaganda and Sociological Propaganda

First we must distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda. We shall not dwell long on the former because it is the type called immediately to mind by the word propaganda itself. It involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration, a pressure group, with a view to changing the behavior of the public. The choice of methods used is deliberate and calculated; the desired goals are clearly distinguished and quite precise, though generally limited. Most often the themes and the objectives are political, as for example with Hitler's or Stalin's propaganda. This is the type of propaganda that can be most clearly distinguished from advertising: the latter has economic ends, the former political ends. Political propaganda can be either strategic or tactical. The former establishes the general line, the array of arguments, the staggering of the campaigns; the latter seeks to obtain immediate results within that framework (such as wartime pamphlets and loudspeakers to obtain the immediate surrender of the enemy).

But this does not cover all propaganda, which also encompasses phenomena much more vast and less certain: the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups. We call this phenomenon "sociological" propaganda, to show, first of all, that the entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly, that its influence aims much more at an entire [62/63] style of life than at opinions or even one particular course of behavior.1

Of course, within the compass of sociological propaganda itself one or more political propagandas can be expressed. The propaganda of Christianity in the middle ages is an example of this type of sociological propaganda; Benjamin Constant meant just this when he said of France, in 1793: "The entire nation was a vast propaganda operation." And in present times certainly the most accomplished models of this type are American and Chinese propaganda. Although we do not include here the more or less effective campaigns and methods employed by governments, but rather the over-all phenomenon, we find that sociological propaganda combines extremely diverse forms within itself. At this level, advertising as the spreading of a certain style of life can be said to be included in such propaganda, and in the United States this is also true of public relations, human relations, human engineering, the motion pictures, and so on. It is characteristic of a nation living by sociological propaganda that all these influences converge toward the same point, whereas in a society such as France in 1960, they are divergent in their objectives and their intentions.

Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and is rarely discussed. Basically it is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context. This phenomenon is the reverse of what we have been studying up to now. Propaganda as it is traditionally known implies an attempt to spread an ideology through the mass media of communication in order to lead the public to accept some political or economic structure or to participate in some action. That is the one element common to all the propaganda we have studied. Ideology is disseminated for the purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people.

But in sociological propaganda the movement is reversed. The existing economic, political, and sociological factors progressively allow an ideology to penetrate individuals or masses. Through the [63/64] medium of economic and political structures a certain ideology is established, which leads to the active participation of the masses and the adaptation of individuals. The important thing is to make the individual participate actively and to adapt him as much as possible to a specific sociological context.


Such propaganda is essentially diffuse. It is rarely conveyed by catchwords or expressed intentions. Instead it is based on a general climate, an atmosphere that influences people imperceptibly without having the appearance of propaganda; it gets to man through his customs, through his most unconscious habits. It creates new habits in him; it is a sort of persuasion from within. As a result, man adopts new criteria of judgment and choice, adopts them spontaneously, as if he had chosen them himself. But all these criteria are in conformity with the environment and are essentially of a collective nature. Sociological propaganda produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things, a certain concept of human relations, which unconsciously molds individuals and makes them conform to society.

Sociological propaganda springs up spontaneously; it is not the result of deliberate propaganda action. No propagandists deliberately use this method, though many practice it unwittingly, and tend in this direction without realizing it. For example, when an American producer makes a film, he has certain definite ideas he wants to express, which are not intended to be propaganda. Rather, the propaganda element is in the American way of life with which he is permeated and which he expresses in his film without realizing it. We see here the force of expansion of a vigorous society, which is totalitarian in the sense of the integration of the individual, and which leads to involuntary behavior.

Sociological propaganda expresses itself in many different ways--in advertising, in the movies (commercial and non-political films), in technology in general, in education, in the Reader's Digest; and in social service, case work, and settlement houses. All these influences are in basic accord with each other and lead spontaneously in the same direction; one hesitates to call all this propaganda. Such influences, which mold behavior, seem a far cry from Hitler's great propaganda setup. Unintentional (at least in the first stage), non-political, organized along spontaneous patterns and rhythms, the activities we have lumped together (from a concept that might be judged arbitrary or artificial) are not [64/65] considered propaganda by either sociologists or the average public.

And yet with deeper and more objective analysis, what does one find? These influences are expressed through the same media as propaganda. They are really directed by those who make propaganda. To me this fact seems essential. A government, for example, will have its own public relations, and will also make propaganda. Most of the activities described in this chapter have identical purposes. Besides, these influences follow the same stereotypes and prejudices as propaganda; they stir the same feelings and act on the individual in the same fashion. These are the similarities, which bring these two aspects of propaganda closer together, more than the differences, noted earlier, separate them.

But there is more. Such activities are propaganda to the extent that the combination of advertising, public relations, social welfare, and so on produces a certain general conception of society, a particular way of life. We have not grouped these activities together arbitrarily--they express the same basic notions and interact to make man adopt this particular way of life. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad; those who have this conception of society are right, and those who have another conception are in error. Consequently, just as with ordinary propaganda, it is a matter of propagating behavior and myths both good and bad. Furthermore, such propaganda becomes increasingly effective when those subjected to it accept its doctrines on what is good or bad (for example, the American Way of Life). There, a whole society actually expresses itself through this propaganda by advertising its kind of life.

By doing that, a society engages in propaganda on the deepest level. Sociologists have recognized that, above all, propaganda must change a person's environment. Krech and Crutchfield insist on this fact, and show that a simple modification of the psychological context can bring about changes of attitude without ever directly attacking particular attitudes or opinions. Similarly, MacDougall says: "One must avoid attacking any trend frontally. It is better to concentrate one's efforts on the creation of psychological conditions so that the desired result seems to come from them naturally." The modification of the psychological climate [65/66] brings about still other consequences that one cannot obtain directly. This is what Ogle calls "suggestibility"; the degree of suggestibility depends on a man's environment and psychological climate. And that is precisely what modifies the activities mentioned above. It is what makes them propaganda, for their aim is simply to instill in the public an attitude that will prepare the ground for the main propaganda to follow.

Sociological propaganda must act gently. It conditions; it introduces a truth, an ethic in various benign forms, which, although sporadic, end by creating a fully established personality structure. It acts slowly, by penetration, and is most effective in a relatively stable and active society, or in the tensions between an expanding society and one that is disintegrating (or in an expanding group within a disintegrating society). Under these conditions it is sufficient in itself; it is not merely a preliminary sub-propaganda. But sociological propaganda is inadequate in a moment of crisis. Nor is it able to move the masses to action in exceptional circumstances. Therefore, it must sometimes be strengthened by the classic kind of propaganda, which leads to action.

At such times sociological propaganda will appear to be the medium that has prepared the ground for direct propaganda; it becomes identified with sub-propaganda. Nothing is easier than to graft a direct propaganda onto a setting prepared by sociological propaganda; besides, sociological propaganda may itself be transformed into direct propaganda. Then, by a series of intermediate stages, we not only see one turn into the other, but also a smooth transition from what was merely a spontaneous affirmation of a way of life to the deliberate affirmation of a truth. This process has been described in an article by Edward L. Bernays: this so-called "engineering approach" is tied to a combination of professional research methods through which one gets people to adopt and actively support certain ideas or programs as soon as they become aware of them. This applies also to political matters; and since 1936 the National Association of Manufacturers has attempted to fight the development of leftist trends with such methods. In 1938 the N.A.M. spent a half-million dollars to support the type of capitalism it represents. This sum was increased to three million in 1945 and to five million in 1946; this propaganda paved the way for the Taft-Hartley Law. It was a matter of "selling" the American economic system. Here [66/67] we are truly in the domain of propaganda; and we see the multiple methods employed to influence opinion, as well as the strong tie between sociological and direct propaganda.

Sociological propaganda, involuntary at first, becomes more and more deliberate, and ends up by exercising influence. One example is the code drawn up by the Motion Picture Association, which requires films to promote "the highest types of social life," "the proper conception of society," "the proper standards of life," and to avoid "any ridicule of the law (natural or human) or sympathy for those who violate the law." Another is J. Arthur Rank's explanation of the purpose of his films: "When does an export article become more than an export article? When it is a British film. When the magnificent productions of Ealing Studios appear in the world, they represent something better than just a step forward toward a higher level of export...." Such films are then propaganda for the British way of life.

The first element of awareness in the context of sociological propaganda is extremely simple, and from it everything else derives. What starts out as a simple situation gradually turns into a definite ideology, because the way of life in which man thinks he is so indisputably well off becomes a criterion of value for him. This does not mean that objectively he is well off, but that, regardless of the merits of his actual condition, he thinks he is. He is perfectly adapted to his environment, like "a fish in water." From that moment on, everything that expresses this particular way of life, that reinforces and improves it, is good; everything that tends to disturb, criticize, or destroy it is bad.

This leads people to believe that the civilization representing their way of life is best. This belief then commits the French to the same course as the Americans, who are by far the most advanced in this direction. Obviously, one tries to imitate and catch up to those who are furthest advanced; the first one becomes the model. And such imitation makes the French adopt the same criteria of judgment, the same sociological structures, the same spontaneous ideologies, and, in the end, the same type of man. Sociological propaganda is then a precise form of propaganda; it is comparatively simple because it uses all social currents, but is slower than other types of propaganda because it aims at long-term penetration and progressive adaptation.

But from the instant a man uses that way of life as his criterion of good and evil, he is led to make judgments: for example, any[67/68]thing un-American is evil. From then on, genuine propaganda limits itself to the use of this tendency and to leading man into actions of either compliance with or defense of the established order.

This sociological propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life. In the beginning, the United States had to unify a disparate population that came from all the countries of Europe and had diverse traditions and tendencies. A way of rapid assimilation had to be found; that was the great political problem of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The solution was psychological standardization--that is, simply to use a way of life as the basis of unification and as an instrument of propaganda. In addition, this uniformity plays another decisive role--an economic role--in the life of the United States; it determines the extent of the American market. Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are. One must be sure that the market will react rapidly and massively to a given proposal or suggestion. One therefore needs fundamental psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion. And in order for public opinion to respond, it must be convinced of the excellence of all that is "American." Thus conformity of life and conformity of thought are indissolubly linked.

But such conformity can lead to unexpected extremes. Given American liberalism and the confidence of Americans in their economic strength and their political system, it is difficult to understand the "wave of collective hysteria" which occurred after 1948 and culminated in McCarthyism. That hysteria probably sprang from a vague feeling of ideological weakness, a certain inability to define the foundations of American society. That is why Americans seek to define the American way of life, to make it conscious, explicit, theoretical, worthy. Therefore the soul-searching and inflexibility, with excessive affirmations designed to mask the weakness of the ideological position. All this obviously constitutes an ideal framework for organized propaganda.

1 This notion is a little broader than that of Doob on unintentional propaganda. Doob includes in the term the involuntary effects obtained by the propagandist. He is the first to have stressed the possibility of this unintentional character of propaganda, contrary to all American thought on the subject, except for David Krech and Richard S. Crutchfield, who go even further in gauging the range of unintentional propaganda, which they even find in books on mathematics.

Excerpted from Jacques Ellul.Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973

In addition to a certain living standard, another condition must be met: if man is to be successfully propagandized, he needs at least a minimum of culture. Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. We are not speaking here of intelligence; some primitive tribes are surely intelligent, but have an intelligence foreign to our concepts and customs. A base is needed — for example, education; a man who cannot read will escape most propaganda, as will a man who is not interested in reading. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90% percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe — or disbelieve — in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.

Let us not say: "If one gave them good things to read... If these people received a better education…" Such an argument has no validity because things just are not that way. Let us not say, either: "This is only the first stage; soon their education will be better; one must begin somewhere." First of all, it takes a very long time to pass from the first to the second stage; in France, the first stage was reached half a century ago, and we still are very far from attaining the second. There is more, unfortunately. This first stage has placed man at the disposal of propaganda. Before he can pass to the second stage, he will find himself in a universe of propaganda. He will be already formed, adapted, integrated. This is why the development of culture in the U.S.S.R. can take place without danger. One can reach a higher level of culture without ceasing to be a propagandee as long as one was a propagandee before acquiring critical faculties, and as long as that culture itself is integrated into a universe of propaganda. Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to make the individual susceptible to superpropaganda.1 There is no chance of raising the intellectual level of Western populations sufficiently and rapidly enough to compensate for the progress of propaganda. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible. In fact, what happens and what we see all around us is the claim that propaganda itself is our culture and what the masses ought to learn. Only in and through propaganda have the masses access to political economy, politics, art, or literature. Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment.

The uncultured man cannot be reached by propaganda. Experience and research done by the Germans between 1933 and 1938 showed that in remote areas, where people hardly knew how to read, propaganda had no effect The same holds true for the enormous effort in the Communist world to teach people how to read. In Korea, the local script was terribly difficult and complicated; so, in North Korea, the Communists created an entirely new alphabet and a simple script in order to teach all the people how to read. In China, Mao simplified the script in his battle with illiteracy, and in some places in China new alphabets are being created. This would have no particular significance except that the texts used to teach the adult students how to read — and which are the only texts to which they have access — are exclusively propaganda texts; they are political tracts, poems to the glory of the Communist regime, extracts of classical Marxism. Among the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Ouighbours, the Manchus, the only texts in the new script are Mao’s works. Thus, we see here a wonderful shaping tool: The illiterates are taught to read only the new script; nothing is published in that script except propaganda texts; therefore, the illiterates cannot possibly read — or know — anything else.

Also, one of the most effective propaganda methods in Asia was to establish "teachers" to teach reading and indoctrinate people at the same time. The prestige of the intellectual — "marked with God’s finger" — allowed political assertions to appear as Truth, while the prestige of the printed word one learned to decipher confirmed the validity of what the teachers said. These facts leave no doubt that the development of primary education is a fundamental condition for the organization of propaganda, even though such a conclusion may run counter to many prejudices, best expressed by Paul Rivet’s pointed but completely unrealistic words: "A person who cannot read a newspaper is not free."

This need of a certain cultural level to make people susceptible to propaganda2 is best understood if one looks at one of propaganda’s most important devices, the manipulation of symbols. The more an individual participates in the society in which he lives, the more he will cling to stereotyped symbols expressing collective notions about the past and the future of his group. The more stereotypes in a culture, the easier it is to form public opinion, and the more an individual participates in that culture, the more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation of these symbols. The number of propaganda campaigns in the West which have first taken hold in cultured settings is remarkable. This is not only true for doctrinaire propaganda, which is based on exact facts and acts on the level of the most highly developed people who have a sense of values and know a good deal about political realities, such as, for example, the propaganda on the injustice of capitalism, on economic crises, or on colonialism; it is only normal that the most educated people (intellectuals) are the first to be reached by such propaganda… All this runs counter to pat notions that only the public swallows propaganda. Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver…

1 Because he considered the newspaper the principal instrument of propaganda, Lenin insisted on the necessity of teaching reading. It was even more the catchword of the New Economic Policy: the school became the place to prepare students to receive propaganda.

2 We also must consider the fact that in a society in which propaganda — whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious — absorbs all the means of communication or education (as in practically all societies in 1960), propaganda forms culture and in a certain sense is culture. When film and novel, newspaper and television are instruments either of political propaganda in the restricted sense or in that of human relations (social propaganda), culture is perfectly integrated into propaganda; as a consequence, the more cultivated a man is, the more he is propagandized. Here one can also see the idealist illusion of those who hope that the mass media of communication will create a mass culture. This "culture" is merely a way of destroying a personality.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes. Knopf. New York. 1965
NOTES FROM PROPAGANDA

I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF PROPAGANDA

1. Any modern propaganda, will, first of all, address itself at one and the same time to the individual and to the masses. It cannot separate the two elements. What does this mean? That the individual is never considered as an individual, but always in terms of what he has in common with others, such as his motivations, his feelings, or his myths. Conversely, when propaganda is addressed to a crowd, it must touch each individual in that crowd, in that whole group To be effective, it must give the impression of being personal, for we must never forget that the mass is composed of individuals, and is in fact nothing more than assembled individuals. Thus all modern propaganda profits from the structure of the mass, but exploits the individual's need for self-affirmation; and the two actions must be conducted jointly, simultaneously.

2. The structure of present day societies place the individual where he is most easily reached by propaganda.

3. Propaganda must be total (movies, books, newspapers, ads, etc.). Thus one leaves no part of the intellectual or emotional life alone. It is a matter of reaching and circling the whole man and all men. Propaganda cannot be satisfied with partial success, for it does not tolerate discussion; by its very nature, it excludes contradiction and discussion. As long as a noticeable or expressed tension or a conflict of action remains, propaganda cannot be said to have accomplished its aim.

4. Everything can serve as a means of propaganda and everything must be utilized.

5. No contrast can be tolerated between propaganda and teaching, between the critical spirit formed by higher education and the exclusion of independent thought. One must utilize the education of the young to condition them to what comes later.

6. Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in nature, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary attitudes. No direct propaganda can be effective without pre-propaganda, which, without direct or noticeable aggression, is limited to creating ambiguities, reducing prejudices, and spreading images, apparently without purpose.

7. Finally, we well know that the combination of covert propaganda and overt propaganda is increasingly conducted so that "white" propaganda actually becomes a mask for "black" propaganda--that is, one openly admits the existence of one kind of propaganda and of its organization, means, and objectives, but all this is only a facade to capture the attention of individuals and neutralize their instinct to resist, while other individuals, behind the scenes, work on public opinion in a totally different direction, seeking to arouse very different reactions, utilizing even existing resistance to overt propaganda.

8. Propaganda must be continuous and lasting. Propaganda tends to make the individual live in a separate world; he must not have outside points of reference. He must not be allowed a moment of meditation or reflection in which to see himself vis--vis the propagandist, as happens when the propaganda is not continuous. The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period of time, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. Hitler was undoubtedly right when he said that the masses take a long time to understand and remember, thus it is necessary to repeat. In any case, repetition must be discontinued when the public has been conditioned, for at that point repetition will begin to irritate and provoke fresh doubts with respect to former certainties.

9. Propaganda must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside.

10. Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual's capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of persistence. This trait of propaganda, its continuity, explains why it can indulge in sudden twists and turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday. Antonio Miotto considers this changeability of propaganda an indication of its nature. Of course, the subject notices the change that has taken place, and he is surprised. He may even be tempted to resist--as the communists were at the time of the German-Soviet pact. But will the subject, then, engage in a sustained effort to resist propaganda? Such breaks are too painful; faced with them, the individual, feeling that the attack in line is not an attack on his real self, prefers to retain his habits. The propagandist does not necessarily have to worry about coherence and unity in his claims. Claims can be varied and even contradictory, depending on the setting. For example, Goebbels promised an increase in the price of grain in the country, and, at the same time, a decrease in the price of bread in the city. Another example is Hitler's propaganda against democracy in 1936 and for democracy in 1943.

ORGANIZATION OF PROPAGANDA


1. Propaganda must be organized in several ways. To give it the above-mentioned characteristics (continuity, duration, combination of different media), an organization is required that controls the mass media, is capable of using them correctly, of calculating the effect of one or another slogan or of replacing one campaign with another. Just as technicians are needed to make films and radio broadcasts, so one needs "technicians of influence"--sociologists and psychologists. But this indispensable administrative organization is not what we are thinking of here. What we do mean is that the propaganda is always institutionalized to the extent of an "apparat" in the German sense of the term--a machine. It is tied to realities. A great error, which interferes with propaganda analysis, is to believe that propaganda is solely a psychological affair, a manipulation of symbols, an abstract influence of opinions. A large number of American studies on propaganda are not valid for that reason. All great practitioners have rigorously tied together psychological and physical action as inseparable events. No propaganda is possible unless psychological influence rests on reality. Separation of the psychological and physical events is an arbitrary simplification that prevents an understanding of what propaganda is. Propaganda cannot operate in a vacuum. It must be rooted in action, in a reality it is a part of.

2. The manipulation of symbols is necessary for three reasons:
it persuades the individual to enter the framework of an organization;
it furnishes him reasons, justifications, motivations for action;
it obtains his total allegiance.

The last is vital, for more and more we are learning that genuine compliance is essential if action is to be effective. The worker, the teacher, the soldier, the administrator, the judge, the lawyer--all must believe in what they are doing, must put all their heart and good will into it; they must also find their equilibrium and their satisfactions in their actions.

ORTHOPRAXY

1. The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief. Only action is of concern to modern propaganda, for its aim is to precipitate an individual's action, with maximum effectiveness and economy. Goebbels states this expressly when he distinguishes between Haltung (behavior) and Stimmung (morale) in the following passage: "The Stimmung is quite low but that means little; the Haltung holds well." The Stimmung is volatile and varies readily; therefore, above all, the right action must be obtained, the right behavior maintained.

2. The propagandist therefore does not normally address himself to the individual's intelligence, for the process of intellectual persuasion is long and uncertain, and the road from such intellectual conviction to action even more so. The individual rarely acts purely on the basis of an idea. Moreover, to place propaganda efforts on the intellectual level would require that the propagandist engage in individual debate with each person--an unthinkable method.

3. To be effective propaganda must constantly short-circuit thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces (this is one of the conditions for the success of propaganda), but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate--and expected--action. If the classic but outmoded view of propaganda consists in defining it as an adherence of man to an orthodoxy, true modern propaganda seeks, on the contrary, to obtain an orthopraxy--an action that in itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be obtained, but which is considered such by the propagandist. The propagandist knows what objective should be sought and what action should be accomplished, and he maneuvers the instrument that will secure precisely this action.

4. This is a particular example of a more general problem: the separation of thought and action in our society. We are living in a time when systematically--though without our wanting it so--action and thought are being separated. In our society, he who thinks can no longer act for himself; he must act through the agency of others, and in many cases he cannot act at all. He who acts cannot first think out his action, either because of lack of time and the burden of his personal problems, or because society's plan demands that he translate others' thoughts into action.

5. And we see the same division within the individual himself. For he can use his mind only outside the area of his job--in order to find himself, to use his leisure to better himself, to discover what best suits him, and thus to individualize himself; whereas in the context of his work he yields to the common necessity, the common method, the need to incorporate his own work into the overall plan. Escape into dreams is suggested to him while he performs wholly mechanized actions

6. The propagandist can mobilize man for action that is not in accord with his previous convictions. Modern psychologists are well aware that there is not necessarily any continuity between conviction and action and no intrinsic rationality in opinions or acts. Man does not obey his clear opinions or what he believes to be his deliberate will. To control opinion one must be aware that there is an abyss between what a man says and what he does. His actions often do not correspond to any clear motive, or to what one would have expected from a previous impression he made. Into these gaps in continuity propaganda inserts its lever. It does not seek to create wise or reasonable men, but proselytes and militants.

PROPAGANDA AND THE EDUCATED

1. It is almost certainly the case that the ultimate achievement of higher education for the great majority of people, is to open them up and prepare them for bigger and bigger lies and to make them receptive to being part of a group that simultaneously sees itself as above propaganda, and also as a member of a semi-elitist class. As Ellul suggests, however, education, at least as its referred to in the modern sense of the word, is an "absolute prerequisite" for propaganda.

2. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls "pre-propaganda"--the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as "facts" and as "education." Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda for three reasons:

a). they absorb the largest amount of second-hand, unverifiable information;

. they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information;

c). they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves."

For these reasons, they literally need propaganda.

SUB-PROPAGANDA AND ACTIVE PROPAGANDA

1. Propaganda must properly be divided into two phases. There is pre-propaganda or sub-propaganda and there is active propaganda. This follows from what was stated earlier about the continuos and permanent nature of propaganda. The essential objective of pre-propaganda is to prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes. It must be continuous, slow and imperceptible. Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He must be made to live in a certain psychological climate.

2. The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth. Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual by training him so that certain words, signs, symbols or even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions. But preparatory work is not yet propaganda, for it is not yet immediately applicable to a concrete case. What is visible in propaganda, what is spectacular and seems to us often incomprehensible or unbelievable (such as the Nazi propaganda against the Jews), is possible only because of such slow and not very explicit preparation; without it nothing would be possible.

3. On the other hand, the propagandist tries to create myths by which men will live, which respond to his sense of the sacred. By "myth" we mean an all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it. Such an image pushes man to action precisely because it includes all that he feels is good, just and true. Without giving a metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been created by various propagandas: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Fuhrer, of Communist society, of productivity, the "inner child." Eventually the myth takes possession of a man's mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it. But that effect can be created only by slow patient work by all the methods of propaganda, not by any immediate propaganda operation. Only when conditioned reflexes have been created in a man and he lives in a collective myth can he be readily mobilized.

4. The United States prefers to utilize the myth; the [former] Soviet Union has for a long time preferred the reflex. The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by active propaganda, by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up, and by the evocation of the myth. No connection necessarily exists between his action and the reflex or the content of the myth. The action is not necessarily psychologically conditioned by one aspect of the myth. For the most surprising thing is that is that the preparatory work leads only to man's readiness. Once he is ready, he can be mobilized in very different directions--but of course the myth and the reflex must be constantly rejuvenated and revived or they will atrophy. That is why pre-propaganda must be constant, whereas active propaganda can be sporadic when the goal is a particular action or involvement.

INTERNAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PROPAGANDA

I. Knowledge of the Psychological Terrain.

1. The propagandist must first of all know as precisely as possible the terrain on which he is operating. He must know the sentiments and opinions, the current tendencies and the stereotypes among the public he is trying to reach. The propagandist must know the principal symbols of the culture he wishes to attack and the symbols which express each attitude if he is to be effective. A person is not sufficient unto himself; he belongs to that whole called culture by the Americans. Each person's psychology is shaped by that culture. He is conditioned by the symbols of that culture, and is also a transmitter of that culture [see Althusser's "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus," particularly his notion of "interpolation" for further light on how this transmission works]. Each time the culture's symbols are changed, he is deeply affected. Thus, one can change him by changing these symbols. The propagndist will act on this, keeping in mind that the most important man to be reached is the so-called marginal man; that is, the man who does not believe what the propagandist says, but who is interested because he does not believe the opposition either.

2. Thus the technique of propaganda consists in precisely calculating the desired action in terms of the individual who is to be made to act. From this we may derive a fundamental rule of propaganda utilization: never make a direct attack on an established, reasoned, durable opinion or accepted clich, a fixed pattern. This does not mean that the propagandist must then leave things as they are and conclude that nothing can be done. He need only understand two subtle aspects of this problem:

a). In that there is not necessarily any continuity between opinion or fixed patterns of action, the propagandist avoid making this inconsistency clear by avoiding a head-on attack against the prejudices and opinions he seeks to alter. The skillful propagandist is aware of this and will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency.

. The propagandist can alter opinions by diverting them from their accepted course, by changing them, or by placing them in an ambiguous context. Other methods here include offering forms of action, provoking rifts in a group, or to turn a feeling of aggression toward some specified object.

3. Thus, existing opinion is not to be contradicted, but rather utilized. Each individual harbors a large number of stereotypes and established tendencies; from this arsenal the propagandist must select those easiest to mobilize, those which will give the greatest strength to the action he wants to precipitate. Propaganda need only determine which opinions must not be attacked head on, and be content to undermine them gradually and to weaken them by cloaking them in ambiguity. It goes without saying that propaganda must also change its character according to the results it wishes to attain in given circumstances. For example, propaganda must be strongly personalized when it seeks to create a feeling of guilt in the adversary ("Americans are capitalist pigs"). On the other hand it must be impersonal when it seeks to create confidence and exultation ("America is great.")

4. Another important conclusion to bear in mind is that propaganda cannot create something out of nothing. It must attach itself to a feeling, an idea; it must build on a foundation already present in the individual. Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material; it does not create it.

5. This "existing material" can be divided into four categories:

a). psychological mechanisms: these are derived from a general knowledge of stimulus-response actions more or less common to all individuals. Diverse schools of psychology provide different insights into the nature of these mechanisms, and here, the propagandist is at the mercy of these differing interpretations.

. conventional patterns and stereotypes: these exist concretely in a particular milieu or individual and can be known more objectively than psychological mechanisms.

c). ideologies: these are more or less consciously shared, accepted and disseminated, and which form the only intellectual, or rather para-intellectual, element that must be reckoned with in propaganda.

d). specific needs: The propagandist must concern himself above all with the needs of those whom he wishes to reach. All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, security, peace, work) or a psychological need. Propaganda cannot be gratuitous The propagandist cannot simply decide to make propaganda in such and such a direction or on this or that group.

6. The propagandist's need to base himself on what already exists does not prevent him from going further. What exists is only the raw material from which the propagandist can create something strictly new, which in all probability would not have sprung up spontaneously. Take, for example, unhappy workers, threatened by unemployment, exploited, poorly paid, and without hope of improving their situation: Karl Marx has clearly demonstrated that they might have a certain spontaneous reaction of revolt, and that some sporadic outbursts might occur, but that this will not develop into anything else and will lead nowhere. With propaganda, however, this same situation and the existing sentiments might be used to create a class-consciousness and a lasting and organized revolutionary trend.

7. Finally, it is obvious that propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man--the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in doing so place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality. To this end, propaganda must stay at the human level. Propaganda must confine itself to simple, elementary messages (Have confidence in our leader, our party...Hate our enemies, etc.) without fear of being ridiculous. It must speak the most simple, everyday language, familiar, individualized (The Bank of America family cares...You'll like our family)--the language of the group that is being addressed, and the language with which a person is familiar.

FUNDAMENTAL CURRENTS IN SOCIETY

1. Propaganda must be familiar with collective sociological presuppositions, spontaneous myths, and broad ideologies. by this we do not mean political currents or temporary opinions that will change in a few months, but the fundamental psycho-sociological bases on which a whole society rests, the presuppositions and myths not just of individuals or of particular groups but those shared by all individuals in a society, including men of opposite political inclinations and class royalties. No propaganda can succeed by going against these structural elements of society. But propaganda's main task is clearly the psychological reflection of these structures.

2. Whatever the differences of opinion are among people, one can discover beneath the differences the same beliefs--in Americans and in Russians, in Communists and in Christians. It seems to us that there are four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern world. By this we mean not only the Western world, but all the world that shares a modern technology and is structured into nations, including the Communist world, though not yet the African or Asian worlds. These common presuppositions of bourgeois and proletarian are:

a). that man's aim in life is happiness

. that man is naturally good

c). that history develops in endless progress

d). that everything is matter

Formulated in this way, they seem to be philosophical notions but are not. We certainly do not see here any of the philosophical schools, hedonism or materialism, but only the instinctive popular belief marking our epoch and shared by all, expressing itself in very concrete forms.

3. The other great psychological reflection of social reality is the myth. In our society the two great fundamental myths on which all other myths rest are Science and History. And based on them are the collective myths that are man's principal orientations: the myth of Work, the myth of Happiness (which is not the same thing as the presupposition of happiness), the myth of the Nation, the myth of Youth, the myth of the Hero.

4. Propaganda is forced to build on these presuppositions and to express these myths, for without them, nobody would listen to it. For example, a propaganda that questions progress or work would arouse disdain and reach nobody; it would immediately be branded as an ideology of the intellectuals, since most people feel that the serious things are material things because they are related to labor, and so on.

5. No propaganda can succeed if it defends outdated production methods or obsolete social or administrative institutions. Though occasionally advertising may profitably evoke the good old days, political propaganda may not. Rather, it must evoke the future, the tomorrows that beckon, precisely because such visions impel the individual to act. Propaganda not only reflects myths and presuppositions, it hardens them, sharpens them, invests them with the power of shock and action.

6. It is virtually impossible to reverse this trend. In a country in which administrative centralization does not yet exist, one can propagandize for administrative centralization because modern man firmly believes in the strength of a centrally administered State. But where centralization does exist, no propaganda can be made against it.

7. When we analyze this necessary subordination of propaganda to presuppositions and myths, we do not mean that propaganda must express them clearly all the time; it need not speak constantly of progress and happiness (although these are always profitable themes), but in its general line and in its infrastructure it must allow for the same presuppositions and follow the same myths as those prevalent in its audience. There is some tacit agreement: for example, a speaker does not have to say that he believes "man is good": this is clear from his language, behavior, and attitudes, and each man unconsciously feels that the others share the same presuppositions and myths. A person listens to a particular propaganda because it reflects his deepest unconscious convictions without expressing them directly. By the same token, a man's real attitude, his deeply-held convictions and beliefs can ultimately be surmised through his behavior, language and attitude; there is no hiding save through an extraordinary act of diligence and dissemblance.

TIMELINESS

1. A man will become excited over a new automobile because it is immediate evidence of his deep belief in progress and technology. Between news that can be utilized by propaganda and fundamental currents of society the same relationship exists as between waves and the sea. The waves exist only because the underlying mass supports them; without it there would be nothing. But man sees only the waves; they are what attracts, entices and fascinates him. Similarly, propaganda can have solid reality and power over man only because of its rapport with fundamental currents, but it has seductive excitement and a capacity to move him only by its ties to the most volatile immediacy. Goebbels said that the face of politics changes each day, but the lines of propaganda must change only imperceptibly.

2. The public is sensitive only to contemporary events. They alone concern and challenge it. Neither past events nor great metaphysical problems interest or challenge the average individual, the ordinary man of our times. He is not sensitive to what is tragic in life; he is not anguished by a question that God might put to him; he does not feel challenged except by current events. Therefore, propaganda must start with current events; it would not reach anybody if it tried to base itself on historical facts. Vichy propaganda failed when it tried to evoke the images of Napoleon and Joan of Arc in hopes of arousing the French to turn against England.

3. The average individual is at the mercy of events. Hardly has an event taken place before it is outdated; even if its significance is still considerable, it is no longer of interest, and if man experiences the feeling of having escaped it, he is no longer concerned. In addition, he obviously has a very limited capacity for attention and awareness; one event pushes the preceding one into oblivion. And as man's memory is short, the event the event that has been supplanted by another is forgotten; it no longer exists; nobody is interested in it anymore.

4. Man remembers no specific news. He retains only a general impression (which propaganda furnishes him) inserted in the collective current of society. This obviously helps the work of the propagandist and permits extraordinary contradictions. What the listener retains, in the long run determines his loyalties. A remarkable study by Carl I Hovland and Walter Weiss has shown that the individual who questions an item of information because he distrusts the informant, ultimately forgets the suspicious nature of the source and retains only the impression of the information. The implications of this study are disturbing: in the long run, belief in a reliable source of information decreases and belief in information from the suspicious source increases.

5. The public is prodigiously sensitive to current news. Its attention is focused immediately on any spectacular event that fits in with its myths. At the same time, the public will fix its interest and its passion on one point, the exclusion of all the rest. Besides, people have already become accustomed to, and have accommodated themselves to "the rest" (yesterday's news or that the day before yesterday). We are dealing here not just with forgetfulness, but also with plain loss of interest.

6. To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness--of himself, of his condition, of his society--for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events.

7. We have already mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased away by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.

8. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and--to the extent he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person--against inconsistencies. The best defense is to forget the preceding event. In doing so, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. All of this is doubly true for those who claim to be "informed" (educated or self-educated) because they read some weekly periodical filled with political revelations.

9. Because he is immersed in current events, the average man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more distressing, more striking, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants.

10. But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality. Here we must emphasize that the current news to which a man is sensitive, in which he places himself, need have no objective or effective origins; in one way this greatly facilitates the work of propaganda. For propaganda can suggest, in the context of news, a group of "facts" which becomes actuality for a man who feels personally concerned. Propaganda can then exploit his concern for its own purposes.

PROPAGANDA AND THE UNDECIDED

1. All of the foregoing can be clarified by a brief examination of a question familiar to political scientists, that of the Undecided--those people whose opinions are vague, who form the great mass of citizens, and who constitute the most fertile public for the propagandist.

2. The Undecided are not the indifferent--those who say they are apolitical, or without opinion and who constitute no more than 10 percent of the population. The Undecided, far from being outside the group, are participants in the life of the group, but do not know what decision to make on problems that seem urgent to them. They are susceptible to the control of public opinion or attitudes, and the role of propaganda is to bring them under this control, transforming their potential into real effect.

3. One strong factor here is the individual's degree of integration in the collective life. Propaganda can only play on individuals more or less intensely involved in social currents. The isolated mountaineer or forester, having only occasional contact with the society is hardly sensitive to propaganda. For him it does not exist. Propaganda acts upon the person embroiled in the conflicts of his time, who shares the "foci of interest" of his society. A prior interest must exist for propaganda to be effective. Propaganda is not effective when based on an individual prejudice, but when based on a collective center of interest, shared by the crowds.

4. That is why religious propaganda, for example, is not very successful; society as a whole is no longer interested in religious problems. At Byzantium, crowds fought in the streets over theological questions, so that in those days religious propaganda made sense. At present, only isolated individuals are interested in religion. It is part of their private opinions, and no real public opinion exists on the subject. On the other hand, propaganda related to technology is sure to arouse response, for everybody is as passionately interested in technology as in politics.

5. As for propaganda and the Undecided, we can present the following three principles:

a). The propagandist must place his propaganda inside the limits of the foci of interest.

. The propagandist must understand that his propaganda has the greatest chance for success where the collective life of the individuals he seeks to influence is most intense.

c). The propagandist must remember that collective life is most intense where it revolves around a focus of interest.

On the basis of these principles the propagandist can reach the Undecided and act on the majority of 93%; and only in connection with this mass of Undecided can one truly speak of ambiguity, majority effect, tension, frustration, and so on. On the subject of this 93%, it is often stated--and opinion surveys tend to confirm this--that between 7 and 10% of all individuals consciously and voluntarily adhere to a trend, to a grouping, whereas about 90% fluctuate according to the circumstances. The first correct estimate of this apparently was made by Napoleon. It was revived by Hitler.

PROPAGANDA AND TRUTH

1. We have not yet considered a problem, familiar but too often ignored: the relationship between propaganda and truth or, rather, between propaganda and accuracy of facts. We shall speak henceforth of accuracy or reality, and not of "truth," which is an inappropriate term here.

2. The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of lies. This concept leads to two attitudes among the public. The first is: "Of course we shall not be victims of propaganda, because we are capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood." Anyone holding that conviction is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the "truth," he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda; moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware.

3. It seems that in propaganda we must make a radical distinction between a fact on the one hand and intentions or interpretations on the other; in brief, between the material and the moral elements. The truth that pays off is in the realm of facts. The necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of intentions and interpretations. This is a fundamental rule for propaganda analysis.

THE PROBLEM OF FACTUALITY

1. In political matters, personal experience with facts is very rare, difficult to come by and inconclusive. One must carefully distinguish between local facts, which can be checked, and others. Obviously, propaganda must respect local facts, otherwise it would destroy itself. It cannot hold out for long against local evidence unless the population is so securely in the propagandist's hand that he could say absolutely anything and still be believed; but that is a rare condition.

2. There are three principles concerning factuality:

a). Propaganda can effectively rest on a claim that some fact is untrue which may actually be true but is difficult to prove.

. Propaganda may be presented in such a fashion that the reader or listener cannot really understand it or or draw any conclusions from it. Sauvy states that this type of propaganda consists in "respecting detail in order to compose a static whole which gives misleading information on the movement. Thus truth becomes the principal form of falsehood." The publication of a true fact in its raw state is not dangerous. When it would be dangerous to let a fact be known, the modern propagandist prefers to hide it, to say nothing rather than to lie. bout one-fifth of all press directives given by Goebbels between 1939 and 1944 were orders to keep silent on one subject or another.

c). Propaganda can use accurate facts, but based on them, the mechanism of suggestion works best. Americans call this technique innuendo. The public
is left to draw obvious conclusions from cleverly presented truth, and the great majority comes to the same conclusions. The only element in the publication of a fact which one must scrupulously take into account is its probability or credibility. Much news was suppressed during W.W.II because it would not have been believed by the public; it would have been branded pure propaganda.

INTENTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

1. This is the realm of the lie; but it is exactly here that it cannot be detected. A fact has different significance, depending on whether it is analyzed by a bourgeois economist or a Communist economist, a liberal historian, a Christian historian, or a Marxist historian. 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.

2. Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions. The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has had and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. The accusation aimed at the other's intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser.

3. Spier says that the role of the propagandist is to hide political reality by talking about it. Sauvy says that the propagandist administers the anesthetic so the surgeon can operate without public interference. This is why, in many cases, according to Megret, complete secrecy is a handicap to the propagandist; he must be free to speak, for only then can hesufficiently confuse things, reveal elements too disconnected to beput together, and so on.

4. Propaganda is necessarily false when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness--and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them.

5. Propaganda feeds, develops and spreads the system of false claims--lies aimed at the complete transformation of minds, judgments, values, and actions (and constituting a frame of reference for systematic falsification). When the eyeglasses are out of focus, everything one sees through them is distorted. This was not always so in the past. The difference today lies in the voluntary and deliberate character of inaccurate representation circulated by propaganda.

6. One cannot make propaganda in pretended good faith. Propaganda reveals our hoaxes even as it encloses and hardens us into this system of hoaxes from which we can no longer escape.

7. Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda--not an exclusive definition, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.

Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and insinuating false intentions. There are two salient aspects of this fact. First of all, the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy. But the accusation is never made haphazardly or groundlessly. The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation. He who uses concentration camps accuses his neighbor of doing so. He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. The accusation aimed at the other’s intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser. But the public cannot see this because the revelation is interwoven with facts.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda,(Vintage, 1965), pages 58.

The second element of falsehood is that the propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts: government, party chief, general, company director. Propaganda never can reveal its true projects and plans or divulge government secrets. That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success. More serious, its make the projects vulnerable to enemy action by forewarning him so the he could take all the proper precautions to make them fail. Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.1

1 Many authors have stressed this role of covert propaganda. Speier says that the role of the propagandist is to hide political reality by talking about it. Sauvy says that the propagandist administers the anesthetic so the surgeon can operate without public interference. This is why, in many case, according to Megret, complete secrecy is a handicap to the propagandist; he must be free to speak, for only then can he sufficiently confuse things, reveal elements too disconnected to be put together, and so on. He must keep the public from understanding reality, while giving the public the opposite impression, that it understands everything clearly. Riess says he must give the public distorted news and intentions, knowing clearly beforehand what conclusions the public will draw from them.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda,(Vintage, 1965), pages 59.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes. Knopf. New York. 1965
NOTES FROM PROPAGANDA
CATEGORIES OF PROPAGANDA
1. First we must distinguish between sociological propaganda and political propaganda. We shall not dwell long on the latter because it is the type called immediately to mind by the word propaganda itself.

2. Sociological propaganda is the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose