Introduction The iiliM of propaganda Before the spring of 200 3. propaganda as ,i concept had been relegated beyond the marginal to the irrelevant. Its conceptual identity was lost amid the new ■endemic lexicon of persuasion. communication theory and the manipulation of consent: the concept of propaganda in popular imagination relegated to the monochrome, stuitenng imagery of bolsheviks and storm troopers. Then began an awakening recognition, .1 cumulative cul-lural drift: lor in a culture where image is sovereign, where symbols matter. \\ here 1 he hair of public figures becomes a nexus of political symbolisation. it OOUkl not he long before an old word that could interconnect these phenomena would be rehabilitated. For we seemed bereft of a concept that could give ■ unitary understanding to the perplexing new realities of our own social back yard - from Wall Street analysts wrapping dol.com and high-tech shares in a cling-film of myth to the evolution of the accounting and finance profession (Arthur Andersen. Enron. Worldcom. Tyco) from purveyors of led to narrators of fiction, to the ascent of spin" (the affixing of determinate labels on to indeterminate events). Then there was Iraq. The word propaganda, like a lexical Rip Van Winkle, awoke to a new era. Everywhere, commentators claimed to detect the hand of the propagandist - in the embedded journalist, the elaborate propaganda ministry at Oaiar. the Coalition of the Willing' and other rhetorical bric-a-brac of the allies, and in the myths - of the Hussein Bin Laden link, and of the Weapons of Mass Destruction. This book differs from other books on propaganda in the elasticity it attributes to the term: orthodox literature has erred in restricting meaning to explicit texts such as the polemical tirade or black" propaganda (like the secret wartime radio station. Gustav Siegfried Eis). So the proposition is that propaganda is not synonymous with mere overt polemicism. but informs manv cultural products, including such apparently politically neutral areas . „ .U-imu-nliiries - and. wn,le tnis explanation h.,v, Wd. si,u,-1- ...templed 10 conceal propaganda cmenammcnt vohuk-s like- It* M.....„, Huron Munchausen or Lu,,H Kic/s (Rentschler 1996). One clear problem In the recognition of propaganda is the frequent d.ffi. cultv encountered ID dlSttaguUhlng U Othef thjD retrospectively. Pr0pa. nnda in the social environme.il is often naturalieed and we are unaware of it The merit of seeking to redeploy the term in critical discourse once again is that it does dutv as a sensitising concept. Foulkes (1983) drew attention to invisible proptfUldl perpetuating itself as common sense1, and quotes Orwell: all art is to some extent propaganda Thus for Foulkes the Nazi: has long ceased to be a real historical being. He nw inhibits the demonic twilight of the entertainment world: the mass-produced collective subconscious within which Zulu Warriors coexist with Invaden from outer space and the Waffen SS ... Propaganda docs not often come marching towards us waving swastikas and chanting Sieg heil': lis real power lies in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of the given s«>< lei y The explicit propaganda of earlier generations would strike people today as merely comical. The role of propaganda in human affairs has been underplaved by the limitations of its contemporary definition. The asp.ration here is to refresh propaganda as a distinct generic entity, and claim new territory for it as a pervasive attribute ol technological mankind for words dirJ^L . What we lack a word for we fail to perceive. Hnd uZct^T^Tc time the word propaganda" appeared to have LZ I ,blepcnod °f replaced by terms like persuasion' or advocacy w defunct- "> be the language and conceptual formulations currently bad! rCaIily tnrou&n integrate the apparently disconnected into n,\t,.n.^ ■ circulation, which enhance the conceptual richness through whi, h wraceS!?*' and tnus we neglect the interconnectedness of modern commu ! RS' demise ena. from spin" to the Afghan and Iraq war-. lcations phenom- The attempt to insert a new phrase Into the political Im, elucidate the meaning and conceptual anatomy r>f that te °n* a$ well as activity. With the Tight' terminologies, much else- might1/8 n° fliv°'ous nuanced debates and clearer and more rigorous bases for em °"°w - more Words are our tools: for example, the phrase 'presldenualP,f1C'1' itudie* something that Tony Blair has certainly been a< i.used of. OJ0?iVe^nrr»ent, meanings and debates - on Amerlcanlsallon. the cult of person*** many '^y. the demise of cabinet government mid parliamentary .........i rfwitj - mto a perspective Concept* may be right, wrong or half true, but vmboot ihrm argument would b< >h< nmrr Impoverished as we search for icftxxseformulae to docribe th»- phenomena that we can onlv dimly apprehend. Contents The structure of the book is conceptual rather than narraure-desu iutive in ' ' : »'•/! i\ organ Keel round an explana; r -:.-.r~s:« Myth ; ~ * " Ph'Moru. ihe foundation concepts of propaganda, are discussed m detail and seen as animating and structuring the core edifice, or ' --" ' '-' ' ••••>< rpi such as hyperbole. ide.\c-*- ?~ ' ' T.arup-dMIoa. deceit, the scan h for uiopia. otherness and the creation of enemies Then the focus moves to a series of specific case study analyses of -.. ' - - • ' ' ' '/m'fi.j lli.il embody these element-ir.z ;-.r". ',r.cnon of symbolic Government', the rise of single-issue groups, negative political campaigning, a,) th<- m cni wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The organising paradigm Is thur foundation concepts - myth, symbolism, rhetoric, key ele-f'jnia:tj. emotion, enemies, manipulation, deceit. Utopia. Summan review of the key themes Defining propaganda The attempt to first, and necessarily, to try and define omnaganria an elu-. - - • .• . ■( ib'-vernacular charge carried by tbewori 7 v.- problem is that in the MsrasM olar propaganda' is merely a term of opprobrium. Yet ..- • • •-;i liow we define something iUujninates the theories that we hold fn one sense, of course, the entire book is a definition of propaganda and its domain. Is it merely, as Schumpeter 119661 says, any opinion with which we disagree? There is unintentional propaganda press photographs for example, and what is propaganda to one person is not -.- ■.■ .'/h< i meaning is negotiable. The issues of definition are atooonet of %cope many things, for example a libel case i McDonald's), can be prrjp% Mutation, especially secondary education, is another theatre of propaganda, where state objectives are sought under the guise of the factual pedagogy of truth. This more elastic definition of propaganda • ..'-.■< ' . of -.late activity that would no: normal) be deluded in rnc*e orthodox reviews, hut such official vices as the manipulation of sta-usucs. or the control of Information, are surely legitimate candidates for a y.v-.rr.- ■■ <■/'.!/ I br Male is inevitably one of the principal irrigators :.".;-m .1 democracy it cannot resort to coercion alone or even at all. and all governments, even non-democratic ones, seek at the passive acquiescence of their people. The claim is that 'propaganda* is emphatically not merely another word for advocacy, is distinguished from mere marketing by its didacticism and its ideological fervour. Whereas marketing is rooted in consumer response propaganda asserts, and ideology is seldom submerged, although it maybe reinterpreted to fit the particular cultural paradigms. Explaining propaganda The book then continues by seeking to explain the phenomena that it has sought to define. The essential argument is that the propagandist dramatises our prejudices and speaks to something deep and even shameful within us. Propaganda thus becomes a co-production in which we are willing participants, it articulates externally the things that are half whispered internally. Propaganda is not so much stimulus-response as a fantasy or :onspiracy we share, the conspiracy of our own self-deceit. The force of propaganda is also the forcibility of the Utopian vision. We argue that Utopian visions are the underlying presence in much propaganda - the thirst for Utopia creates an illusion of a perfect or perfectible world order. This is manifest in phenomena as diverse as socialist realist painting or the advertising industry. And the successes of propaganda are unintelligible without the recognition that the persuasion strategies propagandists espouse are in the main emotional. Emotion is seen as the antithesis of reason and the power of propaganda is largely the power than hy assertion and ^X^^^ n^XTe^ tain emotions such as fear and anger: and escheu- ' J. ■ , rational decision maker. eu models of man as a Foundation concepts: symbolism, rhetoric, myth This review of what are seen as the foundation concepts of propaganda is ^tensive, and the conceptual basis for the applied case studies that follow „„. |t would be impossible to imagine a propaganda devoid of these elects Hfective propaganda is the synthesis and manipulation of all three Ttae chapters examine the definitions, meanings and debates over these uxms and their salience in propaganda. these Hhiioric chapter seeks to explain the enduring success of rh persuasion. We are concerned with how rhetoric works _el°rical forms of This th* u,ins o lhe c°nstituen dements of good rhetoi ic Ideas such us Ihe co production «»l meaning,the power of ambivalence and the wot kings ol ihrlorlc subverslvcly within a value system rather than as an exlei mil challenge to It, and the distrust of the power of rhetoric from the tune ol IMnto expressed in the half fearful, half admiring description ol IViules ('a kind of |m-i suasion played on his lips i Particular attention attaches In the Importance of metaphor as the key tool of persuasive rhetoi u Other ideas of pintuulv NttffwH the concept ol resonance' (Tony Schwartzi: good rhetoric 'smouldci s in 11 u mind*, the notion that rhetoric is not merely a conduit ol meaning hut at lively rrrales it. and. related to the concept of the Rhetoiu-al \imoii teg Slai Wars'. Axis of Evil'): the Hall jamieson thesis on the leminisaiion ol i hetoric; ihe power of partisan language to embed itself in everyday discourse and Ihus appear natural, neutral and objective the easily overlooked rhetorical forms such as bureaucratic rhetoric uoda\ the propagandist use (if language often has obfuscation as its objective such as the phrase no clear proof of animal-human infection in Britain s IISI- crisis); the propaganda use of lan-. • hange perceptions H M Ith thfl OTMfUrC group Mfhk h myt that it advocates the "ethical theft" of mahogany products la perverse juxtaposition that seeks to ethicise the unethical by I linguistic strategy that places it in a fresh perspective). The political and social impact of rhetoric is critical - such as the lan-'.'.rategies used to persuade in Ihe environmental and genetically modified food debates i "Frankenstein foods') and in the American 'civil war r/f values' its historical impact, with examples of great rhetorical events like Reagan and the Challengtr disaster; rod the rhetoric of war. both the language of dynamic metaphor as in Hitler's images of blood pollution or Roosevelt% day that will live in Infamy' to the evasive technical jargon of modern warfare which deliberately alms to detach people from the human realities, as with collateral damage". Myths Nor could propaganda exist without the myths that rhetoric articulates. Myth, defined as the sound of a culture's dialogue with itself, expresses the kry rdhtff of a society in story form. We see myths as critical to society's Integration and sustenance, and to destroy a society's myths is to destroy The Impact of myths on history has been critical for example, the German mmtartst myth of the 'stab In the back' by democrats at the end of World War I - and the core methodology of propaganda has been the creation and sustenance of myths, such as the myth that the US constitution enshrine* the right to bear arms. It does no such thing, yet the popular ill li.iihuik I I1M01 \ art t. ; • I I Ml iii II.N C »\\ II >c : , • • •, i\>\ > i In i iIn1 impc r • -./if/ nl Iiisitu \ in the a v gJFinland >taoc Mi lu.ilh die- train « 'I *■# AM Bi"'' playing the '.' I'/j/hiil hometimes 4 I Ir. Imptti I ..., n,, "• ll'illl I I,, y , ,||( i/i/l.i I1: In tin ||,| ' mi/Mi rulirpir I. Wrwl ,„ ,Ml. t rlvill |.y \1v; '.. / ih»I lltyrt ', immi I'.llxubclh I i':k 'jwnllinl In silk ')[>.r/.iimln \\v - jp In y.irrlrd : hr Wii*. wrm 1-,/r. H'iy ) The h1:<-,i < ognlllve short cut wtqr read a t/e«iiKr ilciumiu' .... iM «»i a i mieature Gexmar. 'Afasx wiili | Imii^ln^ . ... mi'/iim. le(Rhodes 199 : dbdft . IChi m u r v i\ It ll\ , . |n«-i,iir kimi of me>: ' m. • <.lumuui , \.„ wfiom •!»«• id of reading a a chore. Symbols can and • mill older, simplify or r~..; /' li. I In- »lalio 1. , • 1/ < limp lot in //y/i/ii'/o « m.Mi>lc ol endlev. c -. / >iw» , ' , o .. ^—loi i\iiiopU\ . , i iuii. mill uon-tixec s. ■_• . , - <• of n*ST^^H,,,,,,,K,Mr UA '-mlnwiMl with „ Mi.miil.iiliireof >> -: .v ,„ j „M ^op^iiuliM-SHwkFoittu* prw.,.l",1,rK,rN,N advatUaa* * *»i i . \ rli-iMi'iits of propyf The lilnllv of Myth Rfi. \.„ . , I.mi. Hi- .»1 propaganda hi,<: ,.■ ,\> i.ill in p.ii Hi ular: "•holism underglrds other major " '•»»•• I prim iplr |hemes in *ome Manipulation ami deceit I, , -..i\ ili.il propaganda w rn. II, |« mi . h.ii.uteristic of th« o-r■■ niv id ilie lerm is equated Htfl I,mI nevei n nth seeking 0t>->» .<■ Milled I" persuasive advocat some essential essence ' •■;! ". ihe populai understanding ol p,.ipiigry <•»/ \,t manlpulale perceptions. Ihr <>, hil construction of enmilu propaganda is a consequent- ,\ the r apllnllst. It is indeed difficult to imagine a propaganda with',. • lor enemies are essential to a com- pelling narrative structure, but the' hoi' 'of enemies Is inherently political. I*a Hollywood producers as. well - ..- //;paper editors. < .i < .Indies iii modern propaganda 11m i oiu i*pi 11al framework Is applied In tfag ueoad part of the book to a • im ol . evlew analyses ol ><,\.u rnporar y Iheulresof propaganda. The list - I...idly exhaustive, bui d<,e. h /l( .,„,„ ,,\ lhe significant phenomena lrlio„ hi,ve structured and cUUtlMK to direct our politi rt propaganda in all its naivety, has be of pi opaganda thai culture. Today the old cxtrovcu w^y^--- replaced In something more insidious - more .ikm to the art that conceals art. Spin and sound bite, negative advertising and single-issue groUps suggest pervasiveness of polemical forms of persuasion which amounts to the propagandising of our public culture even business is drawn into the vortex Situfh-issue qroups We begin with single-issue groups since they represent an extraparliamen-tarv political force of supreme power. They shape our times, and they do so through their mastery of the arts of propaganda. Victory goes not to the most, but to the most vocal. Their poverty makes them entirely reliant on the creativity of a visible public symbolism. The consequences of issue group propaganda, social and political, are very real and tangible. Since public opinion on many things is ambivalent final victory often goes to those who possess the best propaganda. Many mainstream political issues-Green, feminists - originated not in political parties but in single-issue groups and their masterly proselytisation techniques. The major ideological and value civil wars such as abortion have been fought outside the parties and with the tools of propaganda. Negative advertising Never was the word propaganda" more apposite as descriptor than in the case of US election campaigns, and this is an area where our discussion of the enmity thesis would apparently have singular relevance Negative political advertising is a tried and tested device and a sinister exemplar of propaganda today. At one time it seemed to have become the preferred mode of choice In US politics. Everyone knows about the Willie Horton advertisement, but the level of saturation of mamstream US po ti^with negativity is less well known internationally. Citizen alie t entry does not find a lenitive in rational discourse but in th ?, °n appar" tribes. A culture of contempt may be the achievement Qfy"Second dia" even if it is not the objective: but negative advertisino ai, °. proPa8anda defenders. g 3,50 has cogent Symbolic *)ver" mQSl COUnthes. politician and party are a materially Bui campaigns ca • ^ lheir abuily lo purchase media. The fight is impovenshed at or account, testing pohucians propagandist therefore for a favour reCOgnili0n that no public event is capable of of the media to bandwagon effects, has meant the expertise of governments increasingly becoming nol operational management or pollcj entrepre-neurship but communication skill, thai is. spin1. Democracy is .1 political system and .1 social ethos when- we seek persuasion rather than coercion, and it is the recognition thai the interpretation of events can he managed or even foreordained that has informed the work ol the Blair government in Britain, which hasbeeome .i supreme practitioner of this craft replacing, for example, half the heads of civil service information offices with partisan evangelists. However, we identify spin as part of a broader idea, the Symbolic State, embodied in the apparent solution of problems at the rhetorical level alone, preoccupation among politicians with generated imagery, the manufacture of symbolic events and concomitant devaluation of the roles of ideas and Ideology in politics. Marketing war Afghanistan/Iraq Both the motivation and the conduct of these wars were inspired and structured by communication, i.e. propaganda, objectives Again our conceptual formula is used to illuminate the meaning of these events. It seemed at times that asymmetric" warfare would be fought on an imag-istic as well as a military plane. Uniquely lor a terrorist organisation. Bin Laden spoke in a symbolic language instantly intelligible to his allies and enemies - to recruit, of course, but also to terrorise, not just by the act but by the imagery, specifically Hm Laden himself as serial role player and personality cult. There was the propaganda of the act' - Nine-eleven -but also classic polemicism hyperbole, rage, an enemy to hate. Those vivid tapes, and the Taliban's posture as peasant underdog against the global superpower, made some commentators early on suggest that the Taliban/AI-Qaeda were winning the propaganda war. The US had been taken off guard. There was a general recognition that a global culture had sponsored global propaganda and the US had to master this if it was to retain hegemony in a global order. In Iraq the US sought to meld very old propaganda forms - battlefield leaflets, radio stations and the like -with some remarkable new ones: the 'embedded' journalist, the Hollywood stage set at Qatar and direct approaches via e-mails to enemy commanders, abetted of course (at least in the US) by shamelessly partisan media. New insights on propaganda emerge such as the importance of the coherent integrating perspective, or the problem of imagistic control in wartime. /"frodu,t|0n 10 AfwrwMnl v of the measurable impact of prop. ^ bo„K......• *l,h 11 brt .1.'erection of current events and as a ".",„ DM section of current events and as, Lnfe both ■.....„lU fee failures in propaK;mua campaigns 1 1 •'>• i■ m \ i«'l,m" ..•.„«ainvan insuperable problem guUllni hind in hUtor) \c;nwnt-remains an Insuperable problem, ;,r, r,oi .IHH. ."Ii lOldenUQ m ■ e There js no liri.,| W()ra\ abates but th |l III ■"J11"1 Vhi ieil onlv taken further. Hut that propa-'" h ;' ,l" ' ' Vr -m »n< m our society, an important social garni* »»'","«" 1,1 h,',lU V alU. . ^led by its true name, and studied as part A question of meaning This chapter teases out the meanings of the term propaganda . a task complexified by Mi common usages and connotative content. We orient and nuance the defininon through a number of primary categories: rational persuasion, manipuiauon. intent, breadth. The chapter seeks further clarity of definition by exploring the complex and ambivalent relation of propaganda to the mass media, appraising some of the limitations of the analytical methods that regularly convict media texts of the ideological determinism associated with propaganda. Subsequently we engage in a summary discussion of the conceptual elasticity of the term as embodied in such diverse cultural theatres as education, the arts, bureaucracy, war. journalism-Defining propaganda Propositions on propaganda. This is a dull chapter. No book purporting to explain propaganda can shirk the imperative of actually trying to define the term, a maddeningly elusive task which necessarily involves a recitative of competing definitions. We begin by reviewing the key propositions which summarise the principle debates about the definition of propaganda: a definition that must remain open ended since there can be no closure when a concept comes laden with so much historical baggage. Problem of definition: no agreement It is inevitable that there will be no collective agreement about the definition of propaganda in the sense that we might have accord on the meaning of many other words. Our task is to extract what seems most reasonable from the competing interpretations of the term. Since propaganda is a . ii is to pics, \\W Us social signification ~r;;;r:........................ and w have no rigorous scunillU source or juridical author*, ZZ term but only hlsto. kal usage U; altempl lo dcOne propaganda isto ^iLhtbupnn......iceptualn.....Md.H.....*dijne propaganda^ i^d* expression o. .he «he^ ^98, there arcn„ agreed, mutual u.n■......."I^Ul CI U.Tm whjchallowthe ton ()f propaganda from Into math* Schumpeter (1966) said that Zwiry usage ol the term propaganda refers lo any statement .ting from a source thai * fe «-« likr * h. Jones Singh 1989, t^tedtoseenod.lle.e.helnMvNee.MMO|vu',>-ussion of information Whal IB Mia.ke.mg is telling . in school is leaching in the chun b ll p.osclu.s.ng IB POUUCI is propagandising, in military is •indoctrinating' loulkes (198 51 comments that propaganda .-■ve concept io define p.iiih because lis recognition or supposed recognition is often a function of the relative historical viewpoint of the I m serving n Thus mam uncstigaloi > limit Ihcmselves to extreme situations such as war. loulkes further argues thai the recognition of propa-nda can be seen as a function of the Ideological distance which separates the observer from the act of communication observed. \^cording to I'ralkams (Pratkanis and Arouson ll)91). the first documented use of the term occurred in \h22 when Pope (Iregory XV established the Sacra Congregate de Propaganda Fidel in the wake of the vcunter-Reformalion. Militaristic methods were failing and propaganda wm established as the means ol 00 oidmaimg efforts to bring men and women to the "voluntary acceptance of church doctrines: the word propaganda thus look on negative meaning In Protestant countries but a positive COOnoUUon tfmllai to education or preaching) in Catholic areas ... the term propaga.uk. did not see widespread use until th. k Of the Iwent.etfi eenturv when „ ^ ^ J J^^J^J^ employed during World War One and those late, used hv louilUarian regiSes" Colloquial uses Nevertheless the definition of propaganda is complicated b colloquial usage wherein propaganda is always associated ^ i!** faCt of a eaneSS, and only I term of abuse, signifying the hyrttrtM6 idea of declamatory. The pre-war anti-marnuana film K.vf.r Madneu extrerne. its hysteria the kind of excess popularly ascribed lo propagandas?*11* in rumours, the outrageous libs that vet tester in the gutter of ueXts°rthe *. * k * 111 rr^\ r._ sciousness-that the Holocaust did not happen, thai Nlne-elevin c°n" or an Israeli plot, that the lunar and Mars landings were ena^?SaClA led in a 4 furttion of mrntilnu il HoJfyw^xJ \unUu Another illustration would be so-calM m.„ v ,„„„„ ganda, such as fa |«pftllCM campaign against Sunkist lemon-, m wl|lr|| Ispaoese agri' uliural groups spread the rumour via the media thai Amrrl-~ '•" *'d vvllh Agent Orange' (Chicago Tribune. 1 2 June |S) A major reason for thin eluslveness of meaning is that no working rlHInltion of a concept can ever In- separated nut from its colloquial uv- Hyperbolic ; " r";,lly paHliuliir uses of propaganda rather than ri'-v riplluns of some essence of propaganda Itself. Nevertheless such colloquial usages caoDOi stmpl. ■' < i .e.ide • ;.-••< rnpi- lodl scuks I he lerni obiectivelv are distorted by the ICCU - - - -,l 11n concept through history, its asvy iaiiorr. with the Third Reich, for example making ilispassionate analysis difficult l.)res< her 11987) argue* that 'propaganda' conjures up imizf of go-.f-rrirnrnially : -• ' '/»';, .iihri iii the context i'I a h : - * ,«.ar I ■■ually. Ainericam kl par in ular I lank ol propaganda as an activity that r. engaged .....-man or totalitarian governments. In fact a: fjrev her points - -,'J.i may involve the truth, even though it fall, into thf . He rather than hurrah' words. That the idea of propaganda •< >. which elements Of guile miming md ,p, ,,rc not - i' - yr,-u*.\\\ even from the objective definiuons. Can there then he no meritorious propaganda- The genre a .elf i. viewed - - , - . ■f nily i uunoral and even its wartime uses consigned to the l^aortraJ ttmbo of necessary evil, like the bombing of cities Examples of a ■ . , propaganda are more numerous than we would imagine, and -- m'-iely .i psvcholic e\pre»:. r. :. ■;. tun. tion- - -• ttji a virtuous propaganda '.vhenl rexomp!'-propaganda ■4Ti alo-r native strategy to legal coercion, as demonstrated by the ' »■/,"•'n I he very different attempts to deal with the scourge of sfegaddrugt and thai ol cigarettes. The scope and complexity of the idea of propaganda have often been in HUD parochial definitions that invest it with Its familiar and r WrtUH ola; meanings. The word is not value-neutral and its strong connotatrve aw littOOl need to be interrogated if it is to be used critically -. - . ......,m'.illy ii I choose to speak of i inciting ae'propaganda' .. . ..... .,< < i ■.imiy 111a111 is worthless it mnj be north) bet mtf the apnUf*' "> '-.»ahlr.li Ihe cause as a legitimate one is worthy. Words are toots. To use tool* effort Ively demands not the search for the perfect tools , . . v, . hoi rather lhat we recognise the limitations of those sre do The term 'propaganda' may be conceptually flawed, but it Is not thereby redundant Clarity ■ | . a,~cthe iinamhii'.uOUl transmission of n.^nd. genera.lv ,m ^ ^of ^ '(lari.y may not be an e»c«i •« ,hjs inherem „ , ,r,a,n.y a normative soll)(iofls. Schick 11985?^ lion, lhat it is a complex pur\e\ot eIat* prtwnda to media whose symbol systems are visible Foulkes ,l9,J( ! auM thus argue that a propaganda doctrine socialist realism, could p*. irav only those problems and conllic.s lor which the system ostensibly has •• solution and he also relates this phenomenon to western mass culture in Rhetoric Lo*ar Ml Reason Michael Meyer (1994) argues that manSpalai - . .; r-anda piocccd .1" llirqiirslion they were dealing wllh were solved. However. good propaganda may disguise the fact that it thinks the is limu of the pia? wfcm m.....„ I foflom Ihf ..Id crone out. and. when his l.ithor asks turn he ha* «cm *„ „1,1 |Oln| down the path, replies I did noi But I tarn a fmmgprt am! the hud the walk or a queen. Many auihwita cfeftm t/» penetv itrong distinction between propa-f.inda and the nv^rc UMt*! OMIfflUlltcettOn', 'information' or persua-iton Ellul 1IV cmjfcrilf dh»ifi/i/i<|H •, between propaganda and com-inunication: Morao (Sdricfc I'iHS) atfl then as existing in opposition to One another. The liMtifut* Uir l'ror»a»/anda Analysis, an inlluenttal force in the I nited Stales in the late \ 't Uk deliberately chose the word propaganda' rather than ihe mnreemoto,r,.>\\/ neutral 'communication '. While the lerm propaganda' If tmutknu uwd erroneously as a substitute for other categories of perfusate*), II If not synonymous with persuasion as such and is in fan a hu^hh 1. .<■ fom ol advocacy. There are many examples of non-propagaodfft oerfuaflon. Authorities - Jowett ijowett and ODonnell 1992». for crawpli- Ac dlftingulfh propaganda from persuasion propaganda L- ■: , v imh-d wilh a general societal process whereas persuc^ '/.:-:: . an individual psychological process". Propaganda if firm fPfgefti/.r, md its targets are the multitude, and Iliis. as lowed says, if what (ftfttngulfhei it from persuasion. Propaganda if afaofecn a* Ihf obVfTM of 'reason', or rational persua-sion. otter c •:' - ■• - /.',rd information". Thus some have claimed to perceive an eit-T-T'.'x y. anty in the language of politics, that political language ha1; '.v. -.uyy. 1 he one emotive, that uses rhetorical- emotional appealf (prrrOGfy--- ''■<>i ihe other passive (rational and informational). Propaganda fc» certainly not rational persuasion. The appeal to reason \\' -' • -mother propaganda strategy. When \\c ce; y m (lie attempt to distinguish it from advo- cacy, we also say thai a Lnrrt*% 1 lensc meaning" rather than a bounded or lexical definition - its "/'//nitron that I know it when I see it'. To some extent one ./-xt.t.i f/, ir / and define propaganda by what it is not. As a sealed daTfiaifm the eoflCfpl excludes notions of intellectual exchange. Smith etaf (1946]Itlngulfh between propaganda and education by arguing that the 1t*v ' f > .">ui erned with attitudes on controversial Issues whereas die latter H concerned with attitudes on non-controversial Issues. According i^aaaaavr. 11 fW), the problem with this distinction is that it assume: w- . - >..: ■■.. non t onlroversial. which it is for the haves ol society lee.'.''. . *: r. '.almon believes, are also manipulative and benefit from y/ J&y vtu 0MMd labels which conceal persuasive intent. Yet other endef fat '$9§fgpn.'i> II having no conceptual content distinct from rrw. •:. a, . but propaganda is more specific than < ommunicauon'. a h c U rs lo any transmission of information 1« • '"'i ,„u\ '"li WlthOUl Itnlgi'llHMl *•« deccillul H" .......' communti otlon llwirlil ill merely * aim ii«• "'' ................1 blind, hyp^rW .....iin I • hli ^ UWictte,* . , I .. 11 .1 Mm) |'i'.|»;.K;,„,|()/ ........(id Hi (ill i l"""' I! Hi «''»«11 arc ,,,,,„ ,i ii II IIih Hum between propa^ and bud »1 n • ' ( ( ..... , | ....... ....... Hull judgement** ■ndcommumM .....|(............(, mnerw1ie we accept, Yet language............. , , ..........,,,,i„i port u •^^t;:1:,. J.L i in......•••• Z......................................1............M:™ *al Hatanedt.......In -------- ' ' ''"'T ',omglhc the tntereitt of Ua miiv* IMIllI......1....... "..rrly particular typetof propigind......IWtltNlltl.....iHllWttl «•••»•♦' conceptual essence of propaganda UmmI l # Mill ll|Mll.llll.l I Pronag.unl.. 111 u < .hi id, „,,11,1.. . Trm.iiisH.,,..............„„'';' ;•.......«* seldc............1.1..............„ //I - ''^Propaganda subversion All ,.,,.,„„......i.............. (( ' "••Hih^ltow and works best by speak of an.....iutnl|iultilli. ,, ,,,( ,,, , "' " """|,n" "i.aninglessto conceptually roiluuitdiii i., | J "J ' """ *ould r. ndet the term would mourn I hi I...... lital>ii|iM| n.. ,' ' untied her people Reformationnadeiinlttt .ui.ii.......,..... m,''v which her Protestant tosubsi.ii.i,...........h m,,,,,, , ( H[,"'v.ihrrc-lore.than soubriquet the Virgin!....... ........ ••••«• nhi promoted the Mosl si Ii nil us iiliim 'i i......|.,|,| ,,..... 'propaganda' „,„1 .1.. i.l............... , (| ...... 1-1*,.,.,, ,he word informalii.il h pi........1.......|, ,, ''"'I'llr.o , i i in Cadu.ll,.............................|.....' •;»•'•;... ,.,„,„ Vs encevialliiiu.iiiipiil.«ii.in..| .Muil.i.l., .,n.hl„., ' " ♦••%nt . "i li.l........ . Hi a«i„n.- Bnusnaupucuyoi u.....iwai i Ii ...h. ,„,,, .....'v. ••ipr/Juj7'J ence via ih. ......up..I.a.......1 ..... unlil, , ,',' '»' .-,„ .'' V iow«............................................:,;'unu terminal plan ..I p.. lab. i, .a. .| i ,,,„„„,.......... „r,0 ' " ''"»»iMl(lll P^ede 19 to fulfil an objective'. Propaganda is the deliberate and to share perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct ~- ~ - -" ' --" '• - a response that serves the desired intent of the propa-: The word has attracted negative connotations and now refers to of communication in which a communicator manipulates others. their being aware of the manipulative effort, for the source's than the benefit of the receiver'. '1978) also attempts I number of definitions of propa-on deceit: the fcc= to the - "vu'ral (Roman Catholit meaning pr paganda has now - "• v.nrd rhetoric to mem ItOfnap WB& weri>al strategies aeptive and misleading, or which misrepresent the true motives is that language - most easily a slogan, but perhaps a White an editorial, a book - which influences the false doctrine ideology. es propaganda further: while propaganda might once the political exhortation or patriotic speech (propaganda of generally implies some element of deception, either in the or in the motives of the speaker Thus there is a very fine line oratory and propaganda. bf thai very selection of examples these and other authorities ons. sleaze would appear to be the common denominator. oe true of its vernacular meaning. Yet. while propaganda is g more than advocacy alone, manipulation is a vague - . - that incorporates e\ er\ :h:r.g irem selectivity of facts of fraud. All advocacy manipulates. Inherent in these • .. '.v on that propaganda j.v> >e s. a mere extreme form. • - . \hr\ to effective persuas .•:: ru: does a disservice to the to the definition of propaganda, and can one indeed a I propaganda? The point is not a frivolous one. since ' : - ;• omena embraced bj the tern: rrcpapBlh would be vastly to extinguish the requirement of intent. The attribution a saotive would ascribe an introspection, a level of self-analysis ers and evangelists dc not rxiscis- :he possessors of of truth do not see themsehrs as propagandists but as -. ■■>.•;.<.-pting llus point al>c ;;T.:_;i:r: r.t problem of defi-the term's conceptual expanse to embrace the work of ■ mixers and ihe like. and. indeed. ^ , ,.............• " ; ;^Tno. awa«of committing^^ ...... „ , ^.wiW'W^tartd propaganon of thev«ws-% '">■'>>mr* " ,< February 1995I would nevtrhZ !^im«* •»• '"""S^nch theoretician of propaganda, reganb*; """ ,,,„1,1»-' ' . > ht-n ihe biases an- unconscious ^ '"' ' ' mien.. Ellul thus mate* TS- the <^fZS^ and bias. This is would n«» "m a. _ ^fnreii pWaS«",u. --- llM11,si ,a.i> i ^I^ariK biased, but not all bias is necessary ___t-, -rtnti U> ^in^LM'c^^*^ controversial. How can something hi I'M'|mh...u!.m i • » • ; * ■ .... even awarc that the messages'art 1' 1 'r n '' rhc bet pwT""** * sometimes the most "acoo- 'T '''Ti'^-onsumer ccthehtaorian. of propaganda might judge a textai ...... /. . ihe producer did not: all those school books and ,......, « hu h ^caoaWthcgtoesof the British empire were not neces- „, ih s,,n b) «riatai»teas|wwanda. They thought they were telling the truth or < :>eytag the proudest voices of conscience and profession: the i ,,i that u haee been manipulative, but the intent may not haw bean l heajuaaaonof therelationship of intent to propaganda, then .niinii no i at] noIudoo - particularly in relation to education, whose |M-d.igi»giu"s m triuauclwu as communicators, yes. persuaders sometimes. '" v" ,M>17 rsuchenucs. propaganda is defined by inten- NW ,IM1 í " ^ľplmc^ar pobucal effect on a particular audience ......t*;;„ - but u imPues that the com- F°unkation is r^urpoeeluL AndTaykw • 1990) argues that by propaganda 1 n » the drl)r*mtf anempt 10 persuade people to think and behave in a t, !.',i,.(|h .0 r.v ^ mímoch propaganda is accidental or unconscious. , [,,,' 1 ,uu da* ussmg ihe conscious rational decision to employ techniques ','„ ,1immon ^ 10 specific warlike goals.' These sources. ,,„ q Mould Mi á^aajiwhÉng property of propaganda as being this i(|h . ..»<• mieni M mlueiioe. bat ihe same could be said of much human .........Link ibon - rare* caked l.i' 1 \ p> .MViajanda event niay booaaerang and be conscripted bv **Sl' in si the cause that sptaaaared a. Thai is exactly what hapnen!j"la8DIlists , vvnai nappened m the case TrVtord 1194 U. which contrived to ľľ«rt s pob*** ^Lnan government but against the A question of meaning 21 a US officer in the Vietnam War that a M n^ssary to destroy the vill.^- . .. 1 "mssary todestroy tht in order to save it . circumnavigate the globe, a self-inflicted wound Another illustration of how propaganda can transmute into c propaganda is afforded by Ceor*- Hush s landing on the aircraft-carrier Abraham Lincoln to declare the Iraq » a. oxer (In fact more Americans were ounw-i —------------------—— —- » » wi\ ii 'i a '\i i • i i > i olive-green (light suit and with I helmet tucked beneath his left arm. Inspi rational music kicks in as the spot continues. An announcer runs through Kerry's record while the advertisement goes on to Hash images of him at various points in his life: making his presidential announcement before the carrier Yorktnwn in South Carolina, receiving a combat medal as a young navy officer, speaking with voters, speaking at hearings and writing at his desk. The \ew York Times comments the commercial does not bang viewers over the head with the image. In fact, the script does not refer to it once. Campaign strategists said that is because the moment speaks for itself and provides a good curtain-raiser for a spot that highlights Mr Kerry's vast experience as a soldier and politician.' Propaganda can be indirect, and a text can be usurped as propaganda even when the intent was neutral - the creation, for example, of an image in photo-journalism Key images from the Vietnam War were scorched on to the consciousness of world opinion: the napalm-burnt girl, naked, running in terror: the South Vietnamese General Loan (Eddie Adams I tiring a gun into the head of a helpless Vietcong suspect: the John Filo image of the college girl kneeling over a lifeless body at Kent State (Goldberg 19^n. Whatever the intent of their original photographers and publishers, these images circulated internationally through many media as classic atrocity propaganda: their pcrccpcual construction helped determine how we interpreted the war then and ho*** we remember the war now. One communication vehicle that particularly raises the question of intent in propaganda is the documentary. This announces in advance an intent of objectivity, addressing burning issues of the day. Wrhile nobody would suppose that a ctocumentan- film maker would properly lack a sense of mission, the ostensible purpose is truth telling and it is therefore a particularly appropriate refaick tor the confection of lies. Television documentaries can mutate into propaganda by the very measure of their selectivity, and without, necessarily, any conscious intent on the part of the producers. Lesley Garner, the reviewer of a BBC-2 television documentary on euthaanala. Death on Request, pointed out that the merciful self-chosen extinction exhibited in this Mm is still one end of a long /fining what and not m Mtll spectrum whi. I. - '"'« ^UWmlc deaths of the disabled. ' tinted (Dolfe ^ II Mil* LJW In this case, the ,,,„, \Mkers recorded tl.. •,. m. womb. ..I .i I hili'li motor neurone disease suf. tear Ceee van Wendcl ilr 1.....k In oslnislbhl powerful documentary lboul the organic! ending Ol I I".....^ .nv protoundly moved by ins suffering mdconvlnt cwl l»v llir ImmmiUy ol his olhcial executioners. Inn the film is about a -.Ingle . .■■•« "',.1 II dors not seek nuance or debate tboul the complcxii..-. » (secret) euthanasia decree explained it to Llebene......I leipiesled n Him (Herzstein 1978). since Gocbbels had sensed dlsiiulel among manv over the regimes policy, espe-v tally among Catholn s / Accuse is about tin- deterioration mulct multiple sclerosis of a young woman whose husband pants die release she craves by killing her. something doctors have refuted I lei husband is put on trial. The concluding scene illuminates iIn- ii gumenti lot oulhanasla thai the regime had sought to mobilise. The doc I oi < hanur. hh mind. Comments Herzstein: the dialogue in ibis s..... i. r , yui la.nment euner e* text ,t am scklom be Q noses or to estabhsh the ctnuauv imi» ______«. . . poitica because politic, is a signal which activates a defence mechanwn. The broad social uberahsm of mam entertainment products - racial tnte-gration. harmony, social esteem lot different segments of the community-represent an ethos. This ethos BMQ be celebrated overtly: it is more likely to be simply a benevolent nai raiiw assumption. But it is not propaganda. All entertainment is propaganda would be a nonsense, the notion that since entertainment is manufactured bj commercial interests it will invariably celebrate the status qiu\ The I'rankfurt School in particular viewed all entertainment as propaganda for a dominant social order - as gratifying to the masses and therefore contributing to their further enslavement. This is a gross simplification. As a cultural product entertainment must seek out novelty and therefore sub\ ersion, since continuous celebration of the status quo would bore. Drescher et al. 0987» argue that what we classify as propaganda is also a function of receiver perceptions the same message may function as objective information or as a persuasive statement in a different context' and 'whether the message is interpreted as fact, propaganda depends on the perspecm I of the receiver.... A sender may also tr n message with the intent that it sen e more than one function i!nSmi13 may also be transmitted with the knowledge that Nation A willV <\SSageS as statements of fact while Nation B will find them to be *gard them nature.' Thus Drescher argues that the speech that to some so^h*6 "* simple patriotic praise may be perceived by others to have self-Ser^ ^ propagandist motives iBoaniman Many apparent cases and ganda 'will be interpreted dilYervntly by different readers'. T/n Propa" lere are ambivalent cases which provide both information and fog - for e the newspaper which announced that intlation in March rose 3.2 rj^p]e Cent, question of meaning 2S continuing the trend of declining rates of interest"! films may be propa ganda only in the sense that some of the audience would choose lo read as if to propaganda, since that is the meaning they have chosen to appropriate from a repertoire of possible meanings. A literary or musical piece, such as Mozart's Marriage of Figaro which satirised the aristocracy on the eveol tin-French Revolution, can be used as propaganda (Perris I 9K5). and as pnllt ical propaganda it was the more beguiling, and the more dangerous, because clothed in a language that was not verbal but mush "I and there fore both meaningful and imprecise. Derrida 11981) claimed that no single interpretation can claim i«> be the final one. He demonstrated this not by revealing how the lexis meaning ll reconstructed but instead by deconstructing a text in the sense of showing its failure to be interpreted unambiguously. Of course this is not line of much historical propaganda, one of whose characteristics is that meaning is indeed non-negotiable. Even in the war propaganda realm we do indeed meet examples where an openness to interpretation exists: the subtlety ol a film like Powell and Pressburger's Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (194 U introduces us to layers of meaning. And Cook (1992) has described how -partly through the agency of para-language-the message and Story lineol much commercial advertising is ambivalent. For example. Calvin Klein advertisements would seem deeply vulgar if put into explicit words (see J. O'Shaughnessy 1995) . This coheres with the Hovland thesis thai people are not passive receptors but active participants in the creation of meaning (Hovland and Janis 1959). The most extreme version of this view sees all meaning as a ultimately a co-production between text and viewer receiver (see Kellner 1995). An apparent propaganda event can turn out to be anything but. Responses - how people choose to interpret material - may diverge from what the producers intended or what logic would anticipate. This was. for example, true of the television film The Day After (Adams el al 19Nf>). about the aftermath of nuclear war. It had the distinction of the third highest viewing audience in US television history, and therefore (potentially) some social significance. The prediction was that it would foment opposition to the policy of nuclear deterrence. The reverse happened. The share of people seeing Reagan as the more dangerous President declined appreciably, from 36 per cent to 2 7 per cent. This can be explained on several levels. First, the film was not the explicit propagandist evocation of nuclear armageddon predicted by the political right. In fad il was rathei anodyne. Second, nuclear holocaust was shown as survivals, which may have surprised people, since Americans already accepted the destructiveness of nuclear war. Third, the film had received considerable publicity, sensitising viewers to possible manipulation, and making the Dvtitunq w/iiir and rvasonln 26 S nlm an.ic.imac.ic. Researchers were unable in de.ee, even a „,,„ ,„„ ~!ZZl££ 1«» is Perhapsa morecornplex n.me, ,„„„,,,„. Moreover. iut b. d js ideological-propagandist la ,„ ^^ricys o meel and merge in a complex theatre of idee oglcaI pluraUsm; politic* opinion becomes less definite when people hold a portfolio ol right-wing and left-wing positions rather than coherent Ideological package, hi, is consequence of components of the 1960s counter-culture bemg absorb* into the political mainstream. For example, elements of the figure o Rambo himself - long hair, bandana, androgynous breasts - are derived from it (Tasker 199 5) while for Webster 11988) "the countrywide is .. symbol that unites the contemporary ecologist with the old blood-and-soll Kight (hinted at in terms like hick-chic f. Propaganda and interpretation Each producer of a message relies on its recipients for it to function as intended. This assumes they know how to interpret the message. Meaning is always negotiated in the semiotic process, never simply imposed implacably from above by an omnipresent author through some global code (Hodge and Kress 1988).This is where the didacticism of much classic propaganda fails in persuasive terms, for example Soviet propaganda, which assumed a hypodermic model of opinion modification: C.oebbels in contrast sought to disguise propaganda as entertainment. Traditional semiotics errs in viewing the relevant meanings as frozen and fixed in the text itself to be extracted and decoded by the analyst by reference to a coding system that is impersonal and neutral and universal for users of the Code (Hodge and Kress 19 S H). The media text does not have one meaning but has to bo internreted Rambo for example, within the social and political context that eave hirth tn it. so that the complete meaning of a propaganda event therefore emer.es only when we study the society that produced it. Like many cult.. V^u rists. Kellner (1995) argues that the audience is not a passiv pre-digested meanings'. The domain of communication and cult ^ °f be clinically separated, and in Kellner's view they are an inter, ^ C'annot There are dominant, negotiated and oppositional readu^.'^ *ySlCm* propagandist this presents the problem of the unintended ^ F°r mr~*K> Audiences......., d..................ffprttttton and appropri- .,, „nages o create .heir own mSSnlngl] „,„„. f„r CXHmpIc, rncn ^w York homeless centre u,,, .....lt(...... ,, ......Illiv|(. svmp.llhcUc (owards ,,hls iUV,,,l,s ...............Ill -I hegemony and counter- hesemony: Kellner 1995) And wl„ ,, Mlohttl Moore's Rogerand Me Mi.-.irman el al Bn undsnllbly propagandist lilm. was shown to a group of Japanese student-, liny m luiilly oik ted slightly favourably towards business in then own i OUntl v Negotiation of meaning Much in Mlm eludes precise si inly n < .10 be described but its nuanced nature makes analysis dlffll ult Mow do we dlssrel atmosphere' or tone? What ideological function do ic,< i ll•< to •.lylisiie devices that qualify or even subvert a dominant Ideologic al reading, such as a certain playfulness? lasker 1 1 9S> 51 complains <>l 'ittndirdf Ol truth against which popular films hCVC been judged, standards whl< h rarely admit the complexity of terms like fantasy". The new critics l<»« ns mi m fid forms provides, it is argued, a valuable qualification to a politii al under '.landing of popular texts as an uncontested space for the play ol dominant Ideology", since specific formal devices do not carry an innate 01 essential meaning. Attempts to stigmatise tin- mass media .is propaganda are usually doomed to failure because ol the Ideological elusiveness of much of their r onienl. Yet. if political fixity ll a chsrai terlltiC of propaganda, it is rarely to he found in the populai cinema I I .e.kei I 99 \). As a consumer product, media must please targel markets which are usually ideologically heterodox seldom therefore do they Issue an ideological clarion call, more an enigmatic invitation to Interpretation I nlerlainment is both an important soon e -/I propaganda and eni BpSUlltH tht conundrum ol" its definition. Much entertainment that Is ehnrnclei Ised as propaganda by right and left-w\t>y < ri'ics is seldom consumed us such by lis audience, since such critics are really searching for a 1 helm leal bullet In an Ideological war. Critics are mm h too willing to discern In lexis I he hand of the propagandist and this Involves them simplifying the enlei lalmnenl product in the cause of an ideological argument, such as those who dismissed the film Michael Collins because it had pre-invented the nu bomb and other pedantic details. The entertainment industry knows that II Is entertaining a politically plural audience, redneck as well as New York bohemlan. Interpretation is left open. Classification as propaganda may represent the coercive imposition ol .. ngid interpretation thai Ihe fuels do not support if Tacts' are taken to u.< lode the complete ensemble nan alive structure, surface decoration ol 1,vi stylistic devices, dialogue, meaning brought to the role by actors Il„ lesull is a complexity //»,,.», ,\..... (( ( from U^#^^^i(((()|lilspropaganda ,..,,„, ,,1 a dominant ideoloyy -.'n i, ant ||„, ( *tl'i/li l" for example - ne< ev..i,ily ni»,i„„(| »wi ihMl nenple appropriate it as prop.,*,,,,,),, ,),„, '' r ,i .,11 lor example. Blackhawl> h;„„ , ,„„(ll„i|v ",'< |,biaiing bravery, military u,tur«,h la,, , n . tl„-|„n, celebration or ,.i .„, ,,„„,, '',„|„y loi which the soldier r. m.vU i/, ,,„■, m(( , (.M, /;>// (.iin (1986) is more ea ul / < ,.h „„,,,, „ ,: .„•.-, this in relation to ihr 7/«-hl, UmVm9f ~Z**pZ!au' ,a,,h..dses the question of ,i.i.-„» .„,.1 ..-hmIImIhI <:- y" ■ .......s a programme thai oMIy po,.,„v, Wl ' ......i oilers a dominant ideol'/// ,h ,......„ • . . nationalists as a sour. ■ «-r« pro • 1 •■••<> '!• 1» Miiiuale material' /. ;<, BngjUh in migration, there wa l,n|, „ml,|K,iliy in the " l,,r "invasion" story-line and in, i,,viii .I i.l, ological At'd. ■>■' '•' Mi el*** possible to dwell excessively '.'••in 1,,,, ... . ,, texts to Interf***'* ,<:< '* .....1 thai B.rnouw falls ,nto errors of imerPrvi.,iio,, I.., „„,, ... rtll HullfTcrcnce '" ' ' ■' ^racier to lone ami ..In......!„.„■ lulling .„ ,HTcelve Hlirrnito* unrtual interpretations such as ih.i. s.,n., ,.| the1 onsptratortal wxid view embedded in straight or serious spv II......i Thorburn accuses Barnouw of seeing ..nl\ 1I1..1 ih, M.,„.N envisaged Americans as living among MUfJUpUlUUI DSniplrttOri who required a " y -«*e in kind: camp villains were pari of no cote Inlei pici alive essence bill Simple surface features in ideological fables Me . lalms such readings fact typical of social science anahscsot television (fol example, at the Annenberg school r a more sophisticated school. Raymond Williams and nl% krUUAon also would surface television's Ideological subslructures as apost^ia for advanced capitalism. Thorbui n suggests 1I1..1 ideological preset not dktates: television in the Iliad Kel» h b\ « ontrSJt, was being planned as a propaganda instrument, to be kepi OUf Ol pi Ivate hands and " Television and film are consensus narratives', so created bymyriad interactions between the ic\t. Us in< estors, competitors, authors, audience and socio-economic order (till > ommunallty explains OMtr unorlgsnassry and also their poswi to .11 nculale the wisdom of the COtRSSBunrty that Inherited understanding is no simple ideological con-■ • "- ' ■ 3 _:e> and assumptions iluit undergo a continuous revision in the culturally llcenseil experience of con-the meaning ol such Cultural lexis were clearer fhey might Indeed sanction as propaganda 1 ' : nd scope of propaganda As we hate seen, critics differ in the elasticity ol definition (hat they would ascribe to the word 'propaganda While we canuol |x 1 mil a definition so tensed flsat a cease* to possess an independent ot Operational meaning, our at • pectfs* Is thai current understandings have erred in restricting its aasasttng. Tossxtatrate this breadth we discuss (he propaganda endowment '4 suchoWrsesubjects such as war architecture, music, bureaucracy. For •am the date of an attended event can haw propaganda merit and be nominated to that reason 911. theemergencv telephone number in the United ft sirs ssae psefced by AK3aeda with truly diabolical cunning; another -imrnJL ss AdossraS* W,,, . ■ ■ with all the savvy of 11 Madison Avenue exec-- "*o% 11-11-11 as the moment month, day and hour-for the ......- ; £ - ,; com can fun. Hon us propaganda, such w oVsauaajsgof alar Why Frenchcou^ which suhsiituted for the anachro-ajjajj 7 ti|m ,pxsdaaii aarmr a new formulu. 'tgllM, lumillc. patrie'. to vmdeme andextras the values of the icgiiuc Since propaganda Is the 30 Defining what and reasoni den.al as well as (lie evangelisation of message, censorship also function, „, propaganda for example, no legal case in history can have quite so bi*,^ a title as The Government of the United States versus the Spirit of Ul, American Revolution, but in 1917 the crime of depicting the British * America 1 enemies even in the context of the War of Independence was* fic.ent to merit a subsiant.al (three-year) jail term (Kämmen 1978). Propaganda and the arts The problem of dissecting theconcept of propaganda lies also in its breadth, since so many theatres of human activity exhibit propaganda content Architecture, for example, cannot be excluded from any discussion of propaganda - to involve it is not to extend the boundaries of the term, but to attempt to give n a completeness of definition. The fact that the master pro pagandist himself. Adolf Hitler, was such an enthusiast for architecture should suggest the prima facie existence of a connection between his twin passions. The Great Dictators were sponsors both of a massive conventional propaganda industry and architectural monumentalism in the pseudo-Romanism of Albert Speer. Stalinist baroque, or the triumphalism of Italian Fascist construction Architecture is not merely associated with the propaganda of totalitarian dictatorships. Lutyens's New Delhi, though actually built largely after the publication of the Montague-Chelmsford report which started the clock ticking for the Raj. is an extraordinary and studied essay in imperial superciliousness: it is propaganda in stone. The arts can also function as propaganda and. again, to apply the term Is by no means to imply condescension. Manifestly, the greatest art has sometimes had propaganda intent: El Greco and Titian were propagandist celebrants of the Counter-Reformation, glorifying the wealth, power and renewal of the Roman church. David, similarly, was propagandist for Napoleon, evoking the radiance of his impérium. Shakespeare was an apologist and occasional propagandist for the Tudors in general, and in particular for Elizabeth I and for that brilliant conception of monarchy and legitimacy which was so beguiling to her court. Thus to say that art Is 'propagandist' does not consign it to being mere crude iconic representation Propaganda does not inevitably preclude the kind of nuanced subtleties critics find endearing. (Art ceases to be propaganda when it becomes unh For example, the fierce dejection and fatalism evoked by Byron's The /V/ oner of Chilton is art. a melancholic analysis of one man's fate, but also impassioned curse on the authoritarian regimes which do this to people | propaganda. Its meaning is both individual and universal (political). the arts can be deliberately suborned for political purposes: the Informut I. , Research Department of Britain's Foreign Office, for example, had Orwell* isl allegiif v. 11 ,ni i. ' ■ • "*egian (Adam iv, J ■J ■•• • • / • ■ - : nation teac In ■ \>> • ,\, • toeect^aoicaeieaif seen as the real arjiJdai '/¥. ,■ -•r.ersively.'they unyni *j >> eMBf afcaag For example. Na/.i rrui'•,•—.*»., llMMiM «1 IHK of calculating iIj« -)'/,,• WeaaVeW I^V J i. All education [if Krinwi auai | • " cCo of 1 5KK is jxyr if.<-. . . • od education are ultimas . -iv>. . v.- of education a- projA > • -/ •/;•' n education .r ..' v . ■ ,v • t* liberal propaganda I or «-/•■>•/ * .<••,.>• bul do not assum< • ••»•>-■ .-. v»r conditions below deck.' What I «4argue that secondary wJu'.-s-.-r • y. i her offensive nor soo.«-r • • . . jes that stress comr,/*1 j <:' theatres. This (zoom - . . . J he preference lo/v/ - - r. ol a value prefereriM- v.< -vr pjg> eaaoof professional hisuwteaa at i rton among the co/nm , • .jlum assume that it baa* , - a world very familiar to .h-v.v. , >A education to pe/j/" : out in the nineteenth and ea*ty tea ' j he purpose of text'//.' <■ f (lUmmen 1978). The Vu**iaeu tel voal military hen** - • ^etflderpinningil. t^lall'Vljr>• ,. lc ol dc ',.<», and the Mirrors predictability was the difference between the Mrroft del llon-mnrning Time for a ehuiuv and the Suns 'If Kinnock wins liKiay will iii«-1. t person out of Britain please tin u ofT the lights.' illustrated by I pfc tUTI ol Neil Klnnock's head in a light bulhT Categories: direct action Propaganda, one would imagine. If popularly identified with il,r ,,,„ organisations of the powerful < o»porat ion. the nation state. tlu« plr>. *'1 nate. the totalitarian empire. OtWO the particular course ,i ^ twentieth-century history. It Is hardly surprising that propaganda 1« tarn A question of meaning an activity "I the omnipotent monoliths, and thai perhaps we should be grateful to them for not using its persuasion alternative, coercion. The identity of propaganda in the late twentieth century shifted fundamentally in so many ways. It is especially true thai propaganda is now no longer the exclusive prerogative of the holders of power communications technology, particularly the internet, makes self-authorship possible. Everybody now can be a propagandist. Not even money is entirely necessary. All that is needed is determination. Seen in this light, the idea of propaganda becomes more demonic to some and more acceptable to others. Propaganda is no! only a means by which states and organisations can sustain their power and continuity, but also offers their miniature enemies a means of opposing them, such as the propaganda of direct action, and also, for anyone who can afford a computer, cyber-propaganda. Modern propaganda as a genre is a resource both of the powerful and of the puny. Propagandist direct action which is provocative enough, such as lesbian activists abseiling into the House of Lords, will stimulate public attention. Many intelligent citizens, who would never see themselves as victims of propaganda, are nevertheless members of single-issue groups: not everything those groups do is propaganda, and nor are those of their activities which can be described as propaganda always contemptible. Often such acolytes simply do not accept that what their group is in fact doing is engaging in propaganda. (It is necessary to enlighten them?) At its furthest extreme, direct action becomes terrorism and is represented by groups such as the Real IRA or, on a more diminutive scale, the Animal Liberation Front. Such groups eschew constitutional process: they do engage in conventional propaganda but spike it with acts of violence. For Schmid and de (iraaf (Crelinston 1 989) Terrorism cannot be understood only in terms of violence. It has to be understood primarily in terms of propaganda. Violence and propaganda, however, have much in common. Violence aims at behaviour modification by coercion. Propaganda aims at the same by persuasion. Terrorism is a combination of the two.' Bureaucratic propaganda War propaganda and revolutionary propaganda should be seen not as the (almost) exclusive contexts for propaganda, but rather as particular variants of it. Other kinds of propaganda might include, for instance, bureaucratic propaganda - the official accounts promulgated by government departments but. also, the way they manipulate information. Thus during the 1980s the definition of unemployment" was changed about fifty times by the British government. Altheide and Johnson (1980) assert that bureaucratic organisations through official accounts of themselves (propaganda) gstji'u'iy v».imi una ff8j*,L .. riu-v iK-M-i i»H- how bureaucrats draw 0Il create a self-justificatory wor- ^ tne |og|c Qf . ^ reaffirm a socially construeu H, s() forlh (Kakow lS8m Th2* formation -statistics, annual. ■ in no the demise of ^ ■irmauoii - wm——....... fhc political forms of p......WW* ^ ,hc state itself-have kv-» ..... great dictatorships, bu, prcs;. ..... ^ jnforma(. « bureaucratic pwjjganda. Rcm. ......... P ^ » saged: measures of air pollution. ior i i «nere there is no traffic. 'InformaLon can......I*' M*™ '"character, such as the so called Parents" Charter' mailed lo every single British home under the auspices of the former OoOM value Education Secretary. John Pta* Then again, information can be censored or withheld, even ancient information. The British government long concealed items from World War 1 such as details about the trial of Sir Roger Casement or even the inking of the Lusitania, or information about Ireland in those years What, for example, was the identity of thai master spv who from 1 884 lo 1V22 gave Dublin Castle full details of the activities of Irish nationalist conspirators-We still do not know (Richard Beimel I 199$) Some of what bureaucracy does is actually a propaganda activity, with the aim of increasing its power and diminishing its inconvenience. Bureaux seek the exercise of power for its own s.ike and to vindicate the magnitude of that power: and bureaucratic success is measured by the size of budgets and numbers of officials employed Bureaux are organisations that seek permanence by self-perpetuation, thev are thus their own self-)ustification and they seek their ends via. essentially, the control of information , in such methods as the denial of journalistic access). Incompetence is hidden energy « invested in preventing secrets, such as the bombing of Cam hod, a from being released (for example. ,he oflical persecution u Peter Wright). UUon of ^.watcher Bureaucratic propaganda is I fad of life in all societies Th m evasions and bureaucratic fog often thrive beyond the r d o^al lies, aganda textbooks precisely because they seem to he the « J*recn of DroP" publicly imagined to be propaganda, not hlgh-declbe|dnU| 'S °f Wnal is mannered and arcane. Conventional propaganda Is equated^ Silenl guage but here is manifest the reverse - bureaucratic langu° 'Urid ,an' to sedate and It is therefore ignored. Bureaucratic propagandas0^1* Seeks language of obfuscation and obscurity, evasion and denial* |C,,8ni5 in the daily, seek to present itself as 'rational'. Administrative 1 d0es- ^Pe-idcological rigidities, proposals are made to seem logical andseff00 mttsks indeed, the entire Nazi enterprise was often veiled In such bu^ 'dcni ~ formularies. Neutral' vehicles, e.g. reports, statistics, carry id^^Hc .\ question of mranlnq is messages The normality' of bureaucratic propaganda is enhanced by its espousal of bogus rationalism, such as the claim in Britain s BSE crr.i. (Harris and O Shaughnessy 1997) that there was no clear evidence that BSE could move from animals lo humans (as if the requirements of scientific and civic veracity were the same). Moreover bureaucratic language is depersonalised, the author not an individual but a system. War as propaganda War is communication The aim is seldom the complete physical extermination of the enemy but lo persuade them to surrender the object of war is therefore the enemy's morale. The activity of warfare is structured by propaganda ob)ectivev and. partly because of this, wars are conducted inefficiently. Strategy itself is often dictated by symbolic aims - the symbolic meaning of the place, rather than whether it is the easiest route or the most easily defended The strategies of World War II are in particular a theatre of symbolism. For example. General Mark Clark's determination to capture Rome in 1944 rather than advance up Italy allowed Kesselnng to regroup. Clark could, potentially, have cut off their retreat, but was more interested in the propaganda value of capturing Rome. In the Spanish Civil War Franco's strategy was distorted by the propaganda imperative of capturing the Alcazar of Toledo. This point could be made by innumerable other examples from the most famous campaigns in history: that propaganda value is a significant military objective and often overrides a rational military calculus. Notably of course there is Hitler's inflexible refusal to make a strategic withdrawal at Stalingrad when the Wehrmacht was trapped: Stalin, conversely, would hold the right bank of the Volga at any conceivable cost. Stalingrad was the symbolic pivot of World War II - and upon its outcome hung the future of the war In World War I the equivalent was. perhaps. Verdun. Thus propaganda and war are inseparable. In the twentieth century war had meant the mobilisation of vast civilian populations. They had to be convinced. For example, by the end of 1944 Dr Goebbels even withdrew 100.000 men from the front lines of the dying Reich - the size in effect of the current British army to make a colour epic about Prussia surrounded during the Napoleonic wars. Kolberg (Herzstein 1978) Propaganda also muffles the reverse-, of war. as with Churchill's conversion of Dunkirk from physical defeat into a great (moral/rhetorical) victory. Symbolic sites can be murderously contested when they engage with national myth Nuremberg, the great stage of Nazi rallies, was militarily valueless but »tlll the target of a notorious air raid. Battle may be sought purely for ih«- imagery it generates. The 1968 Tet offensive by the North Vietnamce was. military, a failure, and the United States was the ,lHnr Ypt the US public - with Vieucrtg appearing even n* Snry became a US defeat because it wa< : ^ a5 such Thus pr0^ JndZu QOl just a branch of military activtf* lOtery activity itself ,8 ..'.hrmiily propagandist, in part, or enhrdy •, I „.„■ can be no final closure in the debate on i-.e meaning and definition 0| |)r„p:,ganda and there will always he those v. r.: icpri the idea as bogus But il the word has no meaning, under what other terms can we discuy, the phenomena it purports to describe- \1< rt r.t--2 -^rms and formula-ttoni give neither coherence nor intellectual direction: a word is a classil,. cation system, and delinitions are meaninglefi if they would include ,v.r yihing from Goebbels to the 'host and f o l n d* ooaumn of the local newspaper in the same conceptual breath. Word' perceptions, we cannot he -.aid to know' what we lack a language to describe, and without this particular word we become desensitised to the ubkfsatyoi its operation. Por example, when Governor Pataki asked that New York schools should teach I he great Irish famine as a Holocaust, that is. of dettxrate causation, he is l>nih undermining the historical primacy of the Jewish Holocaust and teaching children an erroneous lesson. The real comparator with the 20 million dead of Mao's Great Leap Forward '19 5 ^-1961). and the derivative leVion on the rigid Imposition i,l iv . - - : :Jeologies. is completely lost. Where propaganda is the text studenttcome out of education not the less but the more ignorant. Why not. then, use the term? 2 {explaining propaganda Why propagandas This chapter seeks, if not to answer, then at least to understand that question better - or. more particularly, the persistence of propaganda into our own time. The salience of propaganda Lexis and events in history is not in doubt, although the measure of its impact is impossible to gauge and therefore permanently subject to dispute: the visible continuity of propaganda as a mode of social mobilisation beyond the wars and dictatorships of an earlier generation and into our own age does, however, require us to seek some explanation. Where the entire communicaUons context is controlled, as in the old totalitarian dictatorships, as in the hermit kingdom' of North Korea today, the reasons for propaganda as a ubiquitous form of social control need little elaboration. What is rr..serious is why propagandas should still flourish in modern democracy, among a better-educated generation, one incubated moreover amidst the cacophony of mass media. Our cultural conditioning in Western countries includes the acquisition of learned defences against the blandishments of advocate':, and advertisers of every kind; indeed, did we not learn to filter out many of their messages, our reason and even our sanity would be in doubt Yet propagandists continue in business via emotional appeals that exploit our uncertainty, •ttoiuiate our fantasy and take advantage of our credulity: we ask for belief, and the request is answered. Propaganda, as has been discussed, is no recent, or ephemeral, historical phenomenon. The crusades, for example, were propelled on a cascade of ecclesiastical propaganda after Pope Urbans sermon at Claremont in 1095 'f*>lor 1990). since the church wished to externalise the destructive energlee of the delinquent knights who were ravaging early medieval Europe. While propaganda in some recognisable s^mseof the term has actually been a characteristic of all societies since people first lormed organised say. the 'scientific - _ , ;; driving |ru|u " far the „, find .....o.....^ century history .,^.jr,ni, god new tools of com with urbanisation anc _{ >fj r,l.Kflllllled ^ - meant that nd uSernsd ve* h;.ll«„RW|.or ..sad. Hierarchical socialcw ^ omltan, ()f ^ Ihegrcii . /r;l/or even primarily ssary. their police sta" propaganda. Mon> - but by citizen inforrnantsj^--^ . „jf;i| aatostatenow sought nv.r* _ _ , 0||,rrtlvl«allon.Ths .conscription, social°7*^™^|jorj ,ha. .he threat of persuasion arose out of the reaspw could not attain the erids dWasWf eottght no eallv explain the succesaof propafanda today. In less naive evn political culture, ri for the persistence a ,n stable, supposedly rational based end icchnocentrlc -re power of theimpav. :r-". -" ■' W«l wlm no,d I empirical evidence at all. and the tenacity of Irrational beliefs - acquired :-. • ' - ,:- ■ • v *-a "I the rational derived from the eighteenth >.:.-: ••.« v raiv possibilities of via communications technologies (Robins rt al I9H7). For the modern state is. neccaaar. . >.-.-: r.< v apably. Ihe propa- People are in general not sfcdfcd..... of |ogk and argu- we do not train them to be so. They mmy dated tlx lie and still ■r.e> believe its truth w. • . . ,,, n.nslsltfilth •id that people can respond fav^r** l/i» ■ ■ gfj eV(M, w|K-n that it is biased. ,da is also Utopian. Wh.le ,t * rrr^ ,, .„ , ,||f. „ m ^ AT.xh would be comprehensiver. - •,.,•/• . i u • nm„. „..n,h,t.vr . ""gmre. In the -,-rr> propaganda text w.oor."r'vxj/i>^,J ,,„,.,„ iisee.ilmiles exist - the uto0»ft*0» eWo , 'Nu, stM 01 Propaganda, . - - • • /.V. ~;'^-Mo Is unthinkable without some srtsvin of HiaS at id the w, i'i ■ me obicct of idealist striving. " 1 |,u tfass chapter we first advance a theory hand »»r gunu,,,, _j*ry of propaganda today l»et particularly in •(,. • m,.,,,'i(' 11,1 *1) -esponse to stimub - - ...... ■■< i -,.,i ,|„"" 1,,'|v«*n Explaining r* t..:.. - I appeal that .i!ta:« the cynicism r- -Utopian vision sometimes the nitive processes - che the continued beliefs', sel'-c pretation and explore how the temporary parochial li issue groups as j all loyalties are present, for where and thus the activity not the every level of our activities: (2) in spite of from the spectacle of failed Utopias the of things »till arouses the activists sr.: 111 hen there are aspects of our cog-information which may account lor - <. e> to propaganda, such a^ defau : and the permanent possibilities of inter-In the second section of this chapter we > i genre is explained by the : - -, ■ coercive control, weaker..r.z v sources, the ast ent if -of political expression. In such a conierL the possibility of defection is it has to be continually rer cannot cease, making Why propaganda * approaches Emotion: the Most propa; For Hitler, per They are like a abstract reason complement her despise a petitioner The notion of choice, as rati only of econo mists long clung maker: "but as Seare *1995$ what to eat in a ordered preferences indifference curw Laurence Moore Cults (19891 -is totally bereft of aew c social and em ries as those wh.c ' as a calculus of rather than rational in the generation of collective' state has been determined leas by for a strong force which wM the masses love a commander, and is the core of propa; whether political or rven the governing | •cience and marketing. Vet tty-maximising rational i t ts implausible to claim. in have some set of antecedent M calculations to gel on to a tdO Shaughnessy 20031. Intact-God (1994) and Marc . er by a message even at all. and the appeal is 12000) contradicts and consumer decision i various options. Instead he deliberation in decision making as in the main descriptive - we ,nin. terms of self-described or other-described .mages of the choices ava.l^/1 whether a product or whatever. If decision making does indeed resi 0„ mJj tiple alternative descriptions, propaganda s opportunity to persuade |le. in composing them. Faith can be based exclusively on trusi without ^ real understanding. This is particularly true of the less well educated, wh,, tend to use the likability heuristic', choosing primarily on the basis „\ fCe|. ing - the implicit favourite model - and then finding other evidence to justify choice. The search for evidence becomes subsequent, and not antecedent to. conviction. The rational model of decision making ignores the power of emotional prejudice to outweigh illuminated factual truth, our ability subjectively to decry a fact as false even when we know it objectively to be true. In a study by Rozin ft al. (1986) people willingly ate fudge shaped as a disc, but much less so when it was configured as animal droppings, and similarly with sugar which they saw poured from a bowl and into a box which was then arbitrarily named sodium cyanide'. Know n facts cannot bleach out negative associations and the powerful emotions they inspire The power of the emotional appeal in persuasion also arises partk out of our difficulty in resolving uncertainty, where there is no logical path but only multiple risk. Take the case of genetically modified foods. The concerned citizen remains mystified. One set of partisans point to the potential of CM crops to liberate the Third World from hunger, they argue also that fewer pesticides are required, less land needs to be cultivated, allowing more of the natural environment to flourish. Their opponents also claim closure in the debate by simple reference to the rhetoric of Frankenstein foods' Previously we have argued | O Shaughnessy and OShaughnessy 2 i, lhat people do not react in proportion to the probability of some particular outcome eoistem^ emotions enst independently of assessments of logical probab.l.tv n fTét simply to imagine an event causes emotion, even if uV Z, , come is highly unlikely there is always wishful thinking while i and uncertainty create a vigorous market for dogmatic reass CUnty Today there is no real reason to believe that rationality m publľ "T has greater sway than in the past. Some would argue that tod °urse cultural drift towards more extrovert emoiion-dnven forms of ^ {^CTt is a and therefore of persuasion, with our inquisitorial media < !,,,'/,.. ^,i,viour shows, etc Many public manifestations of a mood of anti-vc "clonal talk attempt at reason: the rejection of genetically modified crow u,hu no I_,h_~l I___;„ ____.r I_____ . ľ* in not iiTanooaL was hyperbolic in expression. If human being*, wer ° ,lSC'f rational decision makers there would be little need for propaganda sjl^?^ decisicossaspty goals, they therefore Invoke values, and the MDOQoimh!^ "iat Explaining propaganda 41 express, powei ...nl undergird those values. Decisions involve choice* and trade-oils and these are seldom value-free or devoid of emotion It would be ., ver) peculiar, unique perhaps, propaganda that relied on reason alone B superficial, 01 social, assent might be secured by mere logical exposition but often nol conviction and the commitment that Hows from conviction: indeed, rhetoric and feelings have by a tradition going back to Aristotle been viewed as the opposites of reason and logic, even gendered opposltes, feminine and masculine. Persuasion and propaganda may involve tactical appeals to reason, but in general a process of logical exposition is peripheral to it. Rarefy can a process of logical demonstration entirely convince, since it cannot remove all doubts - and where there are doubts, reassurance and therefore further persuasion are needed. We have claimed (O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy 200 JI that in symbolic logic, by contrast, there is only one solution - answers are demonstrated, errors exposed, in a deductive process. In life, decisions both trivial and life-changing must often review different perspectives, different interpretations, so that persuasion becomes possible. Thus the appeal of propaganda is in general to emotion and not to reason. It proceeds by dogmatic assertion, as if there could be no debate on the propositions advanced: in Le Bon's words an orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmation' (Herzstein 1978i Dogmatic assertion does convince, it elevates mere value judgement to the status of truth or law and. contrary to Petty and Cacioppo (19811, people-are persuaded by such when they are content to delegate their thinking lo others, be it pundit, priest or politician. Constant assertion can stun consciousness, naturalising the perverse as normal and interrupting internal dialogue to prevent counter-arguing. For propaganda is not a nuanccd production: in it assertion has little qualification and the arguments of opponents are parodied rather than rebutted. There is frequent recourse to ad homtnem: opponents presented as either bigoted or self-interested: repetition, simplification and black-white polarisation. Reagan, for example, would use anecdote and metaphor rather than argument, introducing citizens who had performed some selfless act. promulgating a never-never land of trickle-down effects and Laffer curves. Evidence is not to be assessed or explained, but manipulated or invented. Propaganda texts contain scant recognition or capacity for intellectual abstraction, they are actively antagonistic to abstract thought, eschewing the tentative, the complex line of argument, the weighing and debating of evidence. The concern of the propagandist is not with how we think but how we feel. There are numerous instances of propaganda and advertising exploiting this fear of emotional manipulation by claiming an appeal grounded purely in reason. This is. of course, an emotional appeal in itself. Governments are Defininq what and reoson. 42 ,„ m iking il in the face of some catastrophic error, u,„u, atari? prone 10 mak" £ emotion. and this is the rheI2* ,„,,,„, ft* reason » h ^'^never the state or big bul» „ „, (be propaganda argumc C^nda aimed .1 sophisticated targets has. however, long ^ ,'..... -Irv S boma* ,» reason. As U „, World War II did not give up the blond beas and yellow pen, bu. took into greater account the need to explain what people ling for and what institutions they were defendmg. Ever, Goebbels ,n,pelled U> create an intellectual' weekly. Das Re.ch. to counterbalance the intellectually moribund Nazi media. I.topia Ifa b propaganda would seem to register the existence of a Utopia - it can be * hoped-for Utopia, or a Utopia irretrievably buried in the past. Many polnif il extremists are disappointed Utopians, and the vision of a perfect world or world order, its possibility, perfectibility or existence in the past, is the undisclosed presence behind propaganda. This would account for the harshness of some propagandas and their rejection of any offer to compromise, as the achievement of whatever Utopia their creators have in mind QOdnnally eludes their grasp, as. in an imperfect world, it is bound to do. It 11 the impatience with the messiness. fluidity and compromise of the real world that marks the propaganda order. Thus activists rejected the claim of the first deaf Miss America. Heather Watson, to be ambassador for the deaf Sunday Telegraph, 2b March 1995). Hard-line advocates of cultural deaf-r.ev. resented the fact that she had learned to lip-read such that it was diffi-. , la guess B disability. I he current orthodoxy dictated that sign language .s the only acceptable form for communication for the deaf. Deaf advocates protested, saying that she had no right to represent peo^^i^S she was unfamiliar with. In the words of one deaf Id^i u CUlture clinically deaf, but she didn't have the social identity of aTY * A vision of the perfectible does sustain belief It a.ssuattcrf.Ik Pers0n of the newly urbanised twentieth-century publics and h ,insecurities mankinds need for meaning and a coherent value system IV SaUSfy haps help explain fundamentalisms with their contempt 'lb.Would P"" lence of the secular world. From socialist realist art to the irmS arn^iva- of consumer advertising, the dull footage' is edited out in° cstasies | J 982) terms, a Panglossian best in the best of all possible worldSChUds0n s al. (1986) have analysed Reagan's 1984 election campaign as S ^dams el lation of romantic pastoralism'. One photograph that appeared.01311^11" Exphinmj r^;. depicts Reagan beneath a huge mural of Reagan , „„■,., v |„ll larms rfren - svmcvl.c el the virtues for which Reagan ostensibly Mood ihr.ft, hard work patriotism, etc. Such Imagery occurred In hi-. v.•...„, »dver rising and campaign biopic: 'America had wandered. I.. i.,ld U end the symbolism of traditional rural life becomes a way .»1 telling ... wl,„i we had left behind. But this need for Utopia is what unites, com epiually and slylis tically. all propaganda. A yearning for the primordial. loi the pure lor a perfect world, in fact - is prelapsarian fantasy. ForMircea Eliade 11991). we long for something allog»iii»f dillereni from the present instant, something either inaccessible or perm-unml, lost, in fact he argues that it is really a yearning for paradise Itself On thai MgMUMajcl, behind the hectonng. the meanness perhaps of rnuf b propaganda, lies tin-search for paradise, rage at its loss and some half art i< ulaied idra lhal ii once existed Hence, f : sample. Rubin (Kevles 1994/ Mjmmanv Ka« hel Carson's vastly uifluential The Silent Spring (1962) thus: 'fuch popularisations have an excessively evangelical tone, akin to thai ol ih« nrnperance movement, which urges environmentalism upon us noi only io prrvrve the earth but also to achieve a kind of personal salvation ".o-.ialgja is one form of this paradise - in Eliade's view, the most abject nostalgia div lo-x-s the nostalgia for paradise. This. I think, is true of many politic al < uliur»i tor example, the yearning in later Rome for the pristine. as< eti MS td the Republican era- This is no mere romantic speculation Wiener 119811. for example, in his English Culture and the Decline of the Inihr.tnul Spirit demonstrates the way a yearning for a lost rurality. an arc adia <>f Mrrrie ijigJand. permeated the culture, with negative consequences in hi* view In World War II this rural England was. time and again, the symbol in pmters and films such as .Mrs Min/ver. But nostalgia is not perhaps cx.u thj I In- right word to describe what is going on in propaganda. As Webster 11 '»hh» toys of populist rhetoric it is important to see it as a strategic asobflssatioa of the past rather than nostalgia Indeed, the pasts of the propagandist bear little relation to the historical past - the Nazi creation, for example, of aboriginal Germania'. was largely an exercise in fiction, and Wemter argo< . that the American new ngbt' was a mass of contradictions. It mari.ijvl conscript a mythologised past social community in the service of free market rhetoric. Reagan has been said to speak for old values in current ar / eMi V and like the nation, of which he is such a representative figure, he in ' oi.iradu lion in terms-aheroc^theconsumerculturepreachingih' i' 1 ' The antiuopotogist Mary Douglas (1996) argues that Ihr most basic choice that a rational person has to make is the choice about the kind ol societv to In* in or. if you like, his or her preferred life style. Ptopie arc-viewed as coritmuousty 'trying to bring about their Ideal form oh orr.mumty life. In other words, the subordinate value for any person it his or her local Defining what and reasot}. 44 ""9^ ,„v and it is the emotional attachment to this idea w. form Of common, > and ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ dominates as a concern co-ordinating prtacwu? ich all dominates as a concert ^ ^ mfen the co-ordinating principle J Utopians, so prolcsl against other competing wayS0f £ consumer purchase - minohty view, the utopianism inscribed I ^ VSSKS- no, merely exphcable b«, perhaps ^ its persuasive force. Always open to persuade: „hv the activity of persuasion can never cease . oiu. nrvn to nersuasion. and therefore to thai We are always, at least potent, y ^ * variant of persuasion known as propaganua. y ^ the most dearlv held pnnciple or ideal, stnee print pics are never specific com-bu g neral rules, thus raising the possibility of deviance in any par. , mi.*Sv. may be environmentally conscious shoppers but lapse on occasion: as Levitin and Miller , 1979, show, the relationship between general ideology and spec.fic choice is not strong. Our choices are not linear projections from our principles - if they were, our beliefs would be extraordinarily tenacious and saturate every action we undertook. Many decisions are complex and ultimately incoherent, drawing upon myriad beliefs and values, some contradictory, some changing in intensity according to context. If our principles do represent imprecise general rules rather than specific commands, the possibility of persuasion must exist in perpetuity, since there is always a potential openness in the application of the general rule to the specific case, a flexibility propaganda can always exploit. The art of propaganda lies in changing perspectives, and to change perspectives we have to alter interpretation, to interpret the emotion-arousing situation in a different way so people reassess its significance. This is a debate not about the truth of facts in themselves but about their meaning, and there is no challenge offered to values per se but to value judgements, which are reinterpreted. This process is in its fundamentals emotional, not. as de Sousa (1990) says, some sequence of logical inference but of emotional argument with the aim of persuading the audience to share a perspective or conjure up a certain experience. Only then, when both parties are conscious of sharing the same perspective, can rational argument and logical inference proceed. The cunning propagandist will not proceed bv assault. The targets and values will appear to have been left intact and the new argument will stress how the new interpretation coheres with the old values. For example the Irish Georgian Society sought to combat national ist prejudice against the preservation of Irish country houses as relics of colonial rule by proclaiming them the handiwork of Irish craftsman and Explaining proixignndti 4s artisans, and thus worthy of | .-M., .■■,.„, In .his sense, good propaganda fa subversive, since only by s.ih,.-, Ion i .„, . If,, i.ve persuasion proceed Com mcrcial ads. for example. m;»> ■.. ,\ u, assuage guilt through reinterpret* tion. particularly violation-, of if,, rill« BOqulred from past author.!-figures like parents, hence K.-ni,,, kv I rltd Chicken identified its core marketing problem as guilt, whir h a v>u/ht io assuage with the slogan Us nice tofecl so good about a meal [htkm Hid Myers |y«9). We see examples of this attempt to shift interpretation all the time. Opponents of the dc^-penalty in the United Stale', for example now castigate it as another case of government incompetence Why should we trust government to be any more efficient at organising death fairly and effectively than it is at any of the other activities it undertake-,' I h»-y are speaking the language of the political right in (he service of .1 lil/«-r.il < ause. Propaganda does not try tOChttlfC ..dues, it attempts to conscript them. Every advocate knows thai valu«- are almost impossible to alter overnight they move slowly over time as a result of exposure to rival arguments and malure reflection. This is be' MUM values are difficult to change, since they are not open to factual GORO non We do not refer to Mill's proof' of liberty but to his magnificent defers <■ of liberty Values can be neither proved nor disapproved. They are also part of a inn lure - to alter one is to alter the relationship of all the rariable-. in the system, a potentially life-changing event. Propaganda seeks only 10 interpret those values to yield different value judgements. Default beliefs Propaganda can also be irrational hni elleciive because it mobilises an individual's system of default h< Im-Is; discarded thoughts and the fragments of defunct ideology may Mill survive. shadows that flit about in the recesses of our minds fh'-y may COflM back, if for example conditions change, challenging more v eril strut lores of belief and even demolishing them. This is why today, although aniisemltism seems almost invisible, we shouldn't still fear it a-, a paM fa. 1 and as a future possibility. The same is true of academia: rejected ronrepi', and theories may linger on even after their intellectual rejection* 10 btfiPflM what Thompson (1979) calls excluded monsters' - for example. Weber's thesis on Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. Thus explanations for the >\\> < nv»'»'''»propaganda may he in the fact that many beliefs and attitude* cxlni unknown to us. Propaganda is often effective where it resonate*'. wjnViiig (Ichwartl 1973) half-submergtd. barely articulated fears and »%p»r»ilom Dial He beneath the level of everyday consciousness. I homr/.on I'M, Ih-nn, (1979) has relevance here. 46 DefinÍn9What^rea ^ľto to ^propaganda can appeal, arous^dcot enmities thatS tenZ* The example of the Balkans ,s pertmen here, where a « h had occurred within the context of World War II was refought, ^ recrudescence of the old labels and the old warpaint. It Is also trUe , stereotypes, which do not die so much as hibernate; propaganda refresh, and rcinvfgorates them. Clinton, for example had not been high tax. high spenď but that image of the Democrats can always be easily resurrectedby I heir Republican antagonists. The impact of propaganda can be very long-term indeed, encouraging adherence to a cause long alter defeat has become inevitable or even already occurred. Hopeless causes still have life left in them, testament to the enduring power of propaganda. There are many reasons for this: we do indeed have aspirations to bring about something but. on occasions, recognise our goals will never be realised (e.g. to reintroduce laws prohibiting pornography) but pursue hopeless causes because it makes us feel we are doing something to bring about our vision: the cause may be lost, but it is not silent. Lost causes litter the landscape of history and pass on from one generation to another. Expectancy theory is impoverished when it ignores the expressive meaning of action, with expressive meaning involving the emotions. Expressive action contrasts with instrumental action. While instrumental action Is a means, designed to get things done, expressive action permits us to ventilate our feelings or emotion. (O'Shaughnessy and OShaughnessy 2003) Second, whereas beliefs may be changed by new information, emotions do not necessarily cohere with them, at least not straight away They may continue to carry the charge created by past propaganda: beliefs have an after-life as well as a shelf life. Self-deception A further explanation for the persistence of propaganda is its role in self persuasion; the propagandist, whether party activist or Mormon ary, internalises adherence by the activity of propagandising0 jmiSS1°n* words, the function of the propaganda can degenerate into s ■ ° ° psychological needs of those who produced it in the first ljV1Cing tne Herzstein (1978) has argued that by 1944 Goebbels was makin^ Th"S ganda as much for himself and the leadership as for the masses' He Pr°pa that the later products of Nazi cinema and the slogan 'Victory in deatrf81*68 resented 'visions of salvation*. For the Nazi elite films such as the colour ru*P Explaining propaganda Rite of So, r,f„ p. where at the end eternity beckons with a heavenly chorus were allegories ol the end I he aim was to transcend the doom-laden ores ent via belief in an immortality conferred by the approving judgements of history and future generations of (lermans. Self-deception is thus another consequence of propaganda: it may also be an intentional objective. We can become co-conspirators in our own self deceit. Self-deception' is not necessarily always motivated by an aversion to some truth but. on occasions, simply motivated by affection for some-particular falsehood. (This is particularly true when through self-deception we neutralise an ethical dilemma.) Some, for example, continue to believe that the pra( lice ol the Roman Catholic religion was once illegal in Ireland, although it never was. Self-deception involves refusal to face facts or to lend them an utterly perverse but self-serving interpretation. Often the deft propagandist wants us to do this, the aim of the propaganda being to serve up plausible reasons for that frivolous interpretation, or for those 'facts' being untrue. And the potential is endless. The historian David Irving, for example, can describe Auschwitz as a labour camp with an unusually high mortality rate [Dally Telegraph. 13 April 1994». Presumably he seriously believes this. And any evidence can be twisted round: he can assert that Hitler gave no recorded, direct instruction for the Holocaust (true, but in the context meaningless). When challenged with the lack of evidence for a world Jewish conspiracy, for example, the paranoid antise-mitic will claim that this merely illustrates the cunning of the Jews. While we see this as mere sell-deception or irrationality, there are also other explanations. The truth can be impossibly painful - and self-deception may thus be a necessary strategy for survival: we are seduced by the propagandists because I hey offer us a way of coping. People thus persist in adherence to beliefs despite all the evidence to the contrary. So Germans continue to believe in the essential decency of the German army, the Wehrmacht, In World War II while fully accepting the evil of the overtly Nazi institution!*: many found great difficulty in accepting the extent to which the army itself was compllelt In Nazi atrocities, as the outraged reaction to an exhibition on this theme in Germany revealed (Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of the War of Annihilation. 1941-1944. Berlin Instituted ( ontemporary Art, November 2001). Moreover self-deception may mean simply adherence to dominant values, avoiding the social awkwardness of questioning I hem. at least publicly, and the embarrassment of standing out: self-deception can be a group phenomenon and not just apply to the Individual. If propaganda succeeds with part of a community, it can In fact Impact all of a community since even majorities can be tempted simply to > along' with the strongest opinion rather than the most represent alive l^Hl^lflfflffli|fflffli|V Fantasy Hyperbole does not make the mistake of asking for belief-IUsa f wrnch we are invited to share. expllci and even paranoid, but the f ^ does nevertheless affeet perceptions of he reality One form of hyper> classic atrocity propaganda, for examp e the British claim in World that the Germans melted bodies for fat. Such exaggerations work n because people necessarily believe them but because they are willj* partners in a process of self-deceit of which they may be fully consci0us They want to see their own darkest fears and angry broodings made visible and'luminous. Propaganda does that for them. In other words, there is a political truth that exists independent of the objective factors in a given situation. Propaganda is hyperbole - not all propaganda, certainly, for hyper. bole is a manifestation rather than a condition of propaganda. The aim of hyperbole-fantasy is to trigger self-persuasion by getting people to imagine some event, encounter or person: they talk themselves into believing or desiring something via this process of self-imagining. Much consumer advertising is also an invitation to share a fantasy, with the hope that imagining using the product will create an inner dialogue. Hyperbole became the rhetorical reflex of Serb media in the fragmentation of ex-Yugoslavia. For some time before the Serb invasion of Kosovo, the Serb media carried anti-Izvet propaganda claiming that he would establish a Muslim state. Pointing out that non-partisan sources of information such as the BBC were available to Serbs. Zimmerman H995) claims that people did not want to know the truth: they seem to know the difference between news and propaganda, yet when a choice is available most choose propaganda. The argument is that propaganda is often a co-production and that people lend to It a suspension of their disbelief, and they have a ne^d to see what they recognise as their own fantasies rpflJ, a ?. media, their own lies to themselves remand -of the public space. When critics claim that Drona*13'!? ^ larger ^ they perhaps envisage a passive recipient VVnil 'manipulative'' exchanges may resemble this hypodermic form what propaganda the propaganda process may be more subtle. The id , ? 8°ing 0n 'm misled strikes at the root of the concept of man aT peop^e wi'»ngly maker, yet surely this is what occurred in Serbia Rwand rationa' decision While much propaganda can be said to involve exa ^ eIsewftere. almost, is part of its definition - and indeed active misrepre86^1'0" " that> niably it sometimes involves the manufacture of falsehood11131'00' Unde~ that its texts are even forgeries. Here we are in the realms of a^t^6 extent tion and deceit.Yet propagandists can do this almost openly with^ fa^rica" ence even conscious of the falsehood being perpetrated, becorni ^ audl~ co-conspirators of an act wherein thev themselves are in a cf ^"'"g ense the Explaining propaganda 49 ,ul,ms. Once again the explanation ,., ,,„„ „,,.„ „„. b shar, ,n a mutual fantasy ,, .....,,. ,..........,„,,,.,, |)y ^ ^ U)() ^ ,° nrach lor words like gull.ble end Halve', ■MUjnln| .he audiences have no recognition Of the techniques being „..,,| A„ example „1 ibis Is morphine ,|ohnson 1^. ' When Prolcssor Harold See slood In the \ Wh Alabama Supreme court election, one advertisement showed a skunk fading or morphine Into the image of Harold Bat will, !»„• word-. Some things you can smell a mile aw a> Harold See dr,esul think average Alabamans are smart enough to serve on juries.' Stamped OH his face were the words 'slick Chicago lawyer'. A self-styled 'Commit he lor family Values" produced an advertisement claiming thai See had a sec ret past and had abandoned his iamily. allegations he strongly disputed In |;„ i. he won. Another case, in California, related to the murder ol twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. In 1996 one of the Democratic candidates lor Congress. Professor Walter Capps. was attacked thus by commercials: when the murderer of Polly Klaas got the death penalty he deserved, two people were disappointed . . . Richard Allen Davies. the murderer. And Walter Capps.' Commercials showed images of Davies and Capps with the labels Navies the murderer' and Capps the liberal'. Davies and Capps were run" as a kind of double ticket. Congressman Vic Fazio found that the face <>f Davies was morphed through computer graphics into his own even though he had not voted against the death penalty for several decades (Johnson 1997). Why propaganda? (2) Modern conditions Social control Propaganda, whatever else It may be. functions as a form of social control in the modern world, a substitute for social coercion and for more passive forms of social persuasion. Some social control is always necessary, but its potentials remain both liberal and illiberal, given the question of its form, extent and source (who wields it). Propaganda is 'soft' social control, prison is hard* and generally the most extreme alternative. Ullul (1973) sees propaganda as made necessary by technological society and that its end 'is the integration of man into the technological system'. He believes that we should teach people to live In and against Technology. Many have echoed him. Thus propaganda is subsumed Into the form and structure of social control' (Robins el al. 1987). Propaganda Is seen as a key element in the ability of advanced industrial and post-Industrial societies to organise and integrate themselves and exert some sort of authority over their individualistic publics: otherwise how can we have a public body but not a public mind? Dcfirunq what and tam*t 50 S0r,|"«^ . fhis isDCCaUst- cannon has luvn delegitimised' (Robins c ,9h onVof the great arts to bi Cultivated Propaganda ,s the cheaper ^ doing this (Lasswcll 1971 )< Social change Change entails uncertainty and it is to the insecuril.es created by maj0r social upheavals thai propaganda has often, in the past, appealed. Such uncertainty can be extreme enough to constitute a national mood - the classic study by Canlril 11lH> II, which examined perverse social/national movements such as Nazism, illuminated the evolution of pan-national moods. In such moods of nervous pessimism we yearn for the security we have lost and the emotional anchors that have been taken from us; there is a huge market in nostalgia, exploited by politicians, and by advertising: social change in particular is emotional because there can be no non-users' (O'Shaughnessv and O'Shaughnessy. 2003). The propagandist will thus contrast the turbulent or inadequate present with some imagined Golden Age - this was true not least in the case of the Romans themselves, whose literature and political rhetoric often sought to contrast the degeneracy of the empire with the imaginary austere and stoical virtues of the ancestral republic embodied in figures like Cincinnalus: their habit, the strategic mobilisation of the past to critique the present, found many subsequent imitators. The mood is one of fear as social values cnxle. the familiar disintegrates, the old loyalties are betrayed, the old truths falsified and people grasp for simple certainties and reassurance, with persuasion by authoritarian figures and didactic assertion rather than logical argument. The question Why propagandas may thus be partially answered by reference to the prevailing level of social insecurity: Nazi propaganda, for rZloved0 " u ft?* leVd °f rCSP°nSc umi1 *« «» ^ million unemployed Germans. While a society may in general feel secure particu- ar subgroups may not. In the early 199()s. for example. ,he previous level of job security enjoyed by middle managers d,sanoe-,n,1 !u the mutual loyalty they received from, and gave to ZZ «"57 , they were being delayered and downsized, and a new^d „ f " ^ V agerial literature, often anecdotal and anti-empiricist ann.-.rT St man" to their insecurities. "PP<-arcd to minister Information overload Another reason for the rise of propagandists form-. o| persuasion • society lies in the very complexity of life today - the pressure of mult0^ Explaining information 1001 need to digest information-fort h. The trend of die cation of inform vision and their The offer of proj cognitive misers. We sumer decision : on the advice of (1997) says, a r< fact that people ■ the pronouncements of minor decision, had to be tion for a singJe day: 'it the possibility of Si and the consequent environment is CCTtatl f-mail. direct mail and v> *-as towards the multipft-~ - I 1 channel satellite tele ■unliable new height - U e become, of necesa of issues, from our cor. of Other countries, lodeper. I be impossible. As May hew a orks cannot ignore the independent verificatior. on every issue, if every r.ed we could not furc -- -:'. s ol others thai offer . Ambivalent opinion The opportunity for the propagandist ies essennally in the confusion, the tentativeness of pubuc opcraon. V.e are sesdom without opinions, bat. mostly, they are weaJdy held That b why the minority church of strong believers in anything from me right lo bear arms VRA» in the United States to the pro- and anu-losinnting lobbies in the United Kingdom fight the polemical war so vigorously Pa haps we seek to avoid the intellectual labour of reason and the moral labour of keeping an open mind. Moreover communication has to penetrate noise and contextual density and this in itself is a reasor V ■-;/..-.< ■■ ■-. --•„-. : propaganda, since they guarantee us a more ..lely hearing. For we bam become Toquevillean ■ to excess - only the lurid bestirs us Irons introversion and petty cares. We also exhibit a latent want lor variety, away from that familiar which reassures but also bore*, ui Today political action. poancaJ parte yannn of every kind, becomes a part of the leisure market and competes lor money and consumers with other kinds of leisure activities. The demise of parties and in particular the class structures which #a.e y.er;. >.n automatic corpus of support has led. in electoral terms, to a new coneumertsm in which the loyalty of voters is rented. The coalescence of spendang power and Sew Media creates choices, mar, partisanship, of every kmd becomes enfeebled and the inherited wisdom and mythological structures of comneanines expire with their decline. Persuasion tenter? it up U* v<** The negotiation of multiple pressures make* People vulnerable. htA wMt local tnadom represented one possible defend Drfininj what and reoso 52 ™"»Hi i. H^narture from traditional ways of knowing mat «*,«.«. urbanised society becomes a cu,turN «*« m°re the space vacated by tradition. S a> ""I ule le ty f social integrating mechanisms ,„ > for propaganda i the^pover y ^ rf commu * * ,.,,„„, marke,-plac emocr cy I ^ ^ ^ ^ rf ^ oul and a decline of social h'erarc > traditional au,h« inherited loyalties: ^^^^Z^ of community and 5, ^SlSSS-- All authority is tentative, and ^ :,llth„r„v ,s negotiated, persuasion becomes central. Single-ivsuc groups Another manifestation arising out of the fragmentation of the old monolithic certainties and the social organisations that were their expression are single-issue groups, and their ubiquity is a driving force behind propaganda (set- Chapter 5). They were the political phenomenon of the late twentieth century. It is through propaganda that they are created and sustained and impact the legislative agenda. Single-issue groups arise as an organised response to an emotional call to action: a consequence of propaganda therefore further becomes a manufactory of it. for it would be difficult to describe the literature and generated imagery of single-issue groups in any other terms. Some of them are now actually bigger than the political parlies, as animal rights, abortion and so forth intrude on to mainstream agendas and usurp them (Richardson 1995). The emotional satisfactions of adherence to a single-issue group are stronger than party activism for many because there are fewer ideological compromises. They exert an immediate emotional appeal. For an issue can be personalised in the way a political party cannot be. the issue becomes our' issue, and participation becomes a hedonistic consumer activity, and also an act of social display. There is thus a symbolic aspect to single issue membership, it becomes part of our identity, one of the ways in which we articulate our social self News manufacture A further reason for the pervasive extent of modern propagand 1* press's need for a condensed story with a hero and villain and ^ that the press is enlisted, though perhaps unintentionally, as d r m°ra' S0 a propaganda battle. This demand for a story is inherent in the organ^"^ *° and culture of the press itself, and derives from both the imperative'5311011 sity of news 'production' and humanity's deep-seated need for myths*?S" give structure and meaning to the fluid, amorphous events of hfe. Tne j^1 /•x/'/<»»'".'//,r"'""'"'"/" SI of story as a framm* ,1(C In Ihe nineteenth century it became U ,p nanl pattern ol pressd,.....Irsc This docs not make the press story a,,, Ji! ically propaganda hm ,. does explain why the press often app,,,r „. become sell < ons< npled as a propagandist agency. Its need for hero* vl ,ainSi scandal, lessons. Ms self-conceived role as moral agent and br.ngrr ol retributive justice, scourge of the hubris or power, make its product sometimes indistinguishable Irom propaganda. Under this melodramatic quest narrative, the antecedent complexities ol situations are ignored because they cannot be expressed in simple story or metaphor. News is quite literally produced - material must be fabricated round pre-existing narrative structures - and all nuance is avoided, hvents - such as the savings and loan debacle in the United States, whose genesis was long maturing appear nevertheless to happen suddenly. In line with this, there is often I nerd to identify some evil individual or community and likewise a hero combating them, with the finality of closure, and if villains cannot be iclentilied they can be conjured up via the rhetoric of implication with phrases like no proof yet". As Crelinston (1989) has remarked, 'it Is increasingly recognised by people both within the industry and by people who study the news that the distinction between news and entertainment is not a sharp one . One term lor thr. I in be the 'news manufacture' approach, and while news manufacture' if riot conceptually identical to propaganda the two have obvious affinities, and sometimes they become one and the same. I he blame for tins - il indeed blame there should be - lies with the introduction by Joseph Pulitzer ol emotion into staid narrative: he brought drama to the news, with plots, story and colour. Newspapers hitherto had contained dry accounts of government activity, but Pulitzer authored blaring headline-., big pictures and eye-catching graphics: emotional immediacy is striven for rather than rational exposition (Vanderwicken 1995). As Crcllr.Moii argues, 'contextualising incidents bores people1. News is a commercial product sold in a competitive market place, and to succeed il musi be vibrant, original, emotional and easily understood - classic attribute-.. ... fact, of propaganda. At times even a free press can conspire to present a powerful .......... view'against win, I, all other opinion is perceived as deviant. When opmwn becomes universal among major press protagonists like this, nol on y . techniques but also ll.e effects resemble those of propaganda s..» n . occasion was the British general election of 1992. when the UbOW . v under Neil Kinnoc k was leading at the polls. The press deckled to Defining what and rfasonj Nightmare on Kinnot* ™«<< Postmodernism The explanat.on for the continuity, even renaissance, of propaganda so be understood in terms relevant to the postmodernist - the univers, of postmodernism a also the universe of propaganda. The extremer n e French, postmodernists lend In reject notions of objective standards, for them there are no absubi.es and I here is no sovereignty of truth, everything becomes a matter of interpretation. Since reason is more suspect emotional judgements a. »ni e a< quire greater legitimacy, the Enlighten-ment reverence for reason, the rational vision of Max Weber, for example, are superseded by greater faith in the validity of our feelings. In asserting this, such postmodernists would claim to be describing the world they find, as well as justifying it at the intellectual level. In abandoning notions of objective truth, the mure radical of the postmodernists credentialise propaganda. If there arc DC absolute standards, a balanced, rigorous analysis is of no greater tccounl I ban emotive speculation. A propaganda text is accorded greater respectability, it is interrogated for meaning and significance, but it is not despised because it is propaganda. Moreover, since no truth is absolute, the search lor truth becomes less pressing as an objective, or even ceases to be an objective at all. The relationship between propaganda and postmodernism lies in the confusion of the real and imaginary. For the postmodernist, the border between the real and the simulated is confused: we inhabit an era of simulacra, of hyper-reality, a time in which the image transcends the word and television is more significant than print where traditions and communities have withered and where identity define, are found in exaggerated symbol systems The pc^d^ord^bo^ aganda is a creative process that Incuses nn th« r since prop and symbol. " the conf<*tionery of image Explaining propaganda: insights from the social sciences n nrnoaaanda could sensibly Ignore the insights generated by the No work on prop * remains a condensed and random summation, social science- wn it • f possibilities for the analysis of the and is speculative, it docss jw ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ can offer explanatory depth, since propaganda la /.;v/>ff'"'"." /""/"'.'"""«« j,, a social phenomenon experienced In social contorts i h phenomenon, lending credibility to the Incredible "-rational i Kplanation In psychology Bthavtourism (see O'Shaughnessy 1 y factors that condi- the to con-of inces- —---- i ■ • »«• win uvai ui u let 1- sanl rcpcl.l.on may contribute to propagandas conditioning effects Napoleon and Hitler used pseudo-classical symbols, but there are also commercial symbols such as the Marlboro cowboy, and such symbols may be said lo evoke, on occasion, a conditioned response. For the notion of conditioning is surely plausible in certain circumstances where the weight of previous association is strong, symbols of ethnic and national stereotypes such as. for example, the symbol of John Bull and the range of associations attributed to him. Classical conditioning also has a place in rhetoric, where the loaded rhetorical term creates compelling associations, as when we refer to Dickensian conditions. Rachmanite landlords and so on. Operant conditioning. Operant conditioning represents a more liberal idea of conditioning. The core notion is that all living organisms are spontaneously enacting behaviour and whenever this action is reinforced it Increases the possibility of recurrence; unless the response is reinforced it faces extinction. Operant conditioning implicitly assumes that people behave not so much out of any conscious deliberation or anticipated outcomes but because of the consequences that have followed similar behaviour in the past. Operant conditioning is more useful than classical conditioning as an explanation of the working of propaganda. Advertising often seeks reinforcement by showing social approval of use of the product such as a particular make of car. and the social disapproval of non-use such as a brand of deodorant, and similarly with propaganda. Propaganda films chronicle how desired behaviours (loyalty, heroism, etc.) are rewarded and undesired ones punished, they feature idealised behaviour patterns engaged in by ideal individuals and denigrate others. The function of propaganda is often to remind - of past pleasures, and also of old resentments - and thereby to reinvigorate. The rites of Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland, their songs, myths and the marches, are a ritual of reinforcement as they seek to implant sectarian sentiment in each successor generation. Adolf Hitler . > have subscribed to an entirely behaviouristic theory of propaganda. emsti 56 Ih-lhunii what ,„„/ „.„ Social psychology (see Webber 1992) Social cognitions Oj the self: self-awareness. When sell awareness e, f,^ we are less likely to act in accord with our values. I he slate ol reduced awareness is known as dcindividuation. which can he created by conditions, including immersion in a group, physical or so< ,.,1 anonyn or by arousing and distracting conditions. These are I he , ond.hor.s we are less likely to be Influenced hy personal inlegr II y. I his Immersion .r,, group can be achieved when the propagandist has organisations at h,sd,v posal such as the Young Pioneers in Soviet Russia (or even the immensely successful Young Conservatives in 1950s Britain). All those conditions of group emotion, physical and social anonymity and distracting conditions were present at the Nuremberg rallies. Jacques Bilul stressed how critical Bear propaganda was enrolment in this type of proselytising organisation: prop, aganda needs a membership list. The success of some types of propaganda such as telcvangelism stems from precisely this sense ol the presence of the crowd. People commit acts after joining organisations such as the Irish Republican Army which they would never contemplate as individuals. The German Nazis in particular focused on the group, and there were membership organisations for everybody (including university professors, on whom punishing demands for physical fitness were Inflicted! Grunberger 1991). Self-motivation. Self-motivation covers the desire for self-consistency. A particularly strong appeal in propaganda is to self iiistdu ation (to retain our social prerogatives and deny them to others, for example), and there is often much to justify. Advertising, for example, often seeks to give permission to our extravagance and hedonism, so that post-purchase justification is its critical object. Ronald Reagan provided rhetorical justification for inequality and free-market fundamentalists told the United Slates that high unemployment was good for it. Another major self-mot. vat ton is the protection of self-esteem, which is also serviced by propaganda and this applies not only to individuals but also to nations. Propaganda is a distorting mirror. Reaganite propaganda flattered, and drew attention away from its civic profligacy. Even Churchillian rhetoric could on occasion ingratiate and assuage national complacency. Social information. We seem particularly hungry for information about others and rely heavily on several forms of social Information Thu Hons of traits, or generalisations about behaviour are nnh. S ,,u ii111versiii even though the attachment of a trail as a descriptive label involves the error f ignoring exceptions. Propagandists deploy the Ureal Leader traits °* medium through which all Leader actions are to be interpreted- such asceticism (Adolf Hitler), virility (Mao), grandfather of i|,c ...„, t, "•iiion fde Valera). matriarchy (Golda Meir). and other enunciated traits include tbJ like the family man (Blair), the lough Leader (Thatcher), the patriot (Mush £xp' Thc Wor,d War 1 sonR Wc>Vt wa,chřd you playing eldest ' i dofi'i want to lose you. but we think you ought to go" is an trw* h v d many limes in propaganda posters and productions with slo-fjmmeh as Woman OÍ Britain say Gď or Is your best boy in khaki? Thus ........... m, ihe delinition of maleneaa, not to be ■ otter ■ tot ease ir, t**m* •.....' tmaJCUlited. ('What did you do ,n the war. Daddy, , Umm+m»„ that for the British such modes of persuas.or, were of art* ......,„ lance because conscription was not Introduce* unUJthe . War. Appeals in recruitment propaganda were to traoV 2« , ,1 M,a.eness. The genders are a,,^ .........M„ bravely, the women to look after the home here s sug nv„ .t /fi/ii r , . virginity of the motherland itself- PS****, tA »h» " viij/mlly. but also me vufci»»j 60 1 hl"'l"H whui the two are equated. Women an- also in......abstract Co ^ as liberty (Madeleine). ,ncew«t^ There is also an overt erotic sir alum m Um iifuigrol propaganda r lions, for example, connect will» idea, ol r.rxim|'liberation' theJarl ^ of the Bolshevik Revolution 01 the evniin ol Purls In 1968. RevolutjJ^ oftenaccompaniedbyproclainalioi.su! Im- love arid a sense thatthelu? been taken off all repressions". Nol only n ruling < lass but an inler moral order is overthrown and in Iii« pn lud before new authority iSe^ lished or bourgeois revenge lakes plm « Ihne Is a llowering of the avarn garde and the bohemian. Sexual appeal-, me ol course the thing in Con sumer advertising, but they are cle.nly prfftOl In every form of pr0pa. ganda. The Nazis, for instance, used i iei inany's Marilyn Monroe. Christina Soderbaum. extensively in their films Propaganda lilms often succeed b) foregrounding the story of attractive women and their romantic relations with men - the propaganda message Is se« reled in the background and in the story line. Indeed, it is a tribute to the potential of propaganda and. at its best, its resonance as an art form, that Cütablanca, probably the most famous film ever made, is also a supreme example of the propaganda genre (though it is seldom analysed as such). Dictators themselves may be framed In an overtly sexual style, from the circulation of rumours as to their alleged potency to Mussolini parading bare-chested to his people, something which shocked the more bourgeois Adolf Hitler as vulgar. Eroticism can be B Itrong element in propaganda. The Breughel-like peasants and earth mother women who clumsily adorn Nazi art are hardly likely to tickle the sensuous fancy, but Nazi iconography also abounds with images of naked women and athletic nudes. Indeed, the male body as a power symbol (physical and temporal) features prominently in Nazi art and propaganda as in the denim and cosmetics advertising of later generations: Hiiagen Dais and Calvin Klein today would understand those associations There Is an obvious equation between the dominance of the master race and sexual virility. But there is also an overtly pornographic element m propaganda, from the ravings of Julius Streichers Der Stunner to the lurid I lies of Rasputin and the Czarina's court printed and circulated after the April 1917 revolution (Orlando Figes 1997). Another characteristic of propaganda which could be of interest to psychoanalysts is its obsession with regaining the purity of some ideal, unsullied by the world. Totalitarianism itself could be represented as the wish for regression to some womb-like state of succour. Propaganda constantly assures us that a perfect world is just around lhe corner, from the myriad Utopias of the totalitarian to the sanitised world of material satiety projected by the advertising industry. Explaining 61 Explanation in soc.ologv | see OShaughnessy 1992) Social anthropology Astute propagandists are best advised to make i m conceptual universe rather than seek to undermine a,uuhers comforting set of private truths. Today tht mucin propaganda programme which is delicient in any of these even though the Individual propaganda text may be. Great rhetoric never retires. To work effectively rhetortc nui>t resonate with attitudes and feelings within the target (Tony Schwann h»~ \\ vire»l rhetoric is substantially a co-production between sender aiul receiver Rhetoric is a cheap way of reaching the target, since it is relayed b\ the press. In this chapter we argue that the power of rhetoric resides principally in ihe power of metaphor. But we will also discuss the arrival of new rhetorical forms such as spin, and we discuss in particular the rhetorical IS presidency of Ronald Reagan Symbols are another component in this trinity. Ultimately wv argue that a symbol can be defined as condensed meaning and as such is an evonomi-cal form of propaganda, for symbols are universally understood in ways that language can never be: a symbol eludes precise scrutiny and can be read' in many ways, endowed with multiple meanings Old symbols can also be re-used, for symbols have inherent plasticity The power of myth is the power of narrative. Propaganda rejects intellectual challenge, and it seeks refuge in the structures of mvths Old myths can be re-created, but new myths can also be invented - that is to say. myth entrepreneurship. Myths are a culture's self explanation, and they are a key part of propaganda (stereotype, for example, is a kind of myth*. Rhetoric and propaganda Seldom does mere logic alone frame our perceptions; u is emotion thai is ihe pathway to conviction. Rhetoric is emotional persuasion and its core is therefore emotion. Rhetoric is a subset of pr^. but lt is 0. confu ed with it. and the two words carrv many* *e same cc^J* probes, for rhetoric is also sometimes a term of abuse, and i m refer to anv argument we disagree w.th. Along wtth ej*^ ^ mvths rhetoric performs a key role in propaganda and the three are inlerd twined rhetoric may be strewn with symbolic appeals that make reference to myths. The trinity of rhetoric-symbolism-^nytrw is the conceptual anatomv of all propaganda. Thus the relationship of rhetoric to propaganda is tricky to nuance, since an intelligent case could also be made for the notion that ail rhetoric is also propaganda. Much depends on how precisely we define rhetoric and the conceptual domain that they both share, especial!;, f ':/pand the idea of rhetoric to embrace the visual and physical as well as the verbal. Rhetoric was once the basis of European education At Eton College, for example, one of the great events of the scno*. - --till Speeches', where students dress up to declaim the great perorations of the pest (King George III being apparently moved to tears by a recitative of the Earl of Strafford's speech on the scaffold. Fickle is the love of princes'). Rhetoric today is as important as ever, and its prime function. to pinpoint, illuminate and showcase the nub of the issue, is unchanged. But the forms are different. For example, the key focus of rhetoric today is the soundbite, its form has become condensed and the art of rhetoric now is one of compression. Rhetoric, verbal and indeed visual, has been a crural part of the propagandist's armoury since the beginning of recorded history In Athens the participation of all adult male citizens in the av,ernUy and judicial process made eloquence highly desirable, and rhetorical \,m< hen - sophists -could teach you. write speeches, and so forth. 'I he ,n of verbal persuasion was the core of sophists training, it was central to »b> i -off for getting it right is considerable: the label adheres and over tune it is naturalised so that people do not perceive it as a label at all. Labels are viewed as objective descriptions when very often they represent mereiy social judgements. They can be damning or they can be laudatory: but an ideology or perspective is inscribed within them. Thus euthanasia becomes mercy killing' and abortion becomes pro-choice". The supreme art is to make the label enter common parlance so that every time it is used it becomes an unconscious act of propaganda, as with the Right to Life' movement "aaorm are always important since learning new words or concepts may result in seeing new classes of objects or ideas that change perspective 0 Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy 2004». A zr.z . _ " - . this is the term political DORCjCiaaaa', which implicitly assooaies _:«r-__5m with the coercion of DC Sal Id >:.-:e This is not to deny rjje pin liaasi of bberal/left excess, merely that the left's opponents' surr „ fivntial trinity 75 v Invsing .» label and getting liberals to use it was •, ,ri„mnK r lh« s.mu- reahty bu,.embody divergent judgements about tha rca, !^ •vvhl„, prostitute . harlot and "courtesan reference the same activity but |N " ■ B^^15*Um' neroin ™d morphine are refinements of the same drug but their cultural signitication is entirely different Words get us to see something in a new light. Or they may be combined inll,metaphor which catches on. even if there is little logic behind the „ansference. The idea of a trickle-down effect' became so popular because it was such an excellent riposte to socialist confiscation, not because it was particularly true description of economic reality. Another (shopworn) example of the power of labels lies in the rhetorical terms 'terrorist' and freedom tighter* and guerrilla", since they illustrate the extent to which words describing the same reality can contain contrary judgements. Words thus do duly as sensitising concepts, such that if we have no word for something we are often actually blind to the existence of the phenomenon. An important function of rhetoric today is the seeking to replace the old culture of rhetorical denigration with a new one of rhetorical uplift: the mastics and cripples of yesteryear, along with the mendicant plastic figurines that dramatised their claimed enfeeblement. are banished to rhetorical Siberia. New terms emerge in their place, so that backward' children become special needs', with the hope that we will see them as such in a new way And terms may be deliberately chosen to limit our vision, language systems are a way of seeing but also of not seeing, and in modern warfare the importance of persuasion has given rise to a miasma of pseudo-technicalia (collateral damage', 'target-rich environment) to veil the reality of what is being done: so different from the reply allegedly given in World War II by Air Marshal Harris to a policeman enquiring about the nature of his profession (killing people'). We have become masters of duplicitous rhetoric' -or hypocrisy. Rhetorical tactics1 One rhetorical device traditionally employed has been the vox populi method, to find a particularly striking phrase or dramatic moment to express what all are thinking. Thus Leo Amerys cry in the House of Commons to Arthur Greenwood, in 1939 'Speak for England. Arthur*, achieved this criterion ot • These W|| known sayings and aphortsms of the eminent can be gleaned from their numerous biographies and other historical works as well as from such reference sources a OxM Dicnonary of Literary Quotations (ed. Peter Kemp). The Oxford Dictionary ^^^Z Partington.. The Oxford Dictionary of Twentieth Century Quotations (ed. Ehzaheth Knowles,. The •Bloomsbury) Biographical Dictionary of Quotations led. John Dalntllh). nvmnnihllii v I DflMi1 minified: a silent, angry witness, l.fr,, llv, ,.|(^ devuw iMin be be* *.....d up by Alexander Pope: What <>lt wjiM|,fJ1|j^ bill n>' 1 ' Hi• well i r\if ' ''■ Great phn.......king nade possible by the great historical moment. H Uses to Unit hUlnrt, Ity a b exalted language. At such rnomenis KooM.v,h used llv di i Id -i pel Gallon: 'We have nothing to fear but fear'. K,n il, wimi wtlli.I.iiliiy', A day that shall live in infamy*. (Mhers chose satire, us with (Inn. hill'fritpfl /^ring's statement that Britain was hk,;h i hit la n Ihttl ' I man , i ojld strangle by the neck. 'Some chicken, some net k \.....<..-, li Mother Important device in rhetorical propaganda, as when foi i ^......>l< I loydt orfye told his audience thai an English duke cost ..s inn. Ii in ii ii. •/ hn ftdnfl ; • I satisfying piece of class invective. Simii.iiiii. rhatOrlt ' '/Ives repositioning some literary or classical rjUOtl II WUh Chamber* • '; ''unich quoting HcnrijIV Part il'Outof this neiile dingat Wi \,\n< \ this flower safety) or Mao letting a hundred Bowen blowom ind ihttl dred schools of thought contend*. Sometimes i In ii.ii, id , li., i , gained I | iphtry perverting a quotation, as with Margaret II...i. I... n,< not tor turning*. Brutality is of course fre-qutntl) I CharaCtatlldl .; rhetoric- the brilliant insult, as James Maxton MPtoPrlmt Mini i. r Ram . •'. fy,nald( Sit down. man. You're a bloody irngeih i ... < linn I..11 to »r i *r %ame -.ictim (When I was a child . . . have waited l.li\ v u • ..... Aonder sitting on the Treasury baiich > «......l 11o «<,«o ha- . /real merit, of course, of being recyclable: PMC* With bonOUl Wat hr.i uied by Disraeli at the Congress of Berlin, iluiu. ei.i.l.ii.i. .1 vi.i /11;- .berlain to Richard Nixon One nation' i> unolliei |.In «,1 hi-.r ii#-ir% which ended on many lips, included Nixon's. tmagOl v ili«li hoofing Oi the most vivid and appropriate image is crit-u.il to .ill id.i.mi. ..I \,< r >. 'jr.. Maynard Keynes's description of D*vM Unvd.....ij" ' II.r 'viraordinary figure of our time, this siren, this gout looted I mi* «1 ii. r I,.,11 li.ifoor, ....tor to our age from the hag-ridden magu ami em hauled woodf of ( eltk antiquity') is memorable for the association! H RlVfJ i" the domJnam feature of his protagonist's personality, his Welsh oloquim I \ I ytU < mmaXU it with an ancient and darkly brooding world Imigoicmbi pat kmau The workers have nothing to low but their chains | |„v have world io ^ur, Workers of the world, unite', or banal, as Mao'l Groat Llip forward (With tta 20 million dead), derisive (Lenin's garbage Inn ol l.l-.iory , >,, ,>,<■< \ hismarck's 'iron and blood'), liven an essentially IhiiiiiI lone/, hh Prine- Minister Harold lUacmlllim's 'wind ol , hange'. can miiim'Iiow < ah h on a. for example with l.abom lie Aneurln Bcvan s nuked Inlo ihe < onf'-rence chamber'. Frequently In political v iMnnuinl. alion tin to...;" ,' ho sail are perhaps necessarily those of rmhal llcinenl Tli.ili la ill. iImIom' .aiurated with aggressive linugery. mid L^ff- Itidci Muilh Grtllxkells famous Fight md tight and light again' Lgrinfl unilateral dlsat ma.went i shows liberals arc hardly immunised ,,sl such linages Surrllk lul Imager) l> another alternative - All I have r ffer you Is Mood 'oil swval and lrurs'etc. h greal • hetoi h li In Hm Iisimple Idea simply expressed but elevated l. {hegrandeui 1,1 Iti context rhui martyrdom Is a particularly frequent K0Jngf°r slu M |,,,rriin' rs ,s Perhaps me primary context and bare xamples .uc legion whethei General Papain's lisnepasseronl pas' ai . un or Barl Malg'l 1918 Wtthoui backs lo a wall, and believing In the ,l( ,•,.| oui « mi«' we w ill llghl on to the end', the rhetoric of stubborn ii, sii I'dw aid Giv> s plangent I1'I-I ' I he lamps are going out all over . „ Great moments In the life ol a damoa".icy can propel even the more mediocre lot ISC lo the »v. tislon ihui an otherwise dull Speaker of the House ommons in the captain of King Charles's guard: T have neither eyes to vf nor hps "ivak except as this House gives me leave.' And Jawaharlal \, hru.it Indian iude|vndcinv \i the sii oke of the midnight hour, while the w,,rld sleeps India w ill awake to life and freedom.' Great events are remem-....,( b) languagS u.uemai Rablfl as language but exalted by the occasion it articulated I hUl Nut SS Iduh Cavell on the eve of her execution in 191 S: I icallfe thai patriotism Is nol enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone IT* powvi ol rhetoric is hence often contextual, it might bana| Q| , |dk uloUS 10 another setting: 1 am just going outside and Mr be iwaj i,m sometime i> s.mi >le vettbewordaof Captain Gates (as ha left the tenl foi. at tain death »n the hope thai his colleagues on Scott's polar a pedldon i ould live! Inspired a generation of Englishmen. Rhetoric Creates meaning Rhetorical devices Induce the reader to apply particular interpretative bemata to the icm the grain ol the rhetoric will invite the reader to adopt a certain Item c and attitude from which the world looks different from how M did before Language is nol mcieh the \ chicle lor articulating our thoughts, it does •Ml create moaning, an active agent lor the creation of perception. If language was meivh a vehicle lor communication, there would be less " i in li. but. in the words ol I'mbcrson and Henderson (1992). lan->■■■>;•' dec iuou-iImu mcieh express reality; it actively structuresexpert ence . . . language and linguistic devices structure how we think about "V M language isomer, then the control of language is the key lo that ' Urns the h\|vthesis holds thai language does not reflect realilv but rather creibM it according to the structures and limits permitted by the ' r^oage ol gum » ullure I on Ikes (198 I) claimed that 'the rejection ol 7b ".....i |Ull..,i hero can produce a re)* tlon .,i the I • , the Indian-killer U i Names and words are no, neutr&| J in Vietnam as nation. ^ or ^ Wme Irnpllci, ^ tools: they may a**. ^ and (withln limits, the more ^> and their use helps b nlially lnc Dl8J mtrodu, ed resonant the wo.eitlu grean t ________.... sonani. nu <.....^ , The current slock ol words m common circulation influences our lhl,. ing signilic.nlIv. end when words cease to circulate, people may 1(:ri(| ( think less in certain ways (though what is cause here and tvhal || ,„,„,. unclear i I or example, when Dickens was writing, the English langua* „„ sessed a word enterpriser (see Little Dorril) which was the equivalent of ihl. French mtTtprmM (an earlier generation had used the word 'projector1. bu, that was more with connotations of speculation,. In the 1970s and after, when a newly minted image of the risk-taking businessman re-entered pop ular currency, the language had to turn to the French for a single word to express that concept, since the English equivalent had atrophied: the social reality it signified had again come to be esteemed. For Foulkes í 198 i, even the dictionary may function as propaganda - it may be part of a dominant group's attempt to control recorded knowledge and prescribe linguistic behaviour'; he is concerned that language in its social context reflects and transmits Ideology without seeming to do so'. He adds that: an obvious example is the way in which modern English is pervaded by the buried metaphors ol capitalism: we exploit opportunities, prolil Írom experiences, cash In on situations once we have assessed the debit and credit side: we sell good ideas ami refuse lo buy the opinions of those with whom we disagree: pop singers ami |>olllieians may become hot properties once they have been taught in capitalise on their talents. Power Language is ol course a weapon of thought control, the great theme of George Orwell's Nineteen eiijhtu-four. Nor were his fears without foundation. One of the disturbing curiosities of the Third Reich, which Grunberger (1991, described and Klemperer (1998) reports in his Diaries, is how ways of looking at reality as embodied in particular words and phrases became general currency. The Reich propagated a linguistic style which condensed elements of Its world, thus making formal persuasion less necessary: a new rhetoric of lhe everyday permeated the Nazi vocabulary and even that of the Nazis' opponents. Hitler himself was a convinced believer in the raw power of the spoken word over literary exposition, criticising academic emphasis on the written word: 'the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches In history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic of :-■ ' ' • li(,lshcvik literature.............i oothtni ' '"ri"'' heaven which lhonsandi Ol agitate* I ■ k the service of an idea, talked Into people' (Blata lbaeraaaaVa target group to identify with us. it isessenilal thai wr s|m-nk toiaaaaiaaaeaT •.- , Rhetoric, as has been already suMesird • •' ' '• ' •' • cultural paradigms that an ilhared With thi :. '--'•'* " hmrjue was to appropriate the vocabulary ol sociaaaaiaaal-fcaoy propagandist-draw from the cultural ftock hank í - • - 5r*nrm and images: thus Hitler 'concocted an Instdfl c.< ' 'rrcs familiar to his German audienci (Bliln I96SI aai faaai ndapon in particular. Burke (Blain 19KK) argued that '.''.">■ rm represented a political pervCTllOH "I ih< ■ ' -ol good against evil of rhetoric owes much to the recognition that '': information processors, embody fixed and oral perspectives, so that the skills ol persuasion imerit is to be achieved. Certainly it eannol be Successful persuasive advocacy thus occur. -// outside it. and the 'correct' perceptions follow ■ '■ fxerts its own tyranny, it is a set of values to :al adherence, so that our decisions miř t adc pet r^-cfive. The consequence is I hat advo< all ,are r cause in line with the audience's existiii^. by rhetoric; sometimes by little else, and the ■' ■ . y as brought with it a new respectability lor thestaatr <* riaefcwfe I aj work of Chaim Perclman (19H21 .•"«! Man VaáariilfJta^lJaweiřrr^r.f in changing perspectives is getting our pari! -' - . - ( ultural mainstream, i.e. the Ideological is I not conclusively claimed that the moil sffft ttVS reproductions. In this view an argument Is all w 4 the audience Is led to draw the conclusion I'm iisHI. a mt* pcrntMtot when it is a co-production and the tores *rectry with the freedom left lo Hu- addressed mdi vkUi .1 Ihose thai seem to be imposed seldom eonvl.uv. urs : vll wk when .he addressee Is free... re.ee. II ri„, couid ^ v stronger wiicn n.v ..-------- -irnmc cluiracteristic of sophisticated forms of piopagand^J?*^* .iif understood.) The co-production of the argument is helped h\ ihe wry ambival ol language uself. The problemalological \ ion assumes language -x :ial and unequivocally so. whereas in practice language is ambigu [he extent that most terms can receive multiple meanings according Hkf cvMUcm (Meya 1994). Ambiguity is often deliberate and vou extract your ou n understandings: was Tony Blair's tough on crime and toueh on the causes of crime' actually a phrase without .. meaning, and similarly with his education, education, education'.- Simply asking what thev mean :\;vscs their vacuity. 1 he mechanism of rhetoric Rhetorical tropes (figures of style, analogies, metaphors) are ncvessary for . . \ significant act of persuasion. The importance of rhetoric is that it persuades because it gives vivid definition - to lluid situations, to what would otherwise be vague or abstract, since on so many matters individual opinion is tentative or confused. Rhetoric provides something for thought to get hold of. something concrete, an image, a scrap of language or feeling Mason 19S9). The power of rhetoric in a democracy lies, essentially, in the hands of others: for rhetoric is an unguided missile whose creators have no necessary control of how it is conscripted and duplicated. The press and media are of course supreme among these powerful others, and the primary target for modern oratory, hopefully circulating and amplifying the rhetorical imagery we have persuaded them to project for our selfish ends. To achieve this degree of circulation and memorability, the rhetoric might be a simple and easily remembered phrase such as Cicero's Delenda est Carthagine.' Great rhetoric - or at least, that which seeks duplicauon - resides primanly in the choice of an especially appropriate image. The idea of resonance' (Schwartz 1973) is particularly apposite here, for good rhetoric fizzes, it smoulders in the mind', since often such imagery is open-ended and its plasticity invites curiosity and review: we turn it over in our minds, perhaps many times. Words are never neutral. They are assiviation-rich. There is. for example, no such thing as choosing a brand name that has no association. 79 , y .• ... iM written discourse curia I tone as we as a content and s . ,n1 ivrsuasive power can be as much a function ol tone ax of ......" OShaughnessy and ()'Shaughne>>> : . ; remark the . . uouis conjures up a fresh perspective but the choice of words may , v. v .resigned to give a certain tone. say. of prole- . -alism by the use of Latin or artenntic jargon as occurs in advertisinc medicines to establish . some words that arc essentia I lv v. •...-.> ^ %ldk«wd'. Vinshed'. distraught', exasperated', fearful', hurt", pressured". ... ined. worried' and so ,,n r-.cre v~. nereis that have i-\ .\w.u\r connotations like 'progress', new vcr t\ -calorie" . v. ami some words with negative connotation like old-fashkncd'. artifi-.. .c.vdients'. non-user friendly', gas guzzJer and so on. Evrn ostensibly v ess w ords have some kind of meaning: they may lack a concrete refer-. vr but still emlwh a sense-meaning. Invented literary words and names, such *> IV*:'. Sw irt s Yahoos in Gulliver's Trawls, do precisely this. . .. v perhaps, to see rhetoric as - -rr.-.r ..-..: . v p.easing the exploding image, the cascade ' ••• - -~c -vis colloquial sc-sc > so Rhetoric is the strategic and tactical use of language to per-. s far from language being !ul. : po. -.a :. c::cc::\e persua-« e in deracinated language. According to Boardman 11978». the .. i muddy issues under the preier.ee : p: I : Ic BananattOlft, the ...... o: obscurity and deviation '1 h> ^ „::-.-..:\a'?le and .: c apparent content, associated with bureaucracy and jargon. ; : xample is ol words 'so care:.;..;. ..-. *.r. .-.s :. rr.p.> more by what lt.....say than by what they do saj :. . : - . .-.-sen > a denial : .> c.; -.[ Nixon: none of these [liiega: MMtaj tec In place with my srec:5v approval or knowledge' - note the rhetorical activity of that word spe. \ h\\irdman also gives the example I V\■ ■ Cafttbodu - he c.c\ ice of dividing and defining What AaaedoaB v.culd choose to aV>nothing when he could go to the heart of the trouble? Rhetoric can be ..- -kc cr cum 'bureaucratic', with ideas Gr.j :Cec ci.rs naturalised' us .-r.j^;. speech. Kveryday speech is not H .: are buried the ::r: .clecs oi the culture. There is no one formula for effective rhetoric - different practitioners ■we mastered different aspects of the an. and different parts of it suit dif-rrr-.: occasions and different audienoM I> IsfMPfk the audience some •■oral public, or is it segmented in some important way - a professional ; ce. perhaps? With general audiences such ai:': i eneapk a jury, the •"•aaectionery of image counts. A good image has an adhesive quality and cannot forget it. a dweller in our half-consciousness Hitting in and out of • Band s tw ilight zone. Framing and anchoring also matter - the way a Mil A(^ePtUa}9rT<^et^ ,,...... „, decision named DM InnUfllCI thi way it ,s inierpr^ ,„,,,., ,i for example: voters era worrtid about versus voters hiV* i„,ivorried about . Wrought properly suggest ,,ul !heie exist r|r,,H'ri»^^P^Isinrhet0rtr ,,,„, |Mvr been made bv ihetouciuns linCf the my beginnings of^ ,„,.,„„..,,1 Pot example Ion (ol status. . uliural totems, material , ,, ,„,(• ..I the most etUvllvc ilinnrs in the hr.tory of rhetonc. ........ibad In the ver> wvrd consecutive", and it is this that Hirschrnan , uplorei In The Rhetoric of RfffCClon (1991), focusing on three fallacie* „ hi, b '.in li a rhetoric is seen loembod) 1 lb, perversity thesis: improvement' will make things worse, not bene: 2 The futility thesis: it will change nothing, but will waste money \ jeopardy thesis the COS) is too high In relation to the benefits, or 11 I. the loss of what we alrcadx have 11|,•< live rhetoric has also frequentIv been gi minded in appeals to autrwrity NOurcee. American rhetoricians loi example, have often been at their moil •iiet live when referring to the words ol the I -minding Fathers. Haaaflkxi. |, n,i ,oi and soon. Other cultures have sought rhetorical homage to other. mimic |m-t uliar figures. Thus Ma.jui \ h> oi has shown the influences both of i|M , I.iv i. s and of Marx en Mrican |h>luu .iI discourse. Host independence Alii* mi politics saw the transition bom a rhetoric with shades of Kipfing ,iii,| othat luerary figures to that of Lenin and other leftist thinkers. The .....boniaiion between the Kiplingesque and Umimsl tradiuons continues. 4.L. „___I—j —-I-----» - « • ----.. .«.■>■■ ,,->i udUlUOT. wiih I marked cultural schizophrenia in the (xilitical conduct of puni mnmm Ah I, .hi . A good example was Nkrumah. who Ugan by quoung Tennyson in nil early works and ended saturating his last honks with Marxist expressions ,„„) pynibols. Another cast* ot ambiguity was Tanzania s Julius Syerere. WhOM rhetoric alternated between Shakes|\\uc and Marx I he end of language is not simpb to communu ate. as Austin points out iM.coii I 'tH^y. there are statements that can he irue or false f constatrve » l„ii i I in are also what he calls rvrloi matives or performance utterances to ivhii h the Question of truth or falsehood Is Irrelevant because they aredra- ......in git When Disraeli called Gladstone a sophisticated rhetorician, ine- I.......id wilh the sheer exuberance of his own verbosity' he was enacting a l„.i |,,i maiu e utterance, not asserting something that was true or false. Ii hi.I (iMirse important to rvmemlvr that a tum Hon ,,\ r betone has been lo Im lllUtl tlie killing of man by man people .me has never met and with who.....in- has no personal quarrel limberson and Henderson <1992> ,.....Im ml a very timely content analysis of war related Monee in the New \„il> him* lor the durauon of the first Gulf War. giving special attention todlret t and Indirect references to death and killing Ihr. analysis revealed Ml ,,„„ mtJOl themes: 11) the existence of rhetorir-.l a™. o. n .s,h.nMh,hiv for war-related deaths and reassurance oh ,h',,K br""m™1- & stories that prepared tin- taint) -boul he .ctual death toll. Certain memorable phrases cam, ahou, as , rsull ol this war - collateral damage" famously being one: war was detci Ibed .., (he new pseudo-science argot of the military. And speaking ol OP*™1 U'UV 1 rm,om and >ts secondary label. Shock and Awe. Hampton and Staubei I 2003) argue that this sub-brand enables its uses to lymboU-n,|h . econcile two contradictory ideas. On the one hand, its theorists use the term to plan massive uses of deadly force. On the other hand, its focus on the psychological effect of that force makes it possible to use the term while distancing audiences from direct contemplation of the human suffering which that force creates'. \ new rhetoric \ isual i hetoric is the telegraphy of meaning via a significant background or foreground. I las visual rhetoric replaced verbal rhetoric? This is an age where 'visual literac] is often described as replacing the articulativc skills Reagan'l use ol visual assertion accorded well with this new lingua franca ol popular culture For vlsuality is a universal language. In Eloquence In the Biectronli U I I 9881 Kathleen Hall Jamieson discusses how the nature of rhetoric has changed under the impact of television. In television eloquence, visual moments have replaced words: such visualities bypass the critical faculty and we should not in fact look to television for much by way of explanation. Reagan, of course, gave a good example of this in his (1980) inaugural address, which he turned into a travelogue of Washington ami its great monuments, the cameras following as his words directed. Symbolic forms of discourse have particular value for a general audience, they resonate and they avoid the kind of categoric articulation of values which In heterogeneous society can alienate. In Reaganite rhetoric, these symbolic devices took the form of visual parables, or moral stories, and more generally a visual rhetoric which would use the actual imagery around him say. the Normandy beaches, or images common to him and Ins audience lamieson describes Reagan as being the pastmaster of electronic lorms o rhetoric, and she provides a close and sustained analysis ol his rhetorical style. Thus frequently he employed physical props to signify and symbolise. H.s communication strategies engaged the use of ordinary citizens who would purvey some form of parabolic function - a youth, far example, who had shown conspicuous initiative in the light against homelcssness g2 Aamc*P*ml*n* Reagan would commandeer shared visual memory, he would bu,|d ( Sscene* that he and the nation had mm* experienced, but. l0s^ "such devices must represent some larger un,verse of meaning pension StJ le therefore used a great deal of non-verbal commun,caUo £e verbal components were essentially colloquial and conversauonalr^ were often framed b> a -amatlc narrative, a favourite Reaganite da£ w.th RonaW Reagan cas. ... the role of storyteller In this, of course. he ls close to rhetcrvwins throughout h.s.ory. for narrative is the phmord.ai mode of communication, which Reagan simply adapted and efTemin.sed f0r H>ti^.^>u^uMuna lelevision Ayy There < homier a fraudulenco implicit in the visual bias of the medium, for a visual symbol enables ll.e avoidant of rebuttal Jamieson (1988i deschbesaHubertHu.nphreva(lvrrtr.rrnef.t which if it had been expressed verbalh and not usually, would have Invited derision. This imprecision is a gift to the rhetorician, as the new propaganda of the visual drives out the verbal Oectoral advertising spot ads in particular are non-nuanced. they telegrarh meaning, they do not explain or imply t Jamieson 1988). This controls with earlier forms lor rhetoric - Aristotle's enthymemes. for example, achieved their power from reliance on unexpressed beliefs and information But. with a decline in shared cultural information, the ability tocv :.-..> -^Ti\isc> ]d.t..r» : .-.sc argues lot the Icuurusation of rhetoric. According to jamieson. trie. >.on has rendered l he old manly style of rhetoric redundant - it is a medium ihjt mandates lhe aria ulalion of feeling, and manly style is a noose. In the ancient world, the metaphors employed by rhetoricians were drawn from battle, but now a rhetoric of courtship is employed and public : ->c has been personalised, as for example with Ronald Reagan s seLf-disvlosive moments. Traditional rhetoric, in contrast, depended for its force on the physical .isjhi ts of performance - the drama, more than content; on the use ol von e, ihe mesmeric interplay of facial expres' and gcstuie. Ii was a ph\ u ,d rhetoric, demanding the rigorous, choreographed gesture. Khetora was physical articulation and seldom linguistic content alone, though powerful rhetoric could transcend this: Lincoln's Gettysburg address was in fact inaudible to his immediate audience ar.i mav even have had more impac t in World War II. Leathers (1986. gives a list of non-verbal channels for conveying messages. Facial expression: example, include smiles, frowns, eyebrows raised or lowered, eyes closed or widened, nose curled, lip pursed, teeth bared, jaw dropped, forehead knitted or relaxed Not ail media with spcclllc rhetorical applW alions are new. and nor are the old manly rheioncal forms exlliigulshed. far from it. One of the phenomena of L'S politics over the 199(is was the invention of radio as a polit- h 0u| drives 0n 1988, '""nes. for ^efs and the ability ording i0 dundant aniy sryK toricians :>yed and Ronald ontrasi. drama. >f facial ng the ion and mscend nexiiate a ihers Facia' low" . ja" raff phc fressentialinmty SI ,ca| medium - reinvention in tact since Charles Coughlin was the first and most spectacular exponent seventy years ago. Talk-radio hosts, along uuh single-issue groups. have become among the most important politicians in (he inited States today What they offer is pure propaganda. This is a medium of reinforcement, noc gaming new recruits but speaking to the provincial white male (he has the highest voter registration of all) in his own language, articulating his anger and ministering to his self-pity: there arc 1.000 talk radio programmes, and Rush Limbaugh himself had an audience of 20 million. In Kurtx's wwds. Tmus. Howard Stern and other loudmouths reflect a high-decibel society in which journalists insult each other on talk shows, pathetic souls denounce their relatives on daytime TV and politicians slam each other in attack ads' (Thomas Install. Sew York Review. 6 October 1994». Every day Limbaugh took events in the day's news and misinterpreted them as pan of his larger indignation over the state of American culture. mdtodnal and group rights, sexual mores, and the ground rules of capitalism i-.: lerr.-xracy He presented the discussions over each of these issues as part of a continuing partisan struggle between a demonised democratic liberalism and ar. idealised Republican conservatism ... he look it as an obligation and higher duty to examine every action or pronouncement to show its deceptive purpose........ "I'm sick and tired of canting on my TV and being told that the Aids crisis is my fault too. becausr : : - . ;i_-e enough— In this 500 anniversary year of Columbus s voyage. I'm tired of hearing him trashed. I don t give a hoot that he gave some Indians a disease that they didn't have immunity against We can't change that, we're here. I'm sick and tired of hearing Western culture constantly disparaged. Hey ho. Hey ho. Western cultures got to go. is the chant at Stanford Uniwenary What would Stanford be if the pioneers that are so reviled todav as unpenahsc racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes hadn't fought their way across a continent to California?" While segmenting racbo audiences by ideology is a gift to the propagandist, such channels represent a rejection of pluralism and the idea of political exchange. The United States may be a democracy but its airwaves became a one-party state? Impact of rhetoric Rhetoric is power. Coosmeraal rhetoric can make the difference between success and failure for a company. Branding, for example: the right name can easily justify a 20 per cent, or even 50 per cent, price premium. Thus in business the power of rhetoric can be measured in monetary terms. The power of rhetoric is diustrated by the extent to which a well chosen image, possessing traits of vividness and appropriateness, not merely sticks . but S4 A "'""THwIu, ► Turkey as the sick hangs around for generations»uir mck man of Ue also remember the r^ trans** to ifae '. rhu> the \vart,,m. despite the qualifications \luth of the B/ifr (1991». are to fighting on the beaches, in the continues to do its duty in a Historically the power and HOD scholar) has been -they have lain in the c ps the greatest em of metaphor gave her work a lead of never could have found. caaang, far preservation and insect coot success lay principally as a military strategist). What we nam his moral character, but also to has rvrsonilication: thus on bayonets in her Arc:., starved lips her phil< -. Churchill presented th surrendering: the rhet of any author, preacher Hitler exclusively rhetorical tor example m the case ol r*r Carson m hose mastery that mere rational exposition the chemicals used for wood of death iKevles 1994) Churchill (certainly not for example as a refers certainly to of articulation, metaphor and sharpens her through self-s 19851. Rhetoric and ideas For one writer. Geoff Mason »1999k realms of opinion, for the actrr Only- if certainty is dema cannot be reached, rhetorical .Mien defined as the endeavour to do not follow on from each other win Car eaving room for possible •jig people disputing the rigour of I urse in practice is concerned wa absolutely critical in the pr the intellectual ideologies that because their sponsors were the a the need for rhetorical devices to an intuitive feel for the puwu of mankind and burn its Rachel Carson was one SeVm* Spring, did more t rrr. ronmental movemeaal lption of her writing forms of propaganda tlounsh in the permanently a final conclusion we. Argumentation is ortry because reasons of mathematics. * thing prevent-proof, so every dkv of rhetoric has been ine twentieth century l have t arguably I done so • - - rx-nents understood attention, they had the introversion of ihough ts. 1*94. Her great polemic. The to bring about the modern by Iterary powier. Carson's of the more sophisti-combtnation of .1» tactual knowledge and deeply fell en.......Maln^mse,n such propaganda |hc.|i,tIS,hemM'lu-vareh.,ih,.„,.,..„l,|11 ,,,.„,,.,..... P.- „ ls ,„„ Jishunesl writing, hut it remains „.....i.....alive, since facts are selected |i)m>, t(, the guidance <>l an inl.rpnlat.vc Irarncwork. and decorated |M,agcr> and metaphor thai |Y,„| ,|„. rr}l,,t.r to ,hc ngh, emot,ona, ror. mm Ihisisnol mere polemli >1,1 — tftnMlflrfMES^HM One such device was persoiulu atlon sh« writes nf her realization that, j.vpite our own utter dependence on the earth, this same earth and sea have no need of us'. In this way she pei soullies nature, and nature becomes ,, real person whom we need hut who doesn't need us. Thus both our dependence and our littleness are emphasised, an important part of the Carson project: she left government service increasingly despairing over the future of nature'. Carson often auihropomorphised nature, attributing human leelings to fish and animals in order 1«) explain their behaviour to leaders who know little about them; we must not depart too far from analogy with human conduct if a lisli. shrimp, comb jelly, or bird is to seem real to us' or 'I have spoken of a lish "faring" his enemies, for example, not bei ause I suppose a fish experiences lear in I he same way that we do. but bet ause I think he behaves as though he were frightened". Any form of communication involves some rhetoric - there is a rhetoric of siicnce il'relli 1989). though it is much less overt than political rhetoric, since scieiu e has a deep- embedded Ideology of truth seeking and objectivity in which persuasion should be irrelevant. This, of course, assumes that there is only one single interprelallon of the facts: where multiple views are possible, persuasion and therefore rhetoric creep in. Even more is this the case on the fringes of science or in Ihose areas which claim to be science while embracing a much more subjective methodology. This is true, for example, of socio-biology and true, in particular, of psychoanalytical psychology The neo-scientist can avoid the rigours of the scientific demand for evidence and analysis by the employment of rhetorical devices, just as the politician does. Context and audience make it a more discreet and circumlocutory form, as with Sigtnund Ireud. for example in his 1909 Clark lectures (Patterson 1990). Behind his discourse lies the concept of the unconscious, but he does not explain it. merely oilers analogy. Freud treated as proven the premises on which the analogy is based'. Thus the main rhetorical form Freud used in these lectures was the device of analogy. His aim was to present an all-inclusive theory of the mind.' He began with the case of Finina ().. claiming it typified hysterical patients': the woman's symptoms vanished when she traced their origin to the distant past. . . . Symptoms originate In experiences that occur in the past and are forgotten.' Freud describes the analogy of Charing Cross. This is an ingenious story that is (old and elaborated at length, with descriptions „ * ,i monument lo the IManiaafn— oT London s. < m' »"^fftl||t, Preod. is the correct^** Elran.-r nt I*'-" '<* ^ „ ,, („H,pner who ^ i, .ha. modern ■ f«nf •lh'"" "ju2-.to,«Tf the vouthful queen of hfcoaa demand or nrt..1 h„,frtf ,„,, unprac(ica| Loo^ Patterson **» ,., ,.v,lhllsh , from symMu J,-dm ^Wishing a direa rel ship with the ^tafJ^Zmw» .rjues that by u*» between p.iM and r*n*nt M »__,__ . .T. . 2 Freud spared himself the rrsfwnhhiv for presenting a logical don*. There In also FWs aaafaff lo describe repr^lon-that of a peri., Irving lo Interrupt the lecture »The anarchlM F/nma Gofclmanwaa preset in the audience*, aesaang the anaeofY intense dramatic frio-inct. » * analogy the person ts taken out and people have to head the door eta. eat then there is banging on the dour The chairman ulks to heal and he is persuaded to resume hat attendance at the lecture analogy describes the mechanism and the treatment, and H was accident that he chose an anatofj the* tJwrd him his audience as being one Freud was very cumtined 10 protect an anage of his own non-creduhty Vkreoser he portrays himself as a tant convert to r>wrx\*nae*aa> lor example to the notion of ality He 'began, by n*nii iaig' Then he flatters hts complimeiu>thearannaaaaaam He uses the metaphor of ai grate the lecturrs aaal to present himscll as an equal -tual fellow traveller others doubling could also follow the he did. a scientific guide who mereb dev. nhes his private icumey to pay-choanah it i> «Hh rxnri and beniklenng feelings that I e*waTaa the New World before an eucaence of expectant enquirers'. Haat and ostensible equably rtrivne v.u i>! didacticism intellectual bulbing They atoo establish Fiend as a disinterested truth, not status sea^denegrauon b another device by which he this (I had no share ai as earersi beginnings i and the denial that he actually trying to persuade - > *tener> Fime and again he objection to his ideas, then answers it u i> not always easy to tell the L especially when one has to be concise: and I am thus today oMbjed to correct the wrong ataaeaeeaf that I made in the last lectures' Patten remarks. In fact he scertfthened his case. First, his willingness to enteru objections mruorced an aaanrnrrsfaith in his openness Second in the uhiei non N few bansraT the opportunity to present more evidence as support <>l h- H7 • •■ • •'•••■'••"n mmtcss in the Clark ',v:«:e* t> , lnbuU. lo th(. •• v;'MU were extensiveh described m newspaper e.v « • • enthusiasm: thus the Pc<.v :\:-. — described him gltftWf thf kuwlh la. <• that age would never suffer Vhe Tnmtinpt claimed tft* the Ws lures had wnn the adherence of mam el the setentists there. TV evturvs market an Important element in the history of psychoanalyse 4ixl appears in English within a year: by I91S psychoanalysis had • - tv .;>: a topu whose merit ua> c.c:v.:cc. S cu!\ a handful of v "crv*n intellectuals lo a subject that was tani m Qmd Housekeeping tad other populai magazines. After the Clarke lectures Freud was awarded .; • " • v decree, which, he noted, was the first official recognition of ourendeawurs (Patterson 1^90). Thus rhetoric also plays a crucial role in academic discourse. For one tSMR£ it is rich in metaphors, and even scientists are forced to use imagistic ibrtoocas iheu public language, since the.: rr . ate language of mathemat-o > ... ^ c . onh lo Ihe lew. Scientific met a: v: .> not merely a way ol ■ . . -y. ih external constituencies it aflsttl IBS MQ that scientists -. ■• .-o ;vi. ei\ e lhell realities: in fact a metaphor created tor the purpose of pubhc communication can. perversely, spnn$ back and affect the think-."v. c :> creators as well. Metaphors help strucrure and limit disciplines, and pve uVr* a unity the astrophysicist, for example, speaking of black holes' -Kh rhey can also illuminate the values of their creators and influence their . - ......ituMis In the social sciences ::v.< > rarf.cularly true - is man tribal a herd animal, a robot, etc.:- Different metaphors underpin different scv . ^ = cc paradigms. Kconomists in psiticu.a: have traditionally con-omd c4 man as I self-seeking, rational decision maker with a clear, hierar- . -.....cm ol his needs and pp.. r.:.e> ccc. ".vc.ch of their language . that embodies this, and as McC.okcN \**\>> has shown, econ s:> . ...... |> use rhetoric to persuade BSBB ±c\: professional peers. Myth and propaganda ■ - - s mav not be pari ol HQ « « ■ of propa spnda. but most propaganda is concerned among other things with the "■ - -c urn hs: mythology is thus almost a part of Us working del ■Vat, A mvth is a paradigm and shorthand. It surfaces the human inter est and narrative quality that make it memorable in the sense that the am lecture or mere eloquence could new be. Propaganda makes l~ use of myths: they are always a point of reference, implicit or cajftr*. in the propaganda texts. Myths provide a common cultural vocal, assay they unite, they Hatter, they elevate the argument or group thai , h.im aviation with them. They avoid the nerd for , „„l|fll M..... an be incorporated by minimal pl< ion ..h-h-,,,, '/rt^ In ,.„.|. r"Jv. symbol: in simple terms, myih is »h* Idea* whereas ntual is the acting out. the artir ulatlon of myth', tymbj ihr building blocks of myth and the acccptarn c or verier ail/,,, ^ *y,nbr .. .mnficant aspect of ntual. A ritual generally obs* r /« i),. \.v,,\[[u will, v.!,,' b * symbol is invested, which a symbol ( ompi \m J hu raythj^ ••hmkM in rituals, liturgies and symbols, and rcUn-wt \,t ., symbol ^ •» M'"»e sufficient to recall the myth for the mernU-r. of (hi . ommuniij without need to return to ritual' (Schdpflln I 997)* Myih* are universal, in democratic regimes as w II -is r.e •.,, •" i»iiifi I'^timacy. They are also a constant tm I al UftPfy and have !r(JfIi •1««i» annuity been part of the political panoply of all ny.im*-% ai .ill iim^ I he 'lefinition of a m>th A myih rrM, v: described as a story or event that illumio.ii/-s ihe key values "' or association: the events í an !>«• real or imaginary, but. almost Nrtaja y. imagination will have embroidered thiCfl Irur propagan-dl*t ibu* draws from the existing stock of soda I mfÚWÍO§)m a* well as ••ddloKUi them These core myths of a society are its lour.').i> ion i«i«-oh such ••• '.•!■/« r r,or r.ihrcp's City on a Hill" arid th'ir unď-r mining < r tales f»o« ltd upheaval. Myih e. a conceptual rynchpin of propaganda and i> i . in,y,.-,''A<- \n imag-liirihrprot>agar)dised without their myths. Myths are U -thin of all human " ^everywhere A myth bastory. the story a « uliuf u Ms arx,ut itself to perpetuate Itaetf. the sound of a culture's inter rial dial^/ur I h« of the ' Irafkl and Kenans, for example, were just like us hum.we. >n |fl our weak- m and triviality, they are a commentary on our íniMi o u play of emotion* and petty jealousies. Myth' in popular language mean* Invention or "'iifiib but that rs not the academic meaning of the Urm thus* alder's fli* Mj/ť/l 0 elw Bta(1991»is not claiming thai the hist/*,/ .,1 „.-,, / of the Will ' untrue, merely that there are important oualifl, ,,i,o„-; i/, t* made. Thi (act far example, that looting took place alter the \*,iu\,m% n\ tlie Café m»r.< V.-: ::cs not alter the core trull, of noblllly immunity and «acr1/kefarid neither does Calder claim that it dor*/ Myth* are exhortatory. exemplars of approved p..ii/r„. of ^h.,viour: '"'•kT problem for the rx^^ ol y..i.,. f,.w.tdi/in scc- • uiii.nor e^pariaaceathat have wide appeal ain '.h.iu^h-ur**y JMM) \,M Schopfiin (1997> culture itself may l*< iU-\\t**\ n system /in essential trinity of collectively heWnodoos behrfs, premises, ideas, dispositions, and unorr-standings. to which myth ghes a structure We have argued that uhai thrr share is the attempt to identity a basic level of cultural experience manjfeaed in words and deeds throughout history, and concerned principally w articulation of the core concerns and preoccupations of their hc*t r - -(O'Shaughnessy and OShaughnessy 200 31. For Overing (1997) the myth is an exemplar of the work of unconscious logical processes: it serves as a symbolic statement about die social order, and as such it ra>-forces social cohesion and functional unity by presenting and justifying *■ traditional order Mythic Discourse reminds a community of its own ideaorr through the public process of specifying and denning for that commur.tv .-_t distinctive social norms Whether or not people believe in the irrational coo-tent of myth is irrelevant, for the symbols of myth have metaphonc value and serve a crucial social function in maintaining the given social order Eliade (1991) defines myth as an account of the events which took place in principio. that is. in the beginning, in a primordial and non-temporal instant, a moment of sacred time He says an important property of myths has been that they can change people, that is. they have a redempuve function: 'we may even wonder whether the accessibility of Chrisuamry may not be attributable in great measure to its symbolism, whether the universal images that it takes up in its turn have not considerably facilitated the diffusion of its message'. Culture may be defined as a system of collectively held notions, beliefs, premises, ideas, dispositions and understandings to which myth gives a structure. Social myths are perpetuated by propaganda, celebrated in film, ritual and print, and this has been a ceaseless activity. A myth can be maiiifested as a non-specific image perpetuated through time - that, for example, big business is amoral, or government is incompetent. (Nor. of course, do such myths have - as the vernacular sense would imply - to be untrue! i Or it can be a highly specific idea (as Keynes said. Practical men. who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air. are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few-years back'). Or it can be a generic myth, recurrent throughout many societies and periods of history, such as myths of a Golden Age or of an ascetic and uncorrupted past. Romans imagined an earlier and virtuous pofity that was well embodied in the figure of Cincinnatus. the farmer called from his plough to serve as consul to save the republic from its enemies who. having done so. returned to his plough. 90 A(0nrfP'Ua'arr°n9rr>w Why wo have myths In pit Marketing PbWil oj BmOtton(200 \) O'Shaughncssy and(ySh. m-sy argue that every culture is a storehouse of myths which, J?J Questionably accurate, suggest the origins of the culture's prefensSj certain beliefs and values and In the prxvcss reanirm a set of preference l„r Schopflin (1997) myths air about the ways in which communis regard certain propositions .in hoi in.il and natural and others as perv, ..nd alien'. In Athenian Myths and Insfimi - W Blake Tyrrell (Tyrrell* * Brown 1991) examines how myth makeis retlect define and defend^ status quo. For Tyrrell, myths rlfcl tO reJations inherent in the culture value system, they depict in tiuuginai n lot in a model to be emulated, as well M the destructive forces actIve In so* let) which, left unattended, could rupture the social bond. By telling what happens when core values are lo . myths teach what iscultutulU valued. the\ act to assert the status quo-in the case of Greece. I warlike imperialistic society of aristocrats. They become a kind of universal perceptual lens in Schopflin's words (1997) 'myth creates an intellectual and cognitive monopoly in that it seeks to establish the sole way of ordering the world and defining world views'. According to Tyrrell, heroes are particularly important in myths and establish model behaviours. Those who would expose mythologies should do so with care. Any society needs its myths, and if we aggressively and systematically demolish them we may be doing real damage, for nw ths are intimately bound up with .i society's identity, its ability to transmit a coherent culture and moral code in cadet generations and lo inspire pride and a sense of community. Moreover a society whose government ca\ aherly neglects its core myths faces trouble, One reason for the terrible alienation of youth during the Vietnam War was that US actions contradicted the myths of stainless American decency that had been projected bv film and popular culture in the ideological cocoon of the 19 50s. It is necessary for a regime to keep myths in being to guarantee its survival the Roman emperors, for example, having to sustain the pretence that Rome was siill ruled by people and Senate, perpetuated In the slogan Senatus Populusque Romanus'. the SPQR of the legionnaires' banner. Much of the intellectual and artistic energy of the ' 1960s generation' has lain subsequently in the gleeful demolition of myths for example, a British television series. Real Lives, concerned itself with taking famous national figures and posthumously outing them as gay (liaden-Powell. on no real evidence. Vkiily Telegraph. 7 December 1996). bastards (Group Captain Douglas Baderi and so forth. The pantheon of national heroica was serially assaulted on its plinths. News, especially, deals in myth. As Bird and Dardenne (1988) explain news narratives are constructed not through neutral techniques but via s>Tnbolic deuces and the confection of myths and manifest in simple explanations, reassurance and so forth; in fact the myths endemic in a ture constitute a form of selective perception of the world. Selective paraaa-pon. commcr. :: rr.er~.rer> r:' a given culture, has the effect of importing .• characteristic mterpretaoon to phenomena. Myth and story Myths work becau>e integrate rnear..r:-:u. andHastie<1993»sh ber numer- :-. "i ; could make sense of ti plate to era. u čte the rejection of advocacy rative. We identify pa succeeded noc throaj ethos and belief sysu reader through from TheProdiga:S:r. the the Vineyard ar.i sc :'; nised in any cuirure. accords pnmacy to s system that can tfaer Aztec. The figures of C theon of z'-^r. the fpregr.ir.: Virzu deity, or where the a with the Celtic cross. they are structured as stories, as elided stories that facts into a persuasive framework. Thus Pennmgi^r. • a urcrs dealt with their inability to remerr. .-• —r:- r.j: a story framework through which lie facts, and they used this master narrative as a tem-narrative of prosecution and defence: acceptance or • - determined by its cohesion with the master r.ar-ipse's perspectives by the stories they tell. Christianity ih the exposition of abstract ethical rules alone: its m gained inspiration from stories which carried the a beginning to a middle and an end and a message. :•: >amantan. Dives and Lazarus, the Labourers .r .•. ere simple talcs which could be instantly moea> The narrative superstructure of the Gospels, which a;-.r.;e ir.l rebirth, constitutes a primorc:-. rr.;. tr. eby usurp other sacrifice-based systems such as die "hrisnan scripture and tradition could absorb the pan-; via a manufactured resemblance, as when in Mexico i of Guadalupe replaced a (pregnant) Aztec fe uss hes within a circle representing the sun god. The impact of myths Myths have had a real impact on the course of history, and since the creanoc of myths is a permanent activity, myths continue to be important even though some die out. They are merely replaced. The progress of our lives is festooned with myths. There are myths round every corner. Myths, thesr tissues of truth, faitrh^ and fantasy, are the context we inhabit and the atmosphere we breathe. Shopping behaviour is inspired by mythological structures - diamra*** far example, are a rather common little rock, bat they are also a gai's beat friend, and the success of the de Beers cartel in pouring meariaigandeacaisrnry into this stone ranks as one of the greaies: myth-making enterprises of all time. 92 raOW|owmi Mvth is thus impactful. I he OtCUlpetOry myth fabricated bv theľ .eneral staff in 191H - the myth 0Í the stab in the back - had horr> consequeneefeie«*.'iii''i Its acceptonx» by German public Opinion "V , oitedSUlesfOpOWeffttJ DM been the 'log cabin to White House rnyC1 one candidate. Benjamin I Ian .son. oruereu uu.e woouen model cewj bat supporters to carry iTOUnd (Melder 1992). even though he cooeta of an English lord Miiii-ally created myths have performed sterfol service for their manufacturers, for example the myth of the winter of J cor .-.as endlessly promulgated by the Conservative Party through^ the 1980s, and it served them well. Myths can be destructive I hey can affirm our current sense of inferiority by reference to a more glorious past. They can perpetuate untruths, and the social mjquities which flow from this, such as the mythology of the Indian martial races' which grew up under the Moghul dynasties and was inherited by the Bntish. It took World War II to make people realise that all Indians, not merely the splendid tribes. Jats. Dogras. Hazaras and so on. could fight well (Cohen 1990> Military myths are extremely important, establishing a powerful masculine identity for a nation or fortifying its wish to hold and conquer. Ira nee. for example, had the myth of la gloirt. the belief that military success was a function solely of elan or spirit. ('Le pantalon rouge, e'est La France.') And myths endure.'I heir long shelf life illustrates both their convenience as a shorthand for talking about one's culture and our failure to interrogate them I hat Britain is 'strangled by the old school tie' is still a widely believed myth even though the social reality that underpinned it has faded. Such myths -fit they save us from new learning and thinking. The press deal :r,U> in one particular type of myth, stereotype, and one should r.ev.-r ,r.<:ritutor, 18 March 1995». To Schopflin (1997) ^g^pfvui trinity p«^tcular strategies \!^ - . V'^^ring - it can be probed no further d falsehood ► successful a propaganda i spread by the Chinese c sad No dogs or Chinese it. believe it of the British that myth cannot be some relationship fesocdit iSchbpflin 1997] fjeied. The charge of the Lch: -enth century a key ■rtabsed by the diverse epic: tamable only if we a i a prerequisite of the charge : -n researchers claim that 22 makes the myth and its ^om/c/ch/charge_of_the_l oy historians because of For example, did solders - it a Labour Party omhJ A modern historical en* One example would be the fee sege of the Alcazar of Toledo. rjJtV, the leading British authority ffteaAy. on 2 3 July. Candido C .<■-■: ^foscardo to say tha: i avian ten minutes, he would shoot -. .m he had captured Hfefl to you.' added CabeJkx 1* Nothing." answered the s.:c does not surrender.' If u be God. shout Viva Espaf-a Goodbye. Father." answered Lb tjr distinguished Professor lhiy: the in Hong - re could, it underpins the i.se material: it that has ■ . : A what . zttr. >ince the glorious failure. But the of the soldiers were z. '■ and blun-: rr.tri sur\ ived. < www. fact -fact often dis-: ; actually at Tony-«2001 ► it is. demytholo-:c«cimencement of Hugh Thomas BE m Toledo, tele-the Alcazar s 24-year-old sethai s true, he boy? asked the shoot me if the commend your my son. A last «19951 is. however, curtly Btwever. the resistance of the Ml mm ■■ihisaglBMllininthe great symbol of Nationalist heroism. Subsequent -j=e reaferof the siege stould be embroidered beyond recognition, in psrticafesr dstaagh the famous, and almost certain!) spocryphal ilory thai Moscardo was telephoned and told unless he surrendered, his son would be shot. lhc; g mtoates lust hoi false the history we are taught so often is Vlaq rrohAL beJkff - the v haw been told so often enough by the National Rme Assoc*, tion - thai the\ possess a constitutionally enshrined right to bear anas They haw no such thing, otherwise of course cities like New Yorkconal ■ .' ... :\i:i i'ii jiim ownership. The cor.>:.:^:.jr -r.i.* a right to bear arms only as members of a legally constituted mama, yet this myth continues to exert a baleful influence on the pnfctM^j beaefs of erxans to the eaten! that the battle against the gun in pubecttebas emigrated Km the political arena, where the NRA has effectively i <: rviential opposition I Anderson 1996). to the courts of Mwh and mam rdom Deaths and mart> rdom have always been fecund sources of myth I Christ was the ultimate martyr, and all martyrdom has therefore the tinc- . .. - Republican martyrology. for exarr.r r -i it. subtect in itself Bobby Sands was the last of a great asviiihiage of Irish ---ryrs stretching way back in history well beyond Cat prints, books murals and. especially, song and ballad tvrs such as Kevin Barry, the university student who [Mi lit in a tact on his way to a lecture in 1920 and was subsequently executed by the British. Bennett 1995). rryrdom is a particularly persuasive way of inflating a sense of moral r. and has been critical in the establishment of religious faiths and es. Foxes Bookej Martyrs (Ridley 2001), publishedinthe reign of Queen Elisabeth 1. gave the Anglican church the ethical p~fcg'~ it nrt^rf Elizabeth herself ordained that a copy should be chained to potpiL and the look was carried on the ships fighting the Spanish Ar Tbe death by hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney. Mayor of Cork, i ri**r*l propaganda blow against British rule in a Ibe suicide bomber, of course, kills many others in the p '"to 8W Ofie of. cot Ik:, 1. iv 1 nor,*' ,U"0n'en<|s U,ed 31 law. myth making efore the tine-is an intricaic blage of Irish nai PJunJceti. 'e celebrated icipated in a t/y execute faiths ^ , the re'*" pedigree J Armada 4rt os*n." < ' ' ■•"■/' consolation and purgation fJawep However, he referred to the oV obliquely. . , • Reagan saw the programme v. a' > / • ■• •"• And these questions of HMJAli l.ule quotes I> / •••I, Ml "'""'•'Uy»„i..... ;""';/*•"...... ....."'"".J/1,, '•"•tAiiirri, 'I,., | .....| y i"'»i"iK.i" v.* si. dmili and life everlasting; Reagan imp*** 0m* wm ahataf errw was ntendn| America's boundary into NtW Ma '/rslo***! keuy.m i"»kr directly to the dead and hamMwmi 0M mm* 91*1*4 flrr u*\ UU- through thrlr sacrifice for the nation. l.ule also note. \<\v >:.< lions of blame or respoo .; si-/ ops qitis the astronaut', had fpfttk >h4k k*** U* tU* t.I'mftmam Dickering OVST their loss, a-, if the a* -ch . • . s> « \mi%W I bu» • h«##r1hle mistake would rob the death* of (Mfpltf tm4 MmWMmg, U$ fhss w«y Kragan'l eul« used the victims toeffeclhrefy #SmtMMmm*p4tiur*y*i\ >4 rr«pfjtisthllii\ Hy placing the .pare pro/cm.^./ „ - /, UiJUtwA AtimrWmn ptnnert liadl tion. debatcon the prog/amm* % tt*t > *,+ ■ ,1 -A\ <* h/nttad todM0MHNfld when and how the pr^/ramrr,/ » . , - ^ promiv !«• lulllllrd Propaganda and symbol!*™ If myths are the heart of pro;,. , j» ,u ,„„,., ,,.„„„.,„ indeed, to -.peak of a prop..,,,.,,-: <>7oyJ ff ffWMl*H 1» really to be speaking about son.': other ph' now not, fr* « \">nr*%mui* bereft of symbol structures would be unintell.ioM* (*ot/»2»/f J« symbols Urlagraph mtail-ing. and life is a cacophony f/f symbol, +w* ftwy *r« Hi* mannd heurlltli • or short cuLs through v/hc f, '!.#> h M. « >, Haiti, U\v l;,hinkin Hie Ihinu of Ihe ship's ^uriMo f-.po o»h« lumttmf**** |u*f*r> nmnI With ihotl ol ^m*** trinity ponderously regal stone lions front** a p«la,,al edifice. They symbolise the jni,en rejanr Nor do wesee the Isurst guar* kll.ed: ^ J is the'^ . •0« *• « Sm3Shed Rf°mdn * «nM»n in particular became an idiom and symbol,c grammar ot va:.e,> , c, s, p> Napoleon. Mussolini an" especially the Nazis. Ihe prop^nd, of the Reich was encrusted with Roman imagery: it became, m the Roman salute, an adjunct to every dav communication. I he Nuremberg rallies themselves were gimcrack Roman triumphs, w.th llames Hop cohaaess. gjfeant:c eagles, temple-like structures, the very word fast* H of course derived from the Roman fasces, sj mbol of magisterial authont> Commercial advertising also acknowledges symbolism. Much commercial signification celebrate, the idea that matenal things are not an end in themselves but a means of expressioo. sfcjnifv.ng affection, status. Gift cuing is symbolic drama symbols represent social meaning rather than point to something concrete. Products are means to social ends such as admiration, and the thrust of much adverusmg is that these things are attainable through the agency of some purchased symbol, that is. a commercial product. When this is understood we come finallv to the view that the briefest, most comprehensive definition of a product is simply as meaning'. The symbol has been described as a sign that incorporates something in addition to its direct references A symbol, unlike an idea, is something visible, something into which communication has poured meaning, it is a dynamic referent that refers not itself but to the myriad associations that have been packed into it. For Douglas 119821 symbols are the only means of communication. They are the only means of expressing value: the main instruments of thought, the only regulators of experience." For any communication to take place, the symbols must be structured. Symbols, often considered the most powerful and complex forms of comparison, are thus a class of representatives which stand for other things (Firth, in Stern 1988). without the explicit expression of comparison. They are commonly regarded as metaphors from which the first term has been omitted (Beeks and Warren, in Stern 1988». Symbols act as heuristics or cognitive short cuts: when relative choices are confusing and ambiguous we fall back on symbolism. The value of symbolism Symbols are effective because they save cognitive energy, but also because much appraisal is first emotional and only latterly a cognitive evaluation. Persuasion can resort to mere symbolism alone, rejecting any kind of rationale or rational construction of a case, and this has been described by M in hen I i 997) M the rhetoric of presentation. A statue, for examDl photograph without explanatory text can be doing simply this. 0r' Sj tnbols ere ID important aspect of propaganda and one which the literature on propejanda has tended to devalue. First, they J* extar ire .mmetwh cheap form of propaganda: they attract public notice, they * remembered (br decades or even centuries afterwards. A symbol speake d.recth to the heart and does not tax the critical intellect. Commercial organiv.it.ou> haw long grasped the importance of symbols. (Some service examples ,,re Prudential Bach's rock, the Travellers' Insurance Company umbrella and Merrill Lynch's bull: Stern 1988). A brand is also a symbol, and branding is now B commercial science: corporate investment in brand dealgna brand building and brand identity is really testimony to the enduring poa er of symbols. Brands resonate in ways that ultimately defy analysis. Advertising itself has been described as 'pouring meaning into the brand'. \ lymbol i> shorthand. Its essence is compression. For a symbol expresses, often m visible form, what might take ages to write down or debate. The French revolutionaries were 'great believers in the use of symbols as a means of transmitting complicated ideas in a simple form' (Taylor 1990). such as t he Phrygian cap denoting equality, the fasces for fraternity and Marianne as the symbol of liberty. It is also economic. A memorable symbol such as the wartime Y lor Victory' campaign in occupied Europe is an extraordinary a capon, since it can be brief, ubiquitous and costless. In this case the V signature was daubed all over the lands the Nazis occupied and incessantly broadcast by the BBC as the opening bars of Beethoven's Ninth. S\ mbols are attractive also to those with less capacity for abstract thought. To Pope Gregory the Great, for example, statues were 'books for the illiterate' (Taylor 1990). It is a paradox that, the more educated people seem to become, the less symbol-conscious they appear to be. Often what we mean by saying, for example, that academics are 'out of touch' is that they are unaware of symbolic values and the charge they carry, for reason is myopic when it confronts symbols, and the process of education is one of editing out symbolic awareness. This, perhaps, is why intellectuals become so perplexed when they look at situations where the issues are, or are in the main, symbolic. Northern Ireland in particular baffled them because everything was organised around symbolic issues where the core of political debate comprised such arcane matters as the kind of cap badge that police officers should wear. The symbol speaks, essentially, to simpler folk: academics are often so trained that they are immunised to the power symbols hold for ordinary people, and thus too often their analyses ignore them The fact that the highly academically educated tend to be insensitive to nonverbal symbols and dull their meaning is central to the difficulties of Christianity today. For example, the Catholic church hierarchy failed to see the fsseniial trinity ^nfieance of Friday's abstinence to the Insh labourer in London. For him it symbolised allegiance to a humble home in Ireland cr.z z §}mmm tra-jBonin Rome (Douglas 1982). A ntual is an enacted symbol, and any rituaJ is propapuhof an authoritarian and inherited kind. Rituals act as a social adhesne. prescribing and proscribing the key concerns and values of a coaMaaaala. Recognising this, propagandists in times past, from the French re-. -ar.e? :: the Nazis and Stalin, have sought to create new rituals, ones plagiarised from the ritualistic performance of religious and monarchist aisDUiions but celebrating new state ideologies. During the French lewsuuun. ceremonies. Festivals of Freedom and Statues of Liberty helped "to consolidate the Republican idea in a society familiar only with nxmartfcjcal government' Taylor 1990). Today there is an attack on ritual and we speak often of 'empty symbols and meaningless' ritual. Yet rituals are seldom meaningless and the astute propagandist will recognise their value. Douglas 19821 argues that one of the greatest problems of our day is our lack of comminneut to common rituals, while more mysterious is a widespread, explicit rejection of rituals as such. Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty ' '■^■■■■■n She also suggests that many sociologists, following Merlon, use rhe term 'ritual' of one who performs gestures without inner ccwnmitment to the ideas and values expressed. This is a distractingly partisan use of the term, since anthropologists use 'ritual' to mean action and beliefs the symbolic order without reference to the commitment or non^ommitrnerii of the actors. Symbols in history Symbolic acts have been the core of politics, almost since recorded history began What is often regarded as great political leadershipb in fact, and sery often, the highest sensitivity to symbols and a mastery of their manipulation. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was the supreme magician of symbolism: that of his dress and spinning wheel, with their message of ascetic simplicity and self-reliance, spoke both to his followers and to the British imperial rulers he wished to influence. His use of the fast was well contrived, and his great Salt March a masterpiece of symbolic propaganda - as great and significant in its way as the Boston Tea Party, with its message that India's natural bounty, sea salt, was being absurdly taxed by her colonial rulers. Such is the strength of symbols that much of history, much, indeed, of war. has been spent quarrelling over them, seeking them out or exorcising them. In the Spanish Civil War the Alcazar, or fortress, of Toledo held no military or strategic value, but its heroic resistance, deep in republican 104 A^'PWarra^ territory, made it a symbol both of nahonalist determination and 0f lk struggle to control Spain. Francos strategy was dominated by lhe n J* capture this potent but mihtar.lv irrelevant symbol and the war ilse^ spun out needlessly. Again, the Irish Civil War (1922-24) was foUghl * as is commonlv imagined, over the integration of the north - q^J Michael Collins was in fact more radical on this issue than de Valera-bui about a symbol, a mere oath of loyalty to the British king, to be taken b\ ambassadors, members of the Dail. and so on. Yet this symbol was sufficient to drive its antagonists to the sordid brutalities of civil war. even though the British government no longer exercised any political jurisdiction in the south (apart from the four treaty ports). All political events have some symbolic aspect, ways in which their meaning is related to broader interpretations of the political status quo: they are construed not only as events in themselves, but as a statement about the larger trend or situation. Thus during the American War of Independence, the death of Jane McCrea. the fiancee of a Tory loyalist, was alleged by republican propagandists (see The death of Jane McCrea'. painted by ]ohn Van-derlyn in 1804) to have been scalped by tribesmen in the employ of the British (Taylor 19901. This aroused more than mere rage, yet why should the death of one ordinary individual contribute to the outcome of a revolution? The answer is that the horrific event also carried an obvious symbolic construction, namely the opportunism and amorality of the British and their cynical belief that any means would justify the imperial end. The power of this event is comprehensible only if we realise the fear and contempt Americans then felt for the savage' original possessors of their soil. (In fact Miss McRea was probably shot by the revolutionaries themselves in error.) Events thus become symbolic because they have a political meaning that describes a larger problem, and because the appropriateness of their sym-bolisation is accepted, interpreted and amplified through the media. They do not have to be great' or important events themselves. The refusal of striking undertakers to bury the dead in Britain's 1979 'winter of discontent' became symbolic of the surrender of control from government to unions, and it was endowed with a significance far beyond the inconvenience of a few mourners, while over the next decade or so this symbol was used time and again in Tory party propaganda to remind people of life under Labour. A symbol is not. of course, necessarily contrived - it can be spontaneous, but none the less strong: Alexander the Great, when confronted with the Gordian knot, was supposed to have simply slashed it with his sword, and William the Conqueror, stumbling on English land reputedly arose and with handfuls of soil claimed to have taken the earth of England. Napoleon famously seized his new imperial crown for himself from the Pope's hands at his coronation. 105 fcpBjtfW and history are so encrusted arttfa symbols that they a ^ iMl) „aen me way in whjch we remember, from the MarlboroTow^ m May* (i,u,,;,m at Grcund Zero 10 Marian Anderson singing [9 |939, and. later. Martin Luther king speaking - in front of the Una*, Mem'" I"' 1 he random "o^s *"hxh tlood into our minds as we conteaa-our collective past were, once, artfully contrived: in fact they are not ftndom ai all One pgrUi ular form of symlioMich propaganda, of high significance m ,hf nineteenth century as wei as in the twentieth, is terrorism in all its form* In terrorism the symbol is the victim, and terrorists particularly seek out victims who are rich m symbolic meaning: 'the selection of victims i> symbolic and instrumental... the victim is chosen because of whom vlw oi If represent* -_vc victimisation will resonate with spe- cilic audiences' (Crelinston 19891. Crelinston argues that terrorism is a iiu liinn of rxjliticaj vinlrnre, one that is characterised by its communs-in.hi function . . [T]he fleams of terrorism function as signs in a propa-jajndl war Much political fiolecce including war itself, focuses the attack (>ii Identifiable and specific targets that are deeply symbolic and whosedefile-meni pleafUrei the partisans of a cause. Indeed. Blain 11988) concludes that human violent e is not the all into latent animality but rather an extreaae expression ol oui : ir.e>*. It is in the hyperbolic possibilities of linguist ic svmbolism that they should seek an answer to the question of why human beings fight wars.' S\ mhols and meaning Symbol! are not universally decoded m the same kind of way and their meaning varies among groups. They also elude the kind of precise focus and content that might antagonise some of those whose loyalty we scefca Q mbol has a flexibility of meaning to which the viewer can bring his or her own Imagination, it carries an openness to interpretation. Symbols resonate. They convey multiple meanings, since images by their very structure are multivalent FJiade«1991»argues that if the mind makes use of irna*» » grasp the ultimate realitv of things, it is just because reality manifests to* In contradictory ways and therefore cannot be expressed in-concepts. 10 translate an imagetoto concrete terminology by restricting ,t to arryone of i.s frames of ate n to do worse than mutilate it. it is to annihilate, to annul it as an instrument of cognition. nniitie* Ptrticulrty relevant ncM has argu* tha: S'gnlliean,, Kevin M^'^'^*^ „ ,„e history of Imh 11 is not |ust some we^oo of offence or delence in 106 A concept Hrepubltcanlsmn. It IS the grail which transmits the apostolic su, Irish republicanism from one generation to the next.' The faflj?Ss"'r' Majors peace process in Northern Ireland was due in part to his^ on a Republican hand-over of weapons - something even David^ George was willing to back down on in 1922. The British had simp) lo appreciate that the gun was more than a political bargaining tool J}'', IRA, it was an ancient and totemic symbol. Symbols do not mean the same thing for everybody, and the astute pro gandist will be aware of this. Symbols can divide or unite us: the baseball cap for example, is now the headgear of global youth and symbolises American, ism and the associated ideas of hedonism, lack of deference and freedom When the leader of the British Conservative Party assumed one for a photo opportunity he was attempting to embody a younger and more vibrant party, but the general derision with which this essay in self-conscious sartorial gaucherie was greeted indicates that his interpretation of the symbol was not universal: wearing it was felt to be jejune in the leader of a Great Party. For many, the baseball cap is a signilier of the crass and self-centred (especially when reversed!). Similarly, pictures of Bill Clinton, on a yacht, at Martha's Vineyard, with a rock star, expressed everything his advisers wished to leave unsaid: the collective elements of that tableau were repugnant to many Americans when associated with their head of state. According to Hodge and Kress (1988). the meta-signs of the elite who control high culture incorporate meanings of hostility towards the majority just as much as do meta-signs of punks or Maliosi. Even such a significant cultural symbol as the American cowboy is not universally greeted warmly as a positive token of national identity. For one critic (Webster 198S) the cowboy image 'glorifies the male', it costumes him in unfeeling masculinity, (his horse] a kind of pedestal to display virility and hint at imminent violence'. Meaning is also mediated by our cultural milieu and its patterns of signification. What something symbolises may be conventional within that culture, such as the images on a nation's currency, or universal throughout many cultures, as the colour red symbolising danger. But the meaning of a certain symbol to a certain individual may be unique, mediated by social context and individual experience: symbols have a plasticity and so are subject to multiple and even oppositional readings. Symbolic meaning can reside in a privatised code. Hitler's moustache was found merely comical by the British and US publics, but was a studied reminder that he is one of us' lo the veterans of the Imperial German Army of World War I. (Moustaches were trimmed to reduce the problem of trench lice.) We can speak, with justice, of a 'powerful symbol', and those who reject our perception of its power may do so at their peril. Hence the Leeds United football fans who burned Turkish flags in Istanbul (The Times. 2(3 January 2004) may not mtsscntial trinity 107 n,ve understood the enormity of the insult, hut it a-rtainh contributed to ^ murder of two of their members by inllaming lurk.sh supporter* That cs ihe price of cultural deafness to symholisation r** .v svmbolism static. There can be crcativ.lv and initiative In seeking and developing effective symbol strategics, new svmfvls can be invented, and the early Christians jettisoned their symbol the fen. for that of the cross. Or old ones can be retrieved from the past and gum new meaning, the swastika, for example, as in the almost surreal usias of massed 5ii-astikas in Triumph of the Will. By what process of semiological trans--ogr.mhy, for example, did the cross of Christ crucified become the cross of iron on Adolf Hitler's chest? A symbol thus embarks upon an historical •ourncy. but symbols are also powerful in the cause of peace, as we speak of , j.-.- of peace, an olive branch, an angel ol mere] .1 pOM e pftjK \nd win-rws .an continue as symbols long after the reality of the content they represented has changed. Hardly any prisoners were left in the Bastille in 1 789 tat. for the French revolutionaries, it was the most powerful of the symbols of tiie ancien regime, massive and darkly brooding. Since political control of symbols is a crucial feature of political power, failures in political control of symbols are therefore political failures. Symbols ran appear to take over and even usurp political authority, and one of the physical props in a situation can become its embodiment Under appeasement Neville Chamberlain's umbrella seemed to assume a life of its own as a symbol of supine British policy. The political intent underlying the creation of a symbol may not be 'read' by the audience: they may wilfully misconstrue, and a propaganda symbol can be conscripted into becoming a counter-rymbol. Thus. Prince Trubetskoy's statue of Tsar Alexander was read' by the enemies of the regime as a satire on it (and that might actually have been Trubetskoy's intent in making it so huge and menacing: Figes 1997). Indeed, it was subsequently conserved by the Bolsheviks, thus servicing the propaganda apparatus of both the Tsarist and the Soviet states. Sj mbolism and the social sciences V\"hat has characterised human advance has been the reliance on ever more sophisticated symbols - language, art. myths, rituals - for understanding the world, communication and social organisation. For Mircea Eiiade (1991). all that essential and indescribable part of man that is called imagination dwells in realms of symbolism and still lives on in archaic myths and theologies. To have imagination is to enjoy a richness of interior We. an uninterrupted and spontaneous How of images. He believes that the most commonplace existence swarms with images, the most realistic man uves by them. Margaret Mead (Taylor 1990) spoke of the significance of visual s culture, the more of post-Nc-: -of une than bs lor BOH Of and what aaal have no They are bleachec Symbofa social and meaning. A branding m the ism. Such area, interpretaticc meani: . entertauimg realm, and c gandist is to Talcott and not n relations: the mom on symbol! in political al events in the (ameroo-r. ulture are discussed in id a specific policy of substance (Start 19ft( W. Lance Bennett 1996). hy xvictics wherein the d jsmtegrates. There ren or nuance beyond their rn*er* & from the things signified cyr^s.'^ meanings of signs, meaning, and many of the aaon that it is the meaning of thmgt Lr_at symbols organiv: ':/..: >.'. ■ .\.-.rnple. is a symbol < - y. al world is a lest am'.-' . v: y. . _ anthropology a:/; . •> focus t'hermeneutics) and see people a rial calculation, Geertz . *>> y models through which H ;r.'r/r all a system of symbols; the lad the symbol systems of a cult-. an advocate of the imporia:.v:'/ \. ■ in meeting people's (^ftfj rv^r infants began by aaautaying objects and extending the ai matured. This stress on symbolic, status-directed rewaras C activities of ooaoy propagandists, from the inventors of the of the Soviet Union to the Nazi presentation of the c^enaaaa German punpT at the age of ten (Grunberger J 99 I , i^itW i of the utie vice-president m American corpse Lor*, THlt convey status and ewerv social order produces 'hem. aajJ, enterprise could be seen as a status exercise: one was aw mm proletariat the international brotherhood of mwktwt aal more alluring. Another approach to the role of syaaatas km via behaviourism (based on the concept of the Chapter 2 >. that continuous exposure to repeated staaaA mi and these Iniir both inevitable and prediciao:*- 'XMMAat lions have been made. Certainly propaganda uvet tyufrjUu (the Bntish rmlrtog, deftly leased from the iconography^ m» by Tony Blair in his 1997 campaign?). Indeed. there ca*jfcj when a familiar symbol ■ dropped, as the Deuvx.rau *Um their donkey 4- -SN- 109 toiviusion «19971 goes further than other authorities in perceiving myth. " ritual as constituting a language that lies deeper than language c grammar which undergirds and transcends mere verbal 1 blears thM what is not symbol I seJ i> either very difficult to communicate or — .■..nu ated at all. because it is not a part of the fund of knowl->af the community. The language ol Iflllbuit, ntuals myths and so on is. a part of the web of communication shared by any community accidentally, more significant than language itself Members of the shared symbols can continue to recognise one another and communication even after thev have abandoned thnr language in sense. propositions true, then myth and symbol would not represent _ a number of creative possibilities for the propagandisi. In fact ©choice strategies based on their use are not just useful, they are and no propaganda can truly aspire to work that ignores them Integuments of propaganda Key foundations of propaganda This chapter explores key ideas which are generally associated with the concept of propaganda though they may not be integral to its definition. Propaganda, it argues, represents hyperbolic possibility and multiple exaggeration: it is emotional, deceitful and irrational: it does not ask for belief rather it represents an invitation to share a fantasy. Above all. we identify the creation of enemies as a fundamental activity of propaganda (the Man-Douglas notion of how we structure our universe by knowing what we are against rather than what we are for). Since propaganda as the rhetoric of enmity aims to persuade people to kill other people, others must be demonised in a denial that we share a common humanity (atrocity propaganda). Emotion Propaganda has a highly emotional foundation to its appeal. For Aristotle, emotion is central to persuasion: Pathos, distinguished from Ethos and Logos, relied on putting the audience in a state of mind that stirred the emotions, for our judgements where we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile' (O'Shaughnessy 1995). The aim and content of Hitlerite rhetoric were pure emotion, logic could safely be ignored, reason simply jettisoned, thus contradictions were no problem, the Jew could be both capitalist and communist, and this was just further proof of Jewish cunning. For Hitler was a theorist on rhetoric and propaganda, and all his persuasion was constructed round the idea of the supremacy of the emotional appeal: 'the people in the overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion or feeling'. Changing behaviour that has a basis in emotion involves changing an interpretation, and for this to be done the communication must relate to thc values of the iUCUence, ind evoke the son of emotional experiences that led 10 'he values in the In II place. 1 what then is the long lei in impact of the emotionally driven messages ghiraCtcrisUc of propagandai They would lend, according to the Pctty-Cacioppo Elaboration Likelihood Model, to lead only to superficial acceptance of the message via I he peripheral route to persuasion (Petty and Cacioppo 1979». flu* central mule, which supposedly involves the recipient of thc message in intellectual engagement, is claimed to lead to long-lasting and rational attitude change To accept this model would mean that we believe the consequences ol propaganda to he short-term, but the model has been much criticised on the grounds that it devalues the power and significance of emotion, thc deepest inlluenicson behaviour - personal attitudes, religion, morality - arc inlegiallv linked to emotion. In contrast, other theoretical models have downgraded the significance of rational persuasion. Zajonc and Markus t I on |) |,v Way of contrast to Petty and Cacioppo. have argued that attitudes may have a strong emotional base, developed before an v cognitive elaboration. Such altitudes, they claim, can be changed only bv exercising emotional influence that bypasses the cognitive. There are certainly many differences in the kinds of emotion propaganda exploits - for example, social propaganda under the auspices of non-profit organisations and government often seeks to exploit feelings of guilt. Many 'safe driving' appeals would lit into I his category as well as some of the most famous social advertisements of all time, such as the Saatchi pregnant man - Wouldn't vou be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?' - and the Salvation Army's grainy black-and-white images with the refrain For Gods sake. care. Give us a pound.' Behind the guilt is cognitive dissonance. (In Festingers 1957 theory this arises when a person holds at the same time inconsistent beliefs: people try to reduce the discomfort by reducing the conflict.! Ideology It is difficult to imagine propaganda without ideology. For ideology lends to propaganda both its structure and its clarity. A propaganda for a vague and timidly defended belief may still be classified as propaganda but it would be scarcely recognisable as such. Propaganda feeds off ideology. At one level, of course, everything, all discourse and every text, can be viewed as ideological' but that perspective may not be particularly helpful In Ihe analysis of propaganda. There are degrees. For example, some might even argue that all journalism is ideological and therefore propagandist, though journalists themselves frequently claim to represent free opinion or information rather than ideology buse. According to Bird and Parxienne t lSS8> v mugs to new realities - this is how the ideoi^^k e prevailing maps of meaning haw come tobe acce ^ blinding us to the fact that eve:-. . om.nvn sense -P' ^ne example would be the frequent description ■ hich can be solved via some technical typ oi quick lix that is the source o:' foreign-policy which can be solved' via some technical tvpe of°!!!flhl^ * 7, sol^uon ut propaganda is that it is not merelx ideological but '■' • .uions.emrK. * "•• ' * •> :hat forthegene^ guish a propaganda text from other forms of persuasiy w such as. indeed, consumer marketing, where the attitudes of th as* the producer, determine ideology, h: o: her words it is not the >gy alone, but that the is both producer-driven felt, that distinguishes the propaganda text The public Image is thus of an explicitly ideological media communication, in lies on the surface: it does not court the viewer or lis-andeven berates and assaults them. An example of this a would be the ami :>e a:-, education in the :t media imagery, such a blatant style may not be as effective propaganda forms: but it is not made thereby less ideolog-n. merely more subtle. For example, there is the printed >ixteenth- •- ::.r Trca: >e acair.st the Mutter- ■ me Papists in Corners (Foulkes 198 31. or the laudatory maniiftto .-•: -■ iustavus \ ^J^^TJ£^^ virtue would get nowhere. On the W rcvj of the m0S, powerful can dev,^ ^ - nance not merely in Christianity, uu expressions of group solidarity. vaiuc-drenched ('Give me liberty Political rhetoric, verbal and visual.js ^ ^ ^ or give me death* (Patrick Henry), n tyrants' (Thomas from time to time with the blood of patriots Jefferson). Tins element of appeal to values is especially ^ enlisted in controversy. Mussolf s (1991) analysis of congress*^*** illuminates the role of \ alue-referenced rhetorics. Opponents of bJ?** giant businesses invoke free enterprise, and. fearing this appeal, sun?0* counter bv defending their regard for this value and by asserting iis^1 relationship to the policy proposal: the same values are consair^j^^ the purposes of the rival partisans. Hence propagandists seek messages^ resonate with values. Persuasion should speak to values, it should reb and reaftirm and revisit those emotional experiences that first gave them birth. Hyperbole An important function of propaganda is to stimulate, another is preachment to the converted. Propaganda is not dialogue but monologue. Hyper-bole is another characteristic, and a technique (often associated with advertising) which carries the potential for self-parody. Hyperbole does not make the mistake of asking for belief, it is an illusion which we are exhorted to share, explicit and even paranoid. Our pet bigotries are dramatised and enlarged to surreal proportions, but the fantasy does nevertheless affect perceptions of the reality. Thompson (1979) claims that the media merely exploit prejudices, and this absolves our leaders. Others argue that propaganda is often a co-production and that people lend to it a suspension of their disbelief, and they have a need to see what they recognise as their own fantasies rellected in an equally fabulistic media, their own lies to themselves rellected and sustained by the larger lies of the public space. When critics claim that propaganda is manipulative', they perhaps envisage a passive recipient. While some propaganda exchanges may resemble this stimulus-response form, what is often going on in the propaganda process may be more subtle. The idea of people willingly misled strikes at the root of concepts of man as a rational decision maker, yet surely this is what occurred in Serbia. Rwanda and elsewhere. While the relation of journalism to propaganda is a complex and elusive one. there are certainly hyperbolic moments in the history of journalism whose status as propaganda few would dispute. The determination of the British press to package opposition Labour Party leader Ned Kinnock as an ignorant boor and an alarming leftist is an illustration of this. Tabloids instructed reporters to discover all manner of blunders amimitted by Kinnock on overseas trips, and the indiscretions were duly produced. The Sun capped this process with one of the most lurid fantasies in the history of journalism, the eight-page pre-election spread Nightmare on Kinnock Street'. The contents can be listed at some length (McKie 199 5): 'Unions will expect ■nts of propaganda 115 labour s lukewarm start ,^1 to cough up . -—Man on immigration VM| r,.r an «"fll« r Wl ddim lnat he h^d never held down a o,, - on planning applications (even loft conversions andajaifj l0he.'PPr"v'K ''"'" ;'nd lesb,an groups). 'Baby Carl would not ha* forT<>rv NHS reforms'. Lest we forget" (pictures and story or. the atoftfl -/ aa-content). Alan Sugar of Amstrad blasts Ubour'scon trick'. "Iondoc barred as Kinnock visits hospital It's Mao or never, swore Neil'. Allegedly a i asked some famous dead People how they would vote in the election vatives were Churchill. Montgomery. Elvis Presley. Sid fames. Queen Labour supporters were Marx. Stalin. TroLsky. Robert Maxwell, etc /p. 7|.Tbr Sum also claimed that the first day of a Labour government would see shares drop billions in value Uncommitted voters were more likely to cheate the Tories if they read a conservative paper, and in the year up to the 1987 election there was a 5 per cent overall swing to the Conscrvauves aaaaaj persistent reader of Tory tabloids it was 12 percent (McKie 199 5 The emotion-driven hyperbolical propaganda text is exemplified by a two-page advertisement placed in The Times (17 February 1992)by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The caption - large white letters in an 8 bl red hov nad. I o show you what kind of animal your MP is. we're i names." flu u • the v.ord animal' is a rather laboured doub>-pro-hunting MPs are animals and in the advertisement their names marked with red dots This may be contrasted with another, scarcely beoer-mannered ■JlUlaaaiMia' (pro-hunting) that pictured a screaming mag with the I api.on I he voice of reason?* {Daily Telegraph. 10 February 1992>. c'learlv 10 advertisement which is configured in such a way does not. as social and commercial advertising so often does, invite several mterpreu-lions Meaning here is not a matter of negotiation between text ami reador. ll is a fixed and highly political meaning where all dissentcom«toteaaa> dated with an iconic representation of mindless proletarian v.ctoaceA-instantly surfaces other civic fears about out-of-control youths: impucah ry represent the same phenomenon. Their aim is to motivate „ "e , at on and to identify hunting as part of conservative, property- owning values The partisan propaganda approach may fail on several criteria get opponents to question the vehemence of their resolve, does it pc, neutrals? The task of inciting core loyalists to action should not be sought at the cost ol alienating rither constituencies whose support or neutrality coaai be solicited more ambivalence permits supporters, the neutral and even the opposition a limited degree of latitude in affixing their own meanings. The r*rsistcnce of classical propaganda - 1 Propaganda has a popular image, that of the polemical rant, an ^ 1 shameless dialrihe fomenting war and revolution in exotic places Th d rency of this idea of propaganda does certainly anaesthet.se peopfc^ more ubiquitous and less visible or more sophisticated forms, but it ls in* tant to reniember ih*i jrude propaganda, propaganda in its popuiar ^ standing, is suB ottering its benediction for the indulgence of manfand.; most rmserabse instincts. The conunuity of classic propaganda of agitation (in Ellul s terminology, remains not nwery a political force but also a social threat. Tribal and ethnic tensions, successors to the dying imperialisms of the twentieth cen-tury are irTuaied by a propaganda that galvanises hatred into violence Events in Rwanda were precipitated and orchestrated via polemical radio broadcasts which stigmatised the Tutsis much as the Nazis did the lews those broadcasts, their content, number and impact, are a criucal explanatory factor in the saKxade of the 1 million Tutsis. Serb and Bosnian Serb television adopted much the same role in ex-Yugoslavia - chauvinist hyperbole whichckmonised the Bosnian Muslims as 'Turks and so forth, nighdy decanting the ocedous bile of sectarian propaganda. I nfortunateJr the role of classic' propaganda in precipitating and sustaining modern conflict tends to be under-reported. News reportage is responsrveandcxistwlriven: causation and antecedent events are analysed only retrospectively, often superficially, with the focus on personaUties and moments of critical evolution but not on phenomena of persuasion. Communications tend to be neglected because analysis and objective measures of impact are dtfficuh I we ignore what we can't measure) or they are seen as manifestations of discontent rather than causes. Depth research or long residence is thus beyond the opportunity of the average portable newsman, and. when frr^**—finally come to excavate the significance of communications, the dasexwen is no longer newsworthy. Time has marched on. The signatures propaganda on events is missed. Subversion Much of propaganda works, essentially, by subversion. Never in fact was that word rnore appropriate, since propaganda will rarely succeed by directly chafcngsng a deeply held belief or value, but rather proceeds by misrepresent?**1" that insinuates the individuals ideological defences. Gaining agreeaaent with a certain definition and the ideological perspective it illuminates is the key then perfectly logical arguments can then be deployed a way of getting people to rethink ,*is,,„, swhy many propaganda slogans are frarr.H .,- .....,„,„, WHeath).'Whose linger on in, t,,,,,r/,/*,,,,, I aspect of Hitlers rhetorical technique wa* to ra.se of critics at the beginning hi- -.pen h.--. fItlaln )nsts argue that this is a highly effective method, ion is when the persuader ha-, im:vjrtvt\ .ill the y rile audience, or those the audience had in mind to reposition in the mind of the tanjel euetak I vrnie -~guage had made problematic -.oihai ih«- disabled abled. Demonstrating something to be socially appropriate rassment connected with it Alternaiively. show-More generally, persuasion must identify not most important but what is most meaningful to the ': r.paigns targeted at teenager- -.souId ihu- emphasise than the health consequences of smoking, drugs and rehaviour. To show endorsement by someone s social :';rm of persuasion, and advertising doe-, this all the be talked into an emotional state, talked ban I more state but also talked out of an BCOOtkmal state* and O'Shaughnessy 200 3) *'. real or manufactured, in the m<>:i fgeowakk e«Jf _on that 10 percent of the population are in a state ol I more emotionally charged and ih.-r.-foi.- persuasive - mpressive claim that 90 per tent 0* the population ale matter. People will still feel that l<< • I lain lied per s superior to that labelled 25 per cent fat. even after they ^edit The model of utility-maxim, in;......minic man /nng up alternative cho.M-. re-yU-, v. the impact ol the way these choices are presented. involves seeingevent, or feature,, Ml.....d when t.uv a is constantly creating illusory correlation. In part* for example between the product and -„< ial success. 2. un ca k „mi.ntt.A hv an advo« ;'" wU" 1,(U'S no1 .:;;;::r:::r,'..........- would be an alternative expo-.......I -I 11,11 |amle*m> 118 AconcWualQrt feminisation of rhetoric thesis.) Hence the persuasive (perl act uses indirect means. °Cuiionir It may be necessary to position a message away from its true. obje , tion. Thus the 1997 Hyde Park rally in favour of country. i.e blood^1' was ingeniously positioned as a 'countryside' rally and we were tolrf0^ some of those attending had. in fact, no special fondness for hunting tJ*1 there is 'political correctness*. An important distinction between mod propaganda and that of earlier historical epochs is that propaganda often has to be more indirect and therefore relies on devices such as coda language and the subtext. People cannot today be addressed directly in the language of their prejudices, even if accessed in the specific media appropriated by their group. This is because the collective consciousness has become progressively more sensitive to the agenda of every kind of non-mainstream group. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, for example, offered, especially after he had formally eschewed his earlier racism, many of the same populist sentiments as Reagan. It was greater urbanity, not a different ideology, that made Reagan electable. Deceit in propaganda Forgery While much propaganda can be said to involve exaggeration - that, almost, is its definition - and indeed active misrepresentation, undeniably it sometimes involves the manufacture of falsehood, even forgery. Here we are in the realms of active fabrication and deceit. Thus Bush's spring 2003 State of the Union speech 'cited alleged documents stating that Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium from the country of Niger. However, officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency looked at the documents and concluded they were counterfeits' (Rampton and Stauber 2003). Deception, it should be added, is one of the constituents the Pentagon includes in its definition of 'perception management'. Propagandists can do this almost openly with the audience even conscious of the falsehood being perpetrated, becoming willing co-conspirators in an act wherein they themselves are in a sense the victims. Once again, the explanation is that they are really being invited to share a mutual charade of anger, a point missed by critics who too easily reach for words like gullible' and 'naive', assuming the audiences have no recognition of the techniques being used. The fabrication may not be obvious at all and the audience really deceived, an increasing criticism of certain television productions. This is nothing new. March of Time used real footage but also staged scenes when describing the rising Nazi menace (with some footage being banned in Britain: Taylor 1990). Such methods, of course, always carry the risk of nulling J" rr''~asjBBala*i . ^ <:f fabrication - - ' : propaganda qggfrtrfEiscircu'j * run by a Nazi to ^irfcs about the Brument of the N ^fjen claims were c 0save Berlin, a false g^ae' iHerzstein 1Q" Deception has been involves hindering ■Jestern countries a shrunk the propaganda needs xcome deceitful, through stylistic the docu-drama. Mgien. Another the documentary ieliberate mixing of a definition of variant of this: they tuning 'actuoliu tanes use this Minister Jonathan dressed as pseudc- \r cam be Bay mountec :n "aked scenes in show \ Daily Telegnprt. Fonda peacenik in?age ganda technique wtult. propaganda video. "Has s ax media, whose inttBSsrsaaal The media thus iitic but symbiotic. . sume transmit fircrn *n particularly enabling them than those creates : Propaganda does article, a slogan. It ^ «Posed. Rumour is „ -- --.Hned with wartimi radio station ft "man services, clairr - ; "v. alising in the mverr.-.- ■■ Rumour was also a " ".he final days of the and his army were p tr;e Lišttcrdmnmerung ., -the relationship is not v- "-■ relieve the images they issue groups have ■■lir: propaganda, their ».*:•.«■.:■_ raw and authen' Chapter 7). - - an image, a symbol a r t process of denial, by 120 *""'CrP"M,°'^ opporttton text from ever emerging or by rinsing out any neRal. BOOt-live thai might contaminate the mainstream media. In apart* !>r. Africa (Tomasclli 1987) one form of censorship was of course lnpS nhvsual intimidation of film makers: with arrests and confiscations 1 > L [in the case of Sven Peterson's Land Apart) intimidating MCM'sT oflicc in California. Control of distribution, specifying who precisely d watch the film, is a significant form of counter-propaganda. Whites^? trusted with more subversive material, since the state operated ,n lhe Interest* and about one in three films passed for whites was banned Z blacks, the most ridiculous example being the ban on black viewers seeing the him Zulu 119661. The Minister of the Interior said 'there are some films which can be exhibited much more safely to the white child of fourteen wars than to an adult Bantu', but much depended on who the audience was. Negative and even socialist views could be allowed. Nor historically has p ,vrr nmenl censorship been the exclusive province of reactionary regimes, lor example. Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) was banned by I ranee until 1971 {New York Times. 4 January 2004). I bus propaganda can be made through creative use of the censor's scissors as well as specifically commissioned propaganda films. Tomaselli (1987) points oul that film 'may have the meaning inverted through censorship directives' I )ne example is where the South African directorate ordered cuts ami conditions so that, according to the Appeal Court, 'the emphasis is thus changed from a successful to an unsuccessful terrorist attack'. (In another Incident the Minister of Information said that no African had asked to be included on the censorship committee.) Decisions in a commercial environment made under political pressure (though not direct government diktat) can have the same impact. The effectiveness as propaganda of Susumi I lams Prophecy and Terry Nash's // you Love this Planet was emasculated by the reluctance of distribution agencies to show them (Papademus 1989). ( e11sorship is not the prerogative of governments alone. During the 2003 I raq war Al-Jazeera 'became a target of hacker attacks that kept its English-language site unavailable throughout most of the war and kept down its Arabic language site for nearly a week' (Rampton and Stauber 2003). And the most effective form of control remains the intellectual self-policing of the media themselves. Peace groups were denied the purchase of air space by all major networks, including MTV: anti-war demonstrations in European capitals were ignored. Rampton and Stauber claim that 'the rest of the world did not experience the war as the clean, surgical operation that was presented on US television, where major media outlets cited reasons such as taste, news judgment or concern about offending viewers to explain why I hey are rarely showed images of dead and injured civilians'. They add that during the entire war the Chicago Tribune's front page had 'fewer than six' plCtures of dead orJ*"*"*^ ľ** Kuropean a,ld Australian pubh-5,ons were ten limes more Mu* to mention cluster bomb, than i»„,r ^erican equivalents. ' propaganda m**+» > ' "* ihe political inl„r„1;i,„(ll „ and hence the political ****** An example of this is the Inlormau,,,, Research Department of tne Forego Office, the focus „I Ushma tnd Olivers Britain s Secret PrapmmJkAu War. 1V4X-1977 (1998). We cannot really know the truth here and after 2020. when the relevant do< amenta are declassified, but theanpactof thh poop, loundedin 1948 to'expose the realities of communism and tfwlftng communist propaganda'. waj BppW-ently malign. It engaged, at it never should have done, in dometOi < ;im-paigns. for example to CBtcremt left-wing churchmen or ariti-t 'omrnon Market campaigners fa 'coateaaemVirnpired plot'). It supplied ina< .urate information to diplomata anC <■ \/.\\U< a\ decision makers: according to Adams (199 3) one report '-/ample alleging the Cubans were In Guinea training Africans in guerrilla warfare, was questioned by King and eventually tracked down \<>>.:. (.' promoting democracy ... when a Labour Minister a : - W'"^ ;i PaPer on South Africa it came back with one he: . : ' ';; 'b<-ommunist pehľ. Propaganda can thus pollute the springs of mfr*w.*n<,n and fatally distort the policy agenda. There is a process of cm^Otially engaging in small deceits that lead inexorably to large decent and the Um ft moral perspective. The question of integrity is an interesting «U I hi -habitants of the IRI) were presumably blazing with moral Stat loathe of K***™ and all Its works. Hut this Idee \ ill j , u „ ,Ai>rx kind of abuse, their own included. fixe blinded them to every mmm Bogus empiricism k. anda wllh lls demand for Another device 1 " since the slanoarus demanded proof. Ultimately th** ; (\{ governments cause .irmly of proof can be >■<>'■ lnem seem (and who would wish under the auspices emotion, otherwise) to be on tne %*ot » TV^ t0 conceal the sins of govern-So 'proof is often ' » J^.^ q{ viHagers ln M()Zolc. Sal-ment. as with the h ' [ ^ f(1((11.n, ;,t the time was seeking to certify vadorfDidion 1904, .,,,1 .md military assistance. A massacre Salvador as being'.fill' ( ,oUght to discredit the reports on was most inconvenient. 80* ' ^ ^ v|dence'. even though there were pho- the grounds that ib '( .„voklng the ideology of selentlsm by e . - tit*** i lies/ we» fographs of cor| demanding the exacting standards of evidence needed trj ifc. oratory but unnecessary in political decision making whereT probabilities may well be evidence enough. The New York T/m^^ port the journalist who had written about eye-witnev. \" ' -bodies, who was also vilified by the Wall Street Journal, and rh-^ *± US effort in aid of homicidal bandits became the most expense* L support a foreign government threatened by insurgency since (Didion 1994). The state invited the press to become ~~ rnni|ia am, exploitation of a cultural reflex that all decisions be made rattr*^ JJJ basis of empirical evidence, and its success in apparently peri leans to reject the contextual information provided by others wasai stroke. The finest propaganda always does resonate with the reflexes of a culture, and here propaganda created a legalistic employed to rhetorical advantage. Science's ostensible monopoh of truth can be used or science, and then there is pseudo-science, and the role played by | ence in propaganda has been, and is now. a critical one. Science i the antithesis of emotion, which is equated with disproportionate! and those who use overt emotive appeals are making an open i their intent to marupulate. The self-concept of highly educated of reasoning individuals •. - rr.ake rheir decisions on the basis at i and analysis, not feelings. Scientific empiricism is the core of modern ern culture, underpinning its material achievements, technical strengths, so evidence becomes the stock in trade of and exposition, fashion magazines, for example, reviewing the « the latest medical investigation at length. Implicitly, all our ultimately technical ones and amenable to technical solutions. IhBSVrelll ideology, the evidence of experts carries great weight and prolhaascass^ elucidated via data Questions of interpretation are given because the belief is that they can be made irrelevant by sufhcientt> ous pursuit of the 'correct data. What cannot be measured to be excluded from the argument and dismissed as subjective. How then can there be intuitive or interpretative standards rA since these are neither demonstrable nor empirically verifiable/ 'evidence' can be manufactured. In the case of alar on apples, a account by an environmentalist group was expounded or, '.uty and caused mayhem: sales of apples collapsed (Varulerwicken \*fh Hcwson (Sunday limn. 51 March 19951: most junk science started wah the tobacco industry arid . .", simple word proof' The tobacco companies just adore proof ft (rf% out the moolah to their tame professors and then come up win claim that there is no causal Ink between tobacco and thai 11* ir >.,. >/ fir 123 w|]|,h millions of deaths seem to suggest an no, „ dreads weed. nconnected with the 1,1 ' c i i. . ' ,,,,,,u l"ai a Nve-vear-m H can see that m matters of public health the burden of proof comeffrom, afferen. direction to its legal cousin. We don't want scientists to prove7a British beel is dangerous. We want them to prove it is safe' Since the IS public places great reliance on data, a growing industry has developed to create the research to legitimise policy positions or marketing objectives White bread won't precipitate the pounds, and it is nutritious asserts a study from the people at Cooper Institute for Aerobic Research (its sponsors are the bakers of Wonder Bread) while Princeton Dental Resource center assures us that chocolate may actually inhibit cavities: they are funded by Mars (Vanderwickcn 1995). All this, of course, is a gift to the propagandists because it potentially offers what they most prize, concealment. Facts', the antithesis of emotion, can be allowed to 'speak for themselves'. The selection of some facts and the rejection of others, the choice of particular base years on which to draw figures, the claim that something must be a lie because there is 'no evidence', the privileging of some types of evidence over others - all these are famously part of the manipulative process, but unless exposed by the acuity of counter-analysis they are more successful than other forms of propaganda because the craftwork of manipulation is more submerged and the masses will give them the deference they have been trained to give impartial data' and expert scientific opinion. (There is also a technical component: very few have the relevant training to critique statistics and other analytic techniques.) Why we need enemies Propagandists invent their enemies. The creation of a despised other' is neither an essential part of all propaganda nor an integument of its definition. Nevertheless it is difficult to imagine a propaganda cleansed of victims: the creation of an internal or an external threat is achieved by seeking out blameworthy groups, domestic marginals such as Armenians or cosmopolitan threats such as the •international' jew. In psychology the granfallon technique' where groups cohere according to arbitrarily acquired labels, shows how easily otherness' can arise (Pratkanis and Aronson 1991). Schopllin (1997) argues that thus 'the existence of community is preserved from pollution and thus its means of cultural reproduction kept safe from 124 ^""""-w 1 °V in outsiders Such otherness" is not merely a phenomenon ethnic dispute. Academic, religious and philosophic argute ^\v. with the serial creation of enemies, and apparently closely 2 *S * seem to hate each other most: Sunni and Shiite. Troiskyite ttkWj ^ The essential triviality of such destructive differences was sai"1^1 Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, where Big-endians and Little"^b are polarised over the issue of which way to crack an egg open. People know, and know abundantly, what they hate: they are ambivalent about their likings. As emotions our hatreds are more law than our afTections. This argument has been made by the social anthropri ogist Man- Douglas 11982): as discussed in Chapter 2. for her any choosy 'for' is a choosing against' because to choose x is a protest, with each choice a declaration of defiance against alternative lifestyles and a signal of alle. giance to his or her opposing lifestyle. Much political behaviour is symbolic, and that symbol is of what we wish to be perceived as standing against Lupia (1994) shows that less educated voters in California see any support \ for something from those they oppose, any endorsement, as negative symbols and they vote accordingly. The 'enemy' can also be more abstract, an idea perhaps, and the more sophisticated forms of propaganda may eschew i a human enemy, though there is always a suggestion that only the less admirable human beings would associate with the cUscredited ideology. In the world of managerial propaganda. Oliver describes an evangelist for a new management theory thus: 'there was to be a discarded old order and a shining new order, the expression "cost world" was used to denote the old order and the "throughput world" to denote the new one. encompassing JIT. TOC and Total Quality. A large American was introduced' (Oliver 1995». So propaganda usually needs an enemy, and if none exists it will create one - the social construction of enemies is one of the key defining characteristics of propaganda. The sense of superiority thus created is attractive to people at the bottom of some social pyramid, and they can be managed by creating a new people lower than they, upon whom they can look down. Those in the Middle East who are antagonistic to the West face an enemy that is richer and stronger but a sense of worth can still arise through recognition of the Westerner's moral deficiency and infidelity - their faith, and our faithlessness - convinced, in Samuel Huntington s words 'of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power' (Huntington 1996). The absence of enemies sends us back, naggingly. introspecuvely. on ourselves - indeed, since the end of the cold war the United States has been seen by some as experiencing a problem of enemy deprivation In this light, new enemies like Saddam Hussein are not just there but necessarily there. ^tsof prepay |2J need enemies because we need sonuv.u- to blame when things R0 I|M. term w.tch hunt Is apposite and propaganda Invo^ndiS I ****** victim* 1 he qualifications for victimhood would include (hings like physical appearance, membership of some social subgroup a tcndenc> to look and eel mttmtdated: the key is separateness from the social mainstream. lo Overlng (1997) myths of alterlty are not usually subtle- for they dwell upon the exaggerated excesses of the despised and threatening other . Merely to be Afghan could have been enough, as in the case of the taxi driver paralysed in London, even though Afghans were themselves the first victims of the Taliban. The social construction of an enemy fultils several important functions. We define ourselves by reference to what we are not. This clarifies our values or where we stand, and gives us a coherent sense of selfhood. Second, it is only by reference to enemies that we became united, and the greater the internal discord within societies the more powerful will our need for enemies be: the propaganda construction of enemies is a source of social integration. Schdpflin (19971 argues that this process will frequently go together with the construction of mythic enemies who are attempting to destroy the collectivity in a demonic conspiracy'. According to Blain (1988). 'just as people can be talked into buying things they do not need, so the political leader can talk the desire for revenge into people---- The rhetoric of enemies is a potent means of gaining and sustaining social integration in modern society." And Blain believes that political agents concoct a rhetoric of motives that they use to incite their followers to fight their enemies': he claims that the main effect of war rhetoric is social integration through the constitution of common enemies: a victim-villain hierarchy is necessary to the production of political incitement'. Politicians, especially governments in trouble, look about for new enemies to manufacture. Hence in Britain New Labour's search for a reactionary' enemy (Blair's 'forces of conservatism) against which to define itself. It thought it had found one in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and their failure to admit an undeniably bright state school student to study medicine (Stevens 20011. This served several purposes, including d-verting attention from low state expenditure on education and the quality of state schooling. In totalitarian regimes, the creation of enemies is an important part of state activity. In Khomeinis Iran, for example, the figure of the author Salman Rushdie was a useful enemy because he could be Presented as a blasphemer, thereby subject to a death sentence even though o«m« hi? translators were in fact murdered, he lived in a Western country: some ol nis transidiui Ml Is diflicult to imagine propaganda without enemies.) Zimmerman (1995) had argued that when government assumes pre-I isely the opposite role to that of protecting the competition of ideas, when H osefl its power am the mass mtdla to exhort people to hate took to the press not fa Information but for emotional reass^^ cS, can take satisfaction In dischai ging their anger at their neighbj^ lV ana realise that highly manipulated pictures of the maimed anJiX 9 b dered. the cleansed and the condemned, are seen every rugni b even body m the formal Yugoslavia, you can imagine the endurin^ they haw Moreover, enemies stimulate and focus the energy of ^1? hate, they are great motivators i<> action, and the more horrible thev made out to be the mora energised our anger becomes. Horrible eajj! also cause fear, propaganda leads our imagination to paint in lurid a! what will be done to us il OUI enemies succeed. Indeed, many of thCVcr worM atrocities arc carried mil because their perpetrators are fearful.Th^ bo Rwanda the L\itsls not onl\ refused to reject the leadership that urges them to kill but sincerely believe their own survival depends on killing • Bkvk 1994). Enemies also freeze our conscience and assuage our guilt, nothing we do to them t .m possible be bad enough. Pointing out that in Ruanda the killings wen- neither random nor spontaneous'. Block adds, but almost everyone vow meei in l he camps does not see their ordeal as sell-inflicted but as the fault of the Tutsis. There is no guilt.' And after Nine-eleven Anne Coulter had proclaimed, This is no time to be precious about locating the exact Individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. We should Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.' Hampton and Stauber (2003) comment: \ Shortly after Coulter's column appeared, it resurfaced on the Web site of the Muiahidean Lashluu <• Talba one Of the largest militant Islamist groups in Pakistan - which works clotely with Al-Qaeda . . . During the period when Coulter's article was featured, the lite w.is decorated with an image that depicted a hairy, monstrous hand with t laws in place of fingernails, from which blood dripped on to a burning globe «»1 planet Earth. A star of David decorated the red of the hairy hand, ami behind II Itood an American flag. The reproduction of Coulter's column used bold 1 ad letteri to highlight the sentence that said 'Invade their countries, kill their lead. 11 and a invert them to Christianity." Vet. even here, there arise propaganda lessons relevant to our current circumstances. Particularly here: In the management of the current crises a necessary condition of suorss is that the doctrine and practices of one bUlion Muslims are not subje. 1 1,, denigration. Conversely, we must recognise that terrorists and theli apologists can perform those acts - and we now know that no Imaginable OUttage is beyond them - because they have been convinced. Terrorists .... p..Minded, not born, and their monstrosities arise out of a process Of < onviction. That rhetorical activity which arouses and sustains terror, and which in current conflicts we should seek ourselves to avoid. Is the 1 Trillion ol Ihedemonised other, a phennmen ****** ,nCally the essential dynamic of propaganda, and whose key whiili is coor|CDoB that some out-group does not share our common -pppcrty "1 . ^ me preface of genocide throughout time. The terror-human,l\" ' wnat they have done because they have succeeded, first, in jsls b«* us in tneir own minds. Conversely, the danger for us is that dehurn11"^jj| erranr individuals to the entirety of the population from Atrocity propaganda Atrocity propaganda has been historically its most consistent feature and probably also its most effective. From Pope L'rban It's 1095 sermon at Clermont mentioned in Chapter 2 | Taylor 19901. when the Saracens are described as pouring blood into baptismal fonts, to the Nazi film Menschen in Sturm with its depictions of Polish barbarities such as the wrecking of German schools, or films such as Afein Leben fur Ireland (1941) (Herzstein 1978). propagandists have competed to depict steadily more dreadful images of the enemy. The reasons are not difficult to see: one of the most important aims in propaganda is to demonstrate, indeed, that the enemy is not like us. is a ruthless, amoral monster, in order to incite the mobilising emotion of anger. In The Little American (1917) Mary Pickford. the People's Darling, is torpedoed, gives information to the French and manages to escape a German firing squad. Nothing must threaten this illusion of enemy frightfulness (Taylor 1990). We remember the enemy's atrocities and forget our own. and we commit further atrocities in retaliation, which may even be the intent of the atrocity propaganda. (In the Baralong incident. British sailors boarded a neutral American ship and murdered the German submariners who had taken refuge there.) When Nurse Edith Cavell was executed in 1915 British troops were told of the event and carried her picture into battle. In an incident soon afterwards German prisoners of war were massacred (Williams 1987) - ironic in the light of Nurse Cavell's final words. Atrocity propaganda is still effective, in spite of all that the twentieth century did to exploit the genre. The other' can also function as an instrument of terror. During the Spanish Civil War General Queipo de Llano's nationalist propaganda broadcasts stressed the figure of the Moors, the colonial soldiers under Franco's command, their brutality and what they might do to Republican women, surfacing ancient Spanish fears (H. Thomas 1986). Of course there is the role of pure invention in atrocity propaganda (Knightley 1975). Subsequent exposures of organised collective fantasy after the Great War made people incredulous of atrocity rumours in World War II. though 128 exien truth and fiction remain interwoven, for there were indeed U ties, with 6.000 civilians murdered, even if they were not ;,s depraved, as the British claimed. In The First Casualty il995» Philip Kmghtley describes VVi portrayals of Germany thus: The war was made to appear one of defence against a menacing aggressor tv. Kaiser was painted as a beast in human form. (In a single report on Septent. 22.1914. the Daily Mail succeeded in referring to him as a 'lunatic', a bart^ ian*. a madman', a monster a modern judas'. and a 'criminal monarch The Germans were portrayed as only slightly better than the hordes of Gen^ Khan, rapers of nuns, mutilators of children, and destroyers of civuisatuo. Once the commitment to war had been made, an overwhelming majority of the nation's political and intellectual leaders joined this propaganda campaign. Prime Minister Asquith. using the technique of atrocity confirmation t* sweeping generalisation, told the House of Commons, on April 27.1915. \Ve shall not forget this horrible record of calculated cruelty and crime.' Brash newspapers lent their prestige to the campaign. The Financial Sews, in whs now seems an unbelievable editorial, said on June 10. 1915. that the Kaiser had ordered German airmen to make special efforts to kill King Albert's chf-dren. that double rewards were paid to German submarine crews for sinking ships carrying women and children, and that the Kaiser had persona!* ordered the torturing of three-year-old children, specifying the tortures to be inflicted. A committee of lawyers and historians under the chairmanship a Lord Bryce. a former ambassador to the United Slates, produced a report which was translated into thirty languages, in which it was stated that the Germans had systematically murdered, outraged and violated innocent men. women, and children in Belgium. Murder, lust and pillage.' the report said, prevailed' over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries' The report gave tiulla:.".-details of how German officers and men had publicly raped twenty Belgian grt in the market place at Lege, how eight German soldiers had bayoneted a two-year-old child, and how another had sliced ofl a peasant girl's breast in Malines. Bryce's signature added cor : r-.hl. weight to the report, and it was not until after the war that several unsatisfactory aspects of the Bryce committee's activities emerged Finally a Belgian commission of inquiry in 1922. when passions had cooled, failed markedly to corroborate a single ma|or allegation in the Bryce report. By then, of course, the report had sened its purpose. Its success in arousing hatred and condemnation of Germanv makes it one of the most successful propaganda pieces of the war. It is perhaps the case. then, we have learned nothing and forgotten nothing: according to jowett and O'Donncll (1992) on October 10. 1990. a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl named "Nayirah" had shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus when she tearfully asserted that she had watched as Iraqi soldiers took fifteen babies from their incubators in mis of propaganda )2ldicr he is about l<» sh ilium*. ■—--- ^°etfA, unawares, reminding Orwell of their minim.,, human,., ".. saving his life The other' is reduced to broad brush ftrejj* d dominant characteristics - whether the Marxist class enemy nist of the 1950s United State- or I'uruh magazine s ninety image of the Fenian a- -..age whose features are barely hu polemics dwell on the symbols of otherness - facial tvpes. dress._ the mere symbol, such as communism's Image of the s.lk-haned „ will suffice, the fuller picture Is already understood so well tha alone will signify it U is also important that propaganda stresses our superiors, a**, enemy's inferiority, that it teaches us that a vast diasm ser-from their redundancy. Naturally the NaUs paid particular The German social welfare state %vas contrasted with (Hitler proclaimed it was a war against Britain s worshipped money and embraced the |ewi (Lord Cohn the the English upper dass from I) Israeli u,\ lore Helnha were also deceitful, concentrating clcctron. brums m the splendours of plutocratic niuui an mtrasted with the (Herzstein 1978». This beikf In our superiority is incitement to the least privileged in * + irt\ taking thru from those who stand above them to thoee who They become grateful for their small pnv ilegre. and the good fortune to be members of the Volk • I he Orange (axfcraaalilBeai ical manifestations would be an ex. imple.l ihi> >ln cwdeTloe«ABeBSJB«a* enemy, it is necesaary to put into circulation stereotypes mtuch deaf^S) autonomy as an individual i h.ir.n ter In /rw Nuv> . the of the Third Reach i a new Jewish Mere, a \ |h in, teutevi one ghetto Jew of other Nazi prop..,..i it., i. i minm ippenheini is* court, the ugjy message is that virne Jews have a veneer of civilisation, and they arc the most dangerous llierz\t« in 1 *#7H > \ mA ondun merit of this stereotype Is that it mobilises the latent envy o| the have nots for the pirftfh—* taBBTt and successful. George Orwell ■> novel \m., »i, lahti, w depicted a mytat' cal dictator. Hig Brother and his In lilious enemv I mmanuel Goldstein, is a focus for populist rage, with acolytes roaring at Goldstein in quouban hate s'v.ion . The enemy will more usually be a reul one. bui the purpose of propaganda will h<- to motivate us by making us really hate. In Rwanda. Hutu propaganda \o« h a P.idio Inlerahanmc |*»»rti.ived IuIms as homicidal aliens who had to be liquidated, even I hough they had been in Rwanda since An am,., pin r» ul extreme paranoia arose in which as chrlc duly. As HUnk .1994» explains. 0 the lifteenth u,,x dmml ,rom ,lu' 'hamltic theon e. the »im%|V ln ol.>n.^ ivhfcri posited the existence or superior northern \ ., African Anans ,n lad. Hums hiid Iheir own version of ihi> ih«v » , the f0rrign'1l'vs 1,1 ,lu' lu,M u',s a'mri'1 «enet of Hutu p • K virulent and singled out politicians who deserved to die In ten mvk> the mil,tia killed halt .1 million people, helped by Hutu civilians Ituxxiehoul the slaughter the radio continued to encourage Rwandans to till the hatf-emp'V graves \\ hen vou kill the rats do not let the pregnant one e>v. .v We made the mistake thirty years ago of letting them tlee into exile ihis tine none will escape 1 Block 1994). The parallels between Hutu propaganda and the Nazis racist ideology, the enemy as a rat 1a scene m /net. their tlire.il to a superior civilisation, the need to eliminate them entirely are almost loo obvious to merit comment. The language of contempt In the process ol dehumanising, it is particularly important to manufacture a new language to separate us from the victim group and to render mem contemptible Such language may contain a distinct image ot mftTWrtt* such as Charles Murray's underclass', thus performing us \\v . . caldutv cm devaluing them or since words accumulate new meanings, terms not originally intended as vindictive, such as "Sambo', acquire derogatory reference Name calling, one of the methods of propaganda cued by the Institute far Propaganda \nalysis in the 19 3()s (Alfred Lee 1986: Elizabeth I ex* I9S6K is a way of instantly positioning and stereotyping an adversary by highlighting the key features which mark them out as other than us and rei>rrsents the essence of their debasement The Croats referred to the Serbs as terrorists, but the Serbs themselves exhibited a particular fondness for name calling: all Croats were Itasha iC.erman allies in World War II). while Bosnian Muslims became Turks a particularly inllammatory term, given the long history of the Balkans under Turkish occupation (Zimmerman I WSJ Bm Laden exhorts his followers against Zionists and crusaders It the enemy is not reallv an alien, we can still tind the ways of making them appear to r* so. Language is used to divide us from others in our own country. Foulkes (198} l for example, making comparisons between the concept ot un-American and Brecht s reference to the prevalence of the term unAVrman in Nazi Germany. The dianes of Victor Klemperer (1998) are in part a study ol theivkaaV sation of language by ideology intent on severing the bonds ol tvmmon humanity with another segment of the community: the lews Nxvme (or example a hyphenated entity. Jewish-Bolshevik. Democracies at war have also found it necessary to manufacture a nomenclature of derogation. often with radaJ overtones: Huns. Nips. Wops, At* preceded in an earlier g/.r.craiinu l»v Hie (rathei ^»uWr-ifa^J^w leans needed a rhetoric of cr.mliy us well arter Nm^efc^^Av Rivera of the Few network. Al-Qneiln wen- alwaxs tenatisxt^.S^ always heroes 'and the network audience was ^h>*vYm^^*V previous yean. CNN was thus forced to 'burnish Us petrxxwcr^w^S had ordered itscoTTespvjnder.is in relci to the 1 I ih ^t*esBAet^JJ^| time footage is shcrv.r. of I ivilian casuallies in Ugluiv.stan ' 11 November 20011. Olhemess and the media A good story needs a villain. Narrative structurr in mnrlendj film often arises from polarity, espccialh ihc primorafel Sens good and evil, more particularly so since l he c\ il \ irmnairj ewotestn* debased energy whose aroir.nl anil ultimate siihui momentum. Partly, too. this is because In literary tray evil than grxxi Villain . test the hero's comjv :. narrative drive and create opportunities lor rich characti merely saintly cannot oiler (liven Dickens found it difficult toi interesting, a-, Ov.ar Wilde said, one would have to have a not to laugh at the death of I.it lie Nell.! This structural villain in the production ol media texts creates a need to targets and there-fore the debased causes with which vul associate. The Malia cannot, of course, sustain this rose there is villain fatigue, and political correctness V and it is this which makes Holly wood, not institutionary or < on occasion, a propaganda machine. An example of this is populai culture > cik.Uv \ Big Tobacco (Sunday Timet. 2 1 March 19^7) Assauks od this pews'* opportunities for expoang the corruption of [vwerandthe ness while avoiding accusations of being anti-bu Frank Freudberg (J 996), a dying smoker seeks \i less corporate monoliths who fed off his addtci (John Gnsham I 996), anonymous corporate e\< cancer lawsuit: in ihr I'rurthv, a I IS teleusio: lawyer fights her old law professor in another court de* victims. The far» that these works stand prunanS d> that good entertainment ollen demands a \ illam. need : status as propag/joda. They stand squarely with ihe On populism as distunsed by M. Ku/.in in his hw4. Tar ffcai (1995). Oshmsky ha, argued (New Vor! Times, 12 Fetrua its rhetoric had always stressed the light betwven ^x\: 113 ™u of prnpaqamb W*« tended to P<>rlrl,v „„,, ........ SH™5 „„„ (fc, example. William, lenning.s Hryi„, ;„„|,,,„„., , h;i(|,k. ," JU in, and subsequently Rush Umbaugh). |oe McCarthy ,1,-, I.,,,,.,,, , defpTftW ^,,shment conspiracy lo advaiu,. ^ ™ sample would be Charles Coughlins claimed conspiracy ol the Jewish plutocracy-Warren 1996). ' Wlsn The need for narrative structures also domlnaics .hr .naoulariure of our news -Bird and Dardenne 1988). The essence of news is story telling and again, stones demand, often if not usually, a villa... to g.ve then, narrative artve and ethical meaning. The Doil* Mail, for example, plays to the prejudices of the tnglish middle class like a Stradivarlus. a daily procession of nn seekers, thugs, illicit social security claimants, BU excesses worker Stalinists and politically correct lunacies parade, menacingly outrageously, through its pages. The reader is invariably left in a state of repressed rage. The editor of the Daily Mail knows what hi ll doing. The "lia's need for stories with villains also coalesce* with our need to blame someone when things go wrong. With the Atlanta bombing, the only evi-d'fx »■ against Richard Jewel was that he lilted a profile drawn up by a police I his demonstrates aptly how our need lor villains and instant ■iir wen ' an contaminate the process of public judgemn.1 Dobfctn '1992; discusses Nimmo and Coombs' view ol television as pseudo reality. (They claim the 'romantic quest structure' has been particular!, important in television news, while Met ice called the quest a 'uni-mersal (tractive' that gives meaning to political praclices and rituals.) Oohk.ri also quotes CBS news reader lYcd Graham news stories on CBS tended to become two-minute morality ph«ys with heroes, villains and a tidy moral to be summoned up at the end. Graham added thai despite the fa i thai many important events did not present clear cut heroes, villains, morals, the correspondents became experts il pointing them |e«d was no terrorist, and real terrorists are the ultimate other'. How-< , ih.- language of denigration confuses, nut clarllles. Hie issues In the Bra place, governments can be terrorists yet are seldom described as such (thai ol apartheid South Africa, for example). Instead, oppressive governments ,tr, ,e(Jn as maintaining order', conducting ope.......ns . etc. r.teunr 1990). Second, the international media's .eneliou lo groups such ,, lf(, jamds is seldom uniform and may changl OVfl lime, theb e.h.cal judgements calibrated by a language which gniduules from terrorists to r r .lias lo freedom lighters: the choice of these terms Is (he formulating ol oo, social judgement rather than the description Ol IMtOJ phenomena (M< urer 1990).Thirdly, there is a rationale I'm lerim whl. I. the language of « conceptual QrrQn^ IM Hvohenation. while entirely iustmedasav. „r peprtf* n>p some bloody outrage, servestooijj mOttJ r« melaphors such as plague remove CtOOttOOtf " ol biological ^ moUvesrf rorism from » • hkc •game or when lhe moUva^ trivvabseow. ^ ,xNC ^^alional. policy makersareledto^ Socio/ Integration The creation '.I <-r,< rr, < is easy. The right inflammatory rhetoric, judicious selection of bctl >nd malicious parodies of custom can successfulh demonise va >thes of the human race: 'there are many situations where the society in question lacks the cognitive instruments to see the message that is hidden behind the myth and will accept the causation that is being offered as proper explanation for its fate. The use of xenophobic narrative and .< apegoatmg is an easy next step' (Schopflin 1997).Thereis a particular < all for the media to pioneer the responsible role. A climate of contempt is I mated fbf the enemy's culture, with even the more sophisticated member-, of the media competing in parody, for example the assertion in the Daily Telegraph (12 September 2001) and elsewhere in the British media that Islamic martyr-warriors believe they will be awarded seventy-two virgins as brides in heaven (with no authority from the Koran, which along with ih<- other laiths of the book'. Judaism and Christianity, explicitly forbid-. Mnudej. 'I hose stigmatised as hostile 'begin to accept the demonic role assigned to them and behave in accordance with it' (Schopflin Jewel's caaf WBi a moral tale of our times that illuminates our need for heroes and villain-, feted by the Olympics' business sponsors, he himself did not seek publicity hut was soon its victim. Finally the Atlanta Journal announced, 'Hero guard may have planted a bomb', and offered a full profile of the lonei U publicity-seeking drifter hero wannabe: he was the unabubha'. investigated exhaustively by the FBI. followed on motor cycles. Yet lilting the profile was the only 'evidence' about him. (www.augijsla< hronicle.com/headlines/102996/jewel.html) Thus the actlvltlei of the news media compromise in large measure the search lor villain-., and the press thus creates whole categories of social enemies. Yet in Britain the Sun newspaper, once notorious for its social insensillvlly, now lakes a lead, with two pages devoted to the defence of ordinary Muslims, leaiuring profiles of five British Muslims (www.thesun. co.uk). I lolly wood i onld he a powerful force, for if its media products today have a common Ideological denominator it is the importance of social 'ons i is ^ration: ** can inspire inclusion.just as we can inci.e exclusion. Partly (h:> * a -ader of syrnbols - for President Bush to visit a mosque after Nine eleven **.« ™"al rheIonc- °™ of the most significant things he could havedone uoUywoofs needfor enemies ■oJ entertainment needs an enemy. Hollywood's prolonged romance with the Nasss tsee I klanski 1999) was due not so much to a predilection lor history as to the ability of Nazism to project superb villains. The need for enemies is inherently political, since in choosing our enemies we define what we are and also what we are not: our values are illuminated and defined by their obverse, and this process has a political character, since it involves choice over ultimate ends and means, what we as a community stand for or against. We understand ourselves by our selection of enemies. Thus drama needs binary opposition to create those attributes that are key in dramatic suspense: fear (there can be no dramatically effective enemy of whom we are unafraid: we desire their demise because of their unfathomable wickedness and coldheartcdness). and identification - the our" (good) side stresses the best of our values and character. Changing values do not result in a sophisticated and mature vision in which complexities of perspective and character are taken 00 board. I hey simply create new sorts of villain to replace the Red Indians. Nazis. Matiosi and gangsters, complete with all the traditional attributes of villains, and Big Tobacco fits the bill admirably: rich, amoral, deceitful, powerful, it has no redemptive virtue. In Feds a mephistophelian pseudo-militia. CigSoc. attempts to besmirch the good name of an anti-tobacco prosecutor by secreting cocaine in his home, one character remarking, obscene profits and the fear of losing them are turning otherwise decent people into lying, deceitful manipulators' {Sunday Times. 2 3 March 1997). Political correctness and global harmony are. it is claimed, playing havoc with traditional sources of treacherv. These workings can be seen, for example, in the farm film. It is the manichean good-evil universe that has been a staple of Hollywood from its first beginnings. On the side of virtue are the family and its farm and the role of agricultural labour, a synonym for honest toil, fhe villains are the banks, which foreclose on farms after having been promiscuous in their lending, and. beyond them, the big business which pressures them, masking their complicity with the allusions to the free market (Webster 1988). _ „ . . . . „ Hollywood has always needed villains. The little guy or girl against the rotten system a decent man badly wronged who needs to be avenged are classic Hollywood down through its history. It is when the enemy is given some sort of political-social character, and often this Is necessary both to the conllic. meaning and because- social political ideol^ „ Inrce for difference, lhat considerations of propaganda arise. N, Y,t enemies are not necessarMy conce.ved as either human antTr and the real .heme . man s mastery of hosule na,uri. ; umTngbv solidarity and team work. I he war talm F.rw «w StarW „,.. oThno answer the question By whom, Thus the enemy came s,m-) „ reoresem all that man must haltle agums. to be a man. connect!,,,,,,,, warume public with all the natural oPPress,ons that the.r ancen. am** had endured. Enmity in action: Slobodans propaganda war There was nothing inevitable about the genocidal 'ethnic' tension of former Yugoslavia. People had intermarried and lived together for years, and countries, as with Czechoslovakia, can and do sunder peacefully. That, for ten years, they had been killing each other in an orgy of fratricidal butchery not seen in Europe since World War II owed everything to the determination of Slobodan Milosevic and his henchmen to sustain dominance through the toxic agency of propaganda and their understanding of its power to mobilise the emotions of fear, rage and hatred. Through propaganda they created a rhetoric of alien threat lhat is always the necessary preamble to mass murder, and I hey vjught to synthesise ancient and modern fears, the old terror of the Turk neatly elided with modern fear of Islamic fundamentalism. The crisis thus arose also out of the propaganda tradition of communism. Marxism-Leninism, the post-war Ideology of the Yugoslav state, was never a mere' belief system alone but a proselytising creed whose evangelism was an integral part of its ideology. This supplied a ready-made methodology for attaining and sustaining power. Nationalism was just a way for Milosevic's henchmen to retain control by reviving ancient and long dormant tensions, yesterday they were communists, today fascists. Power, not ideology, was what mattered to them. Porthe I rench theoretician on propaganda. Jacques Ellul (1973). 'ideology and doctrine .in- mere accessories used by propaganda to mobilise individuals. Tin aim is the power ...'. This was abetted by some structural similarities between < ornrnunism and ethnocentric nationalism. Both, for example, diminish ih«- individual, making the substitution of one ideology for the other relatively easy. This propaganda assault w;r. contrived round four principal themes: the Muslim as social and cultural >Ure aN '-tar..8 % 0f former andcoUn. for ten butchery termina-oiinarice ng of its ^ propa-cessary nt and fear of unism. lever a m was jgy for evic's sions: was ques -opa- dby rjofl' tion was jrai I 1/ , Lhreal ol in Islamic super-state, the Internátu Is,, i.,.. ■...........JU« of Serbia's enm,!^ """ flK" ......I ll.......... I' V:..rK .........._ I Mi v rhc „, s, j. i ,mi theme of Serb propaganda was the forelgi 111 clím 111 • i ii 111.i irA.J_____..... seldom enough I Ik . -of then Muslim neighbours. Orders to kill *w rnusi acquire moral leglttoacy through the bestowal of social «,nc.lon muJ ,„„«1« obtains .is alibi through this rhetoric of otherness ^on ol ihc alien la nol natural but socially constructed, it hassomci h ,1 |iu m ancient differences, but mostly it is a fabrication. In Rwand , genocide a ai pi eceded in several years of anti-Tutsi radio polemics itrei • m rutels' fbrelgnneai even though they had been in the country fo. H00 Iresj i rhi **** true of Na/i Gennany. (Before then, the extinction the lews laced was real enough via intermarriage.) For Saled (Zimmerman 1995) 'all nationalists, national Identifleation with the nation is bated on ihc fantasy ol I he enemy, an alien who has insinuated himself Into QUI jocletj and constantly threatens us with habits, discourse and rituals thai iire not our kind'. In Bosnia till! was achieved by sarcasm, by such devices as merging a Muslim newacaSter'l VDlce with lilm of chattering chimpanzees, or Serb newscasters mumbling phrases from Muslim burial rites with satirically bowed head; I he stress on Muslim racial pollution, however, comes itralghl out of the ImaglatiC lexicon of the Third Reich: 'it was genetically deformed material thai embraced Islam. And now. of course, with each successive generation this gene simply gels more concentrated." To Radavan K.ir;id/ie. Muslims were an urban population with no attachment to the soil' (Zimmerman 1995). Another theme dear to the Serbs was the vision they had pedalled .it v;ir ions limes of a 'Greater Albania', or of a muscular Islamic fundamentalist state digging deep Into I he heart of Europe and embracing Bosnia. Kosovo. Albania, TUrkey and Iran. They spoke of a threatened Serbdom and the extinction of Serb Identity. Serbs were the guardians of Christendom who had merely boon defending themselves and European civilisation Irom Islamic fundamentalism. Serbs, then, were the defenders of the West, and the West was tOO craven, myopic and ungrateful to realise it. S< hopllln 11997) jn his taxonomy of myths speaks of myths of redemption and suffering, 'where il is clear thai the nation, by reason of its particularly 101 rowful history, is undergoing or has undergone a process of expiating It", sins and will hi* redeemed or, indeed, may itself redeem the world East European myths posll n bleeding to near extinction so that Europe could llourish These uivllis should he understood as myths of powerlessness and compensation Ibrthtl povverleeanees.' Then there were the atrocities of Serbia's enemies. For the Serb lead I the bellevablllty of thll was crucial to their programme of ethnic < leaii'dup Serbs claimed lo have found proof that Muslims were planning cise all Serb boys and kill all males over the age of three and sYV"^ between the ages of liftccn and twenty-6ve into a harem to produ saries' (Zimmerman 1995J Of course this is ridiculous, but prote^ does not have to ask for belief to be effective, people (as We ha*8** become co-conspiralors in magnified fantasies of their own biJ** and fears. Similar a< counts also appeared about the activities of kl^ Kosovo even as the S»rbs mutilated that nation. Projecting your oJ! crimes on to pour enemy is a familiar propaganda technique (as in the film featuring British concentration camps of the Boer War: Ohm Kru^ in Herzstein I97H). Zimmerman (1995) alw discusses Nato's great anti-Serb conspiracy ifr/ no propaganda is complete without a conspiracy). After the Daytcr. accords. Serb anti-NATO propaganda shifted into hyperbolic mode, and the psychological prologue lor the Kosovo war was strenuously prepared. NATO with their military transporters and tanks ... are running over children and mothers on your Serb roads, arresting our best and bravest warriors who fought in the war only to save their people and Serbdom.They are bombarding us. poisoning us with radioactive bombs, destroying our homes and bridges, taking us to court... they want to exterminate our seed.' According to Zimmerman the Serb media manufactured the ultimate fiction, that NATO had used low-intensity nuclear weapons in Bosnia, and people were contaminated by radiation. One historical parallel was thus irresistible: films of NATO peacekeepers merged with archive footage of German soldiers, and television maintained a sentimental diet of World War 11 partisan films. I he international community had betrayed the Serbs. The International War Crimes Tribunal was cast as a partisan body with no further aim than lo criminalise Serbs. These themes were articulated through techniques of rhetoric, myth making and information control. Control - of Information, of images - was the core of Serb propaganda methodology. Zimmerman discusses how Milosevic had long learned to muffle internal critical voices almost to the point of silence by such devices as manipulating the COfl ol newsprint. By banishing all Western media from Kosovo he denied the West that which would most galvanise it into military action, visual Images of massacred civilians, of which we could see the merest peep. The images and information the West got from Belgrade were also controlled: journalists could be expelled, telephones cut. pictures censored. The effect of Information control on Milosevics own people was. however, incalculable, and. as journalists such as John Simpson reported, most of them simply could not understand why the West was attacking them or assumed II was some malevolent international conspiracy against Serbia. ^nents of propaganda M9 ary. for Turks'. Mus,im and Croat ^^^ZZ^ ,makadeen „had warnors, M,Orr eatjerr.,:. Muslim hoX butchers. All Mushms became fundamentalists-, and comrade ^ did not matter, the Muslim was the ternble terrorist but he was also ^ultaneously the smiling dull-witted bah* ,rude peasant. .Zimmerman 1995). Such words direct thinking, they are sensitising concepts, in that a lord or phrase is seldom value-neutral but embodies a picture, an image or an ethical judgement. To get our opponents to use our choice of words is the greatest propaganda triumph, though in the case of the term ethnic cleansing' - so reminiscent of Judenrein - this rebounded on the Serbs and ::.T.sganda became counter-propaganda There were, of course, the myths. Mcotgcenery has argued, 'if Yugoslavia is to teach us anything, surely it is about the malleability of historical memory, myth and identity' (Zimmerman 1995 \ mythic, folkloric Serbia had been created, with Kosovo as a kind oí hory land, its sacrosanc-nry in no way diminished by the fact that for well over 500 years it had ceased to be Serb. Schópflin (1997) speaks of myths of territory, a land where purity was safeguarded, where folk virtues were best preserved before contact with aliens. These interlocked mrich other Utopian self-sustaining myths, such as that of the Serbs as gallant warnors. the image of martial prowess defined by a nightly television advertisement. Schópflin further argues that: The Serbian myth of Kosovo essentially begins wah One redemptive element, in that the defeat of Kosovo Polje is explained by lbe chow of heavenly glory over earthly power. Self-evidently. this is an ex pom. ftetm rnttnnalisaDon of the military defeat of the Serbian forces by the Onoecan annas in 1J89 and the subsequent conquest of Serbia: today the A Slantmi are reconfigured as Turks, the ancient enemy. Myth, he adds, makes communication diíBcuk. ance mythical language is »»> in. ne auus. manes hhuuuuimhhh for intra-, not inter-community communication'. Murder is a deeply unnatural act. We have no inherited predisposition kill. We do it because we have been persuaded to. because our deepest err tfons have been colonised by somebody ebe. The murderers going abou their work in Kosovo were not monsters but normal men Vet their barbarism is incomprehensible unless it is placed in the context that explains it. years of saturation propaganda at once sentimental fetf-pitying. vindictive and xenophobic. The real culprits in this long list of execuuom aaaaaanauon. drownings, burnings, massacres and atrocities furnished by our report, are not. we 140 cone tea repeat, the Balkan peoples. . . The true culprits are those vvh public opinion and take advantage of the people's ignorance to • m's'l'i"J ihř ing rumours and sound the alarm bell, exciting their country in toe1' real culprits are those who. by interest or inclination, declare co nmi,y'^ war is inevitable, and by making it so. assert that they are powerless to it. The real culprits are those who sacrifice the general interest to personal interest... And who held up to their country a sterile polic ^'f ^ flict and reprisals. (Prom the report of the International Commissi ^ inquire into the Course and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and ton Zimmerman 199Si la