Randal Marlin Read online

  dence, accusations that Iran has been pursuing a weapons-oriented nuclear program

  have currently been treated as accepted fact by mainstream media, including Rupert

  Murdoch’s The Times of London and the New York Times.2 Sanctions have been

  implemented against Iran and stronger sanctions threatened, with Iran responding by

  counter threats. There are some alarming similarities with the pre-World War I highly

  propagandized environment, with the important difference that computer-assisted

  modern warfare may allow little or no time for populations to curb war-provoking

  decisions of their leaders. Renewed brinksmanship, supported by propaganda, brings

  renewed fears of war by miscalculation. We have a strong incentive to prevent such

  miscalculation by recognizing and countering the propaganda that makes such situ-

  ations possible. Hence an important incentive to examine propaganda in its many

  dimensions.

  The art of mass persuasion is embedded in contemporary societies, those of

  liberal and neo-conservative democracies included. Public relations methods are

  intertwined with all major functions of modern life. During the 1930s, President

  Roosevelt pioneered the use of radio for gaining public support for his progressive

  programs through his so-called fireside chats. Today, whether one deals with Exxon or

  Greenpeace, with multinational corporations, the coalition that disrupted the World

  Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999, and more recently the “Occupy Wall

  Street” movement that began on September 27, 2011, techniques of mass persuasion

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  are involved. From the viewpoint of discourse analysis, there is little reason to speak of “propaganda” on only one side of a hotly contested issue when both sides are using

  techniques of persuasion to the hilt. We can sympathize with those charged with gov-

  erning a country who see that a campaign of information dissemination is needed to

  forestall poorly grounded opposition to much-needed action. Only when there is full

  appreciation of the need and justification for some forms of public information can

  there be a properly measured response to the ubiquitous phenomenon of propaganda

  in today’s world.

  It may well be thought that with the arrival of the Internet the heyday of propa-

  ganda is over. We do not have to listen to some official party line about, say, a conflict

  in the Balkans. We can go to a website operated by Serbs, Croatians, Albanians, etc.

  Search engines put us in touch with our choice of official, heterodox, or iconoclastic

  viewpoints. Although it is true that the Internet has provided us with a very different

  communications world, it is premature to suppose that the power of propaganda will

  be lessened. First, not everyone can afford to make full use of the resources offered by

  the Internet. Some lack the computer hardware, others cannot afford the monthly

  fee charged by a service provider. Those who are online may lack the time or the spe-

  cialized knowledge to know or find out who is telling the truth about, for example,

  issues such as anthropogenic climate change or genetically modified organisms. We

  can access many different points of view, but do we know the credentials of those

  expressing them?

  The primary objectives of this book are to define what is meant by propaganda, to

  assist in understanding how it works, and to come to grips with ethical problems sur-

  rounding its use. The specific media may change, but principles of human nature have

  remained fairly constant over the millennia. We can learn from studying techniques

  used in ancient Greece and Rome. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, among

  others, catalogued and analyzed the rhetorical art. Also, because so much in the way

  of opinion-shaping goes on in areas other than war and revolution, it seems inadvis-

  able to restrict the focus of this study to the most obvious and reprehensible uses of

  propaganda in politics. Advertising and public relations are two other areas of interest.

  The definition of “propaganda” is not settled, though the use of this word is as cur-

  rent as ever. To insist on using and studying only what fits a narrow definition of the

  term is too exclusive. We want to study communication practices that mislead people,

  that get them to do things they would not do were they adequately informed. The extent

  to which the term “propaganda” can be defined to include al such cases is a matter for

  argument—the objective is not to hit upon a satisfactory definition for its own sake, but

  to understand and evaluate the overall phenomenon of mass persuasion, particularly

  the sort where a persuadee comes to feel, or should come to feel, deceived as a result of

  succumbing to a deceptive message.

  This form of evaluation amounts to an ethics of persuasion and brings into play

  questions of means and ends, truth-telling, deception and integrity, and suchlike. The

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  ethical questions lead into ethical-political matters, such as whether to have legal controls over deception in communication or to have laws that discourage a small minor-

  ity from effectively controlling systems of communication on which the majority

  must rely for political awareness. These will be dealt with in due course. It should be

  acknowledged that much of the inspiration for this work derives from the powerful,

  penetrating, and wide-ranging work of Jacques El ul, the “Bordeaux prophet” as he has

  been called. There will be many references to his work in what follows.

  DEFInITIon

  There are many definitions, explicit and implicit, of the term “propaganda.” In some

  ways the term has been discredited for serious analytical purposes, but it continues

  to be part of the arsenal in wars of words. It is common to identify an opponent’s

  communications as propaganda while maintaining that only one’s own side is telling

  the truth. There is a strong association, in English-speaking countries, between the

  word “propaganda” and the ideas of lying or deception. This association may date

  from the time when a committee of (mainly) cardinals was convened by Pope Gregory

  XV in 1622, primarily to oversee missionary activity. It was called the Congregatio de

  Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), continuing a name

  given to meetings of Pope Gregory XIII with three cardinals in 1572–85 with a view

  to combating the Reformation.3 Protestants no doubt would have viewed the term

  negatively. Early usage of “propaganda” referred to the committee itself rather than

  to its activity. Later it came to be applied to the activity of spreading either faith or

  political doctrines.

  In Latin countries, where “propaganda” means advertising, the word is less con-

  nected to the idea of sinister manipulation, although it is, of course, likely to be affected in time by one’s perceptions of what is propagated. In more recent years it has been taken

  to mean, according to Webster’s Third International Dictionary, “dissemination of ideas, information or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause or a
>
  person.” But this characterization of “propaganda” as neutral misses its negative conno-

  tation. Politicians and bureaucrats generally avoid using the term to describe their own

  activities, tending to reserve it for those of their opponents, although the difference may

  not be perceptible to an unbiased third party.

  Lenin and Goebbels did not mind applying the term “propaganda” to describe

  their attempts to mould opinion. The Allies in both world wars characterized such

  opinion-forming activity by the enemy as propaganda and treated it as largely com-

  posed of lies, while their own information dissemination was treated as the truth.

  Exceptions exist: Winston Churchill’s information officer, Brendan Bracken, among

  other officials, openly avowed his work as propaganda and defended the use of “good

  propaganda” against “bad propaganda.”4 That strategy can work under the right

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  circumstances, where attention is focused on the question of definition. Otherwise, it is wiser to accept that in public consciousness there wil be, for the most part, a connotation of deception or manipulation in English language usage.

  Kinds of Definition

  Descriptive Definition

  Before embarking on the task of examining and evaluating different definitions of pro-

  paganda, it is worth reflecting first on the nature of definition itself. Sometimes we

  do not know the meaning of a word, and we go to the dictionary to look it up, or we

  ask someone whom we have found knowledgeable about such things. Or we have in

  mind one meaning of a term but sense that some speaker is making use of a different

  meaning. The word “consumerism” in the late 1960s came to mean the movement to

  ensure better value and safety in consumer products, such as automobiles, edible goods,

  clothing, and suchlike. Later the term came to be used in a different way to refer to the

  propensity to consume to excess. To clarify meanings we can ask the speaker, consult

  someone likely to be familiar with the term, or look up the word in a dictionary. The

  problem with dictionaries is that they tend to be out of date regarding very recent word

  adaptations or coinages. For this, a good search engine is likely to be more helpful, for

  example, by putting the word, together with “definition,” into Google.

  Descriptions of word usages can vary in terms of accuracy, completeness, and

  overall truth. Dr. Samuel Johnson famously made an error in his lexicon when he gave

  the meaning of “pastern” as “the knee of a horse.” When a lady asked why he defined

  the word that way, he replied, “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” It is a feature of

  descriptive definitions that they be true or false, adequate or inadequate, comprehen-

  sive or limited.

  Stipulative Definition

  Different from descriptive definitions are those in which a person does not lay claim

  to describing or reporting how others use a particular word but rather announces or

  stipulates that this is how he or she will be using it. Anyone can stipulate any meaning for a term. Although clearly useful in science, stipulations can also be confusing and

  misleading. When a word such as “pacifism” is stipulated to apply to certain behaviour

  in rats, it is easy to suppose that experiments with these rats tell us something about

  pacifism in general. Yet, they do no such thing, unless there is independent evidence

  to link the stipulated behaviour to what we would recognize as pacifism in our human

  behaviour, since that is what the word in its ordinary application is all about.

  Although stipulative definitions are not true or false, they may be good or bad,

  advisable or inadvisable, helpful or confusing. They may also be deliberately used for

  the purpose of confusing people and for furthering propaganda aims. For example,

  a government might stipulate that people who have been unemployed for a certain

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  length of time are no longer to be considered in the labour market and therefore are not to be classed among the “unemployed.” It is not difficult to see how a government could “improve” its unemployment record by altering the stipulated criteria in

  the definition of unemployment. It would be easy to “eliminate” poverty by defining

  poverty at such a low income level that in order to be poor you would have to be

  starving to death (and thereby soon removing yet another statistic on the poor side

  of the ledger).

  Hegemonic Definition

  The preceding example suggests the need for a new name for the kind of definition

  where the definers seek to impose their will on others through control over language

  usage. Borrowing from Gramsci and Michel Foucault’s ideas about hegemonic dis-

  course, we might call this definition “hegemonic definition.” Lewis Carroll provides

  a very concise expression of this kind of definition in the dialogue between Humpty-

  Dumpty and Alice in Through the Looking Glass.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just

  what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many dif-

  ferent things.”

  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s al .”5

  The grim reality of this kind of definition can be found when the State, through leg-

  islation and interpretation in its courts, defines words such as “terrorism” in ways that

  suit its political and military purposes rather than following consistently any reason-

  ably acceptable understanding of the term, or defines “torture” (when referring to its

  own practices) narrowly, with a view to avoiding the perception that it is in violation

  of international law. We have more to say about distortion of meanings in connection

  with George Orwell below.

  Not all attempts to redefine words are hegemonic. Sometimes words are defined

  in ways that seek either to give greater coherence to existing usage or to give us greater

  insight into the nature of objects referred to by a term. One name often given to this

  form of definition is rational reconstruction. Another is real definition. As an example of the latter, the definition of a human being as a “rational, self-reflecting, conceptu-alizing and artistically expressive animal” attempts (successfully or unsuccessfully)

  to pick out what is “really” or “essentially” human. Definitions of what constitutes

  a human being can and often do have a political impact (consider Karl Marx’s early

  treatment of the idea of human essence as species being). But if such inquiries are

  motivated by concern for truth, as distinct from being a convenient means for moti-

  vating people to change existing political structures, they would not constitute hege-

  monic definition, or what we might otherwise identify as propaganda.

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  Persuasive Definition

  Worthy of special attention in the context of trying to define “propaganda” is

  what Charles Stevenson, in his
influential Ethics and Language, called “persuasive definition.” When hotly disputed matters are at stake, people often make use of

  definitions that tend to favour their side of a given argument. We need to recognize

  that language has uses other than mere description: it can exhort, evaluate, threaten,

  and express emotions. As Stevenson analyzes persuasive definition, it involves taking

  a word with a high emotive content and altering its descriptive content “usually by

  giving it greater precision within the boundaries of its customary vagueness” but with-

  out making “any substantial change to the term’s emotive meaning.” This definition is used, consciously or unconsciously, “to secure, by this interplay between emotive and

  descriptive meaning, a redirection of people’s attitudes.”6Not surprisingly, then, a term

  such as “democratic” which has a favourable emotive sense today, is likely to be defined

  differently in an ideological defence of socialism from the way it would be defined

  by a defender of capitalist ideology. The socialist is likely to lean towards definitions

  that stress equality in some form, while the capitalist is more likely to emphasize free-

  dom, such as the freedom to engage in commercial contracts without government

  interference.

  Definitions can be persuasive in other ways than that described by Stevenson.

  Instead of leaving the emotive content unaffected, one can choose descriptive words

  that create in an audience an emotional or cognitive reaction desired by the one doing

  the persuasive defining. The words chosen may be emotive and tendentious, but if they

  have some plausibility, the audience may be affected in the way desired. As an example,

  consider Patrick Hurley’s two illustrative definitions of “Liberal”—one directed at cre-

  ating opposition to liberalism, the other at favouring it.

  1. “Liberal” means a drippy-eyed do-gooder obsessed with giving away other people’s

  money.

  2. “Liberal” means a genuine humanitarian committed to the goals of adequate hous-

  ing and health care and of equal opportunity for all of our citizens.7

  A characterization presented in a form that resembles a definition can have great

  impact, as with Oscar Wilde’s humorous reference to foxhunting as “the unspeakable