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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.
TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT PROPAGANDA
JUN 29, 2006 - 4:30PM PST
Posted by John Brown
All posts by this author
The greatest lure of propaganda, for those using it to achieve total victory in the so-called war on terror, is that on surface it may appear to pose no intellectual problems about what it is and what it does. Drop leaflets on enemy territory; place pro-U.S. articles in newspapers abroad; broadcast radio programs that attack the enemy and praise American values -- and hearts and minds in hostile lands will be won over, like a salivating Pavlov dog reacting to food-related stimuli. But propaganda is not as simple as that. In fact, with its long history, it is a complicated topic that has been the subject of intense debate since antiquity. Allow me to touch the tip of the propaganda iceberg and suggest two basic ways of looking at propaganda: moralist and neutralist. The moralist school argues that propaganda is intrinsically misleading and therefore morally reprehensible. This point of view, popular among philosophers and pedagogues, harks back to Plato. True, Plato did not use the word propaganda, a term coined by the Catholic Church in the 16th century (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12456a.htm), during the Counter-Reformation, to describe the propagation of the faith. Rather Plato spoke about rhetoric, the art of persuasion, which he contrasted to philosophy, the love of truth. In Gorgias Plato leaves little doubt that rhetoric aims at domination, not instruction, and is therefore intellectually and morally unacceptable. Prodded by Socrates, the rhetorician Gorgias, stating that rhetoric has the "power ... to persuade the multitude," is left no choice but to admit that it is an art that does not give knowledge, but "belief without knowledge." In the Republic Plato argues myth-making is essential to the existence of the state. But his condemnation in Gorgias of rhetoric as in itself immoral and domineering lives on in Western thought. It is reflected in the modern era in a classic of propaganda studies, Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation Of Men's Attitudes (U.S. edition, 1965), where this French philosopher writes that "[t]he force of propaganda is a direct attack against man ... a menace which threatens the total personality." A similar line of thinking was recently expressed in Stanley B. Cunningham's The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction (2002): [B]ecause of propaganda's systematic mistreatment of truth and information and their procedural safeguards, its virtually imperceptible erosion of individual capability and social freedom, and its unnerving magnitude -- because of all these, it is simply myopic to regard all this as an ethically neutral state of affairs.In his attack on the "myopic" view that propaganda is an "ethically neutral state of affairs" Cunningham is challenging a second way of looking at propaganda that can be traced to Aristotle, who is far more tolerant and accepting of rhetoric than Plato is in Gorgias. The best known twentieth-century representative of this neutralist school is the social scientist Harold Lasswell, whose widely read work, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), sought to look at propaganda objectively and scientifically in the aftermath of World War I, when the public…... FULL TEXT
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 Read Comments:
Ian Parker on June 30, 2006 @ 8:17 am:
One cannot discuss information and information warfare without looking at the Web and to some extent AI.
TV which has had enormous effect on our perception. No one can become President of the US without being telegenic.
Broadband speeds are creeping up and beyond TV and even HDTV. An information war in the future can only be waged on the Web and will involve AI bots.
The extreme islamists realize this, websites of beheadings occur with monotonous regularity. I sometimes why we cannot use some sort of a bot to counter this.
Colin Brayton on June 30, 2006 @ 11:03 am:
I'm one of those old-schoolers (I taught rhetoric at university for a while) who rises to take up the defense of the rhetors.
In the classical trivium, rhetoric is merely a preparation for dialectic -- for debate in the deliberative body of the republic, in which the contending parties, no matter how much they differ, share the same values.
It's when it's uncoupled from that institutional context that rhetoric becomes propaganda in the perjorative sense.
Unlike our current philosopher-king and his courtiers, the rhetor in the space of public deliberation is an exemplary figure who argues his case with the utmost passion, then humbly obeys the will of the majority.
If "propaganda" means "things that should be widely disseminated for imitation," then the best example we can set for the rest of the world is open quality of our public debate, within the context of a firm commitment to shared democratic values.
I always thought the VOA was our finest ambassador in this respect -- still is, but its voice is muted under the rule of the current "military-entertainment complex.
The spectacle of Americans freely criticizing their government, and a free press freely and impartially reporting on that dissent, is the most impressive thing in the world.
"I disagree completely with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say" is the best thought we Americans ever had -- maybe the best thought anyone ever had.
More than anything else, we need the world to see us practicing what we preach, rather than shooting the bearer of bad news and hollowing out the very institutions that made us great.
debbie on August 24, 2009 @ 4:53 pm:
WOW, what alot has changed in 3 years. Wonder about the Obama propaganda maichine,or better yet the Chicago propaganda machine. Maybe Ellul was right? Just because you say so, does no make it so.
Ali on January 6, 2012 @ 8:47 am:
"I disagree completely with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say" is the best thought we Americans ever had
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It was Voltaire. He was French.
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