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THE PARADOXES OF PROPAGANDA
APR 16, 2007 - 9:16AM PST
Posted by John H. Brown
All posts by this author

When I give my course, "Propaganda and US Foreign Policy" (1) -- a historical overview of the subject -- I like to invite the class for a modest buffet dinner chez moi. The last time this get-together took place, it included a screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), a film -- considered by some a propaganda classic -- that celebrates the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. As the students ate their dessert, I turned on the DVD, and the Nazi director's troubling yet spectacular black-and-white images appeared. One member of the class remarked that the movie's opening scene -- Hitler's airplane descent toward Nuremberg -- reminded him of President George W. Bush's "mission accomplished" landing on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier. Then a student, having far greater confidence in my linguistic abilities than I, asked me to interpret the German. I knew this was the beginning of the end. Soon the students lost interest in the film. After 15 minutes, most of them ignored it, preferring to engage in conversation. Clearly, Triumph was no triumph. The students, no film-techniques fans, found it boring. They didn’t see any art (and certainly no fun), they just saw propaganda. When I tried to joke that the film could perhaps be used in a deodorant ad (who wants to put up with the smelly armpit of a brown-shirt uttering Sig Heil), I didn’t get many laughs. This leads me to a first speculation: that, in the words of the famed World War II propagandist (and Plato scholar), Richard H. S. Crossman, "[t]he way to carry out good propaganda is never to appear to be carrying it out at all." (2) Or, as John Pike, the director of a Washington-based defense think-tank, puts it, "[a]nybody who knows about propaganda knows the first rule of propaganda is that it should not look like propaganda." (3) "When you are persuaded by something, says Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross, "you don't think it is propaganda." (4) This is one of the paradoxes of propaganda: the best propaganda doesn’t appear to be propaganda. Take, for example, the jazz program of Willis Conover over the Voice of America, which he D-J'd for some forty years during the Cold War and which (in the words of his New York Times obituary) "proved more effective than a fleet of B-29s." (5) Willis's millions of listeners in Eastern Europe and the USSR loved his program for what they perceived it to be: new and exciting music, introduced by Willis's unforgettable baritone voice. They didn’t see it as an effort to change their minds or behavior for the benefit of the United States. No, they saw Willis's program as anti-propaganda, and a stark contrast to the official media in their own countries. Which leads me to a second paradox of propaganda, closely connected to the first, and again underscored by Crossman (as noted by his American admirer William E. Daugherty): One must hate propaganda to do it well. "…in the…... FULL TEXT
 
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joel rochow on April 17, 2007 @ 1:18 pm:
John, I think the present crowd outdoes Riefenstahl and Goebbels. I have been interested in how propaganda since taking classes from John Wahlke in political philosophy in the fifdties.

This crowd must have knowledgeable people on board, for their sophitication allows them to mix straight news with NeoCon allegations (and delusions). Extremely well done in terms of propaganda, but unfortunately highly believable to an electorate not stepped in professionally sculpted propaganda. Dropped my teeth at a Georgetown dinner when a third year law student said Scalia was her favorite Justice. This was a very bright lady. The NeoCons have the ability to reach around rationality and tap into that part of us which is the True Believer (Credit Eric Hoffer here.) Dustin Hoffman does this on the screen, in a non-ideological way. When we watch Hoffman, he draws us into the narrative with astonishing subtlety, and we are in the room with him watching. Bush and Cheney have this effect, even spouting the demonstrable allegations they love.
Bottom line: control, power, but without the knowledge or intent to use that power as statesmen, rather just get it, because power is an end in iteself to some people. Who would have thought they could convince 70 per cent of those polled that Saddam Hussain was involved in 9/11? And that Zarkawi was independent wannabe al-Qaeda Islamist?
Well done, George and Dick. I guess you know where your priorities lie.

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