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A similar statement from British Labour politician Richard Crossman is that “the art of propaganda is not telling lies but rather seeing the truth you require and giving it mixed up with some truths the audience wants to hear”
Carey said that “commercial advertising and public relations are the forms of propaganda activity common to a democracy. . . . It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century”
But what it really means is that consumers are now circulating entertaining viral adverts on Facebook and companies are using ‘Astroturf’ or fake grassroots techniques to create the appearance of a broad base of support for their product or message” (Higham, 2013, p. 2).
Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.
Black propaganda is when the source is concealed or credited to a false authority and spreads lies, fabrications, and deceptions.
Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, claimed that outrageous charges evoke more belief than milder statements
that merely twist the truth slightly
One of the most dramatic examples of black propaganda was known as “The Ghost Army,” a field deception unit devised in 1944 to deceive the Germans in World War II into believing that the Allied Forces were in various places in Europe from Normandy to the Rhine. Eleven hundred American men, many of them artists, craftsmen, and designers, landed in France with truckloads of inflatable rubber tanks, rubber airplanes, and artillery guns, sound effect records, and radio interception devices. They made phony tank tracks and placed rubber artillery shells on the ground for German reconnaissance planes to see. They used sound trucks to make it sound like much equipment and a tank battalion were coming in to certain areas. Germans opened fire on rubber tanks and were fooled into planning attacks where there were no armed forces. The Ghost Army staged more than 20 deception operations in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, each one requiring that they impersonate a different U.S. unit, often using different multimedia and fake equipment. This elaborate deception saved many Allied lives because they tricked the Germans into going to false battle sites. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said that deception is a potent weapon because of surprise and duplicity. The Ghost Army was kept a secret for nearly 50 years because during the Cold War the U.S. thought there would be a war with the Soviet Union and did not want them to know how their deception had worked (“ The Ghost Army,” 2013).
The spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1991) describes people supporting popular opinions presented in the media and suppressing unpopular ones to avoid social isolation. This theory assumes that (a) society threatens deviant individuals with isolation, (b) individuals fear isolation continuously, (c) this fear of isolation causes people to assess the climate of opinion at all times, and (d) the results of this assessment affect behavior in public, especially the open expression or concealment of opinions. The more people remain silent, the more they feel that their point of view is not being expressed, and they continue to remain silent, losing confidence and withdrawing from public debate.
History is replete with recorded instances of psychological warfare. One of the best known is the biblical story of Gideon, who created panic in the numerically superior Midianite camp by equipping 300 of his men with a torch and trumpet each. Conventional warfare of the period called for 1 such equipped soldier for every 100 men, and Gideon was therefore able to create the illusion of an army of more than 30,000. These
300 were strategically placed around the Midianite camp in the dead of night, and on command, they each revealed their torches while blowing on their trumpets. Thinking themselves under attack by a superior force, the enemy became confused and even attacked each other. Eventually, the Midianites gave up and fled the battlefield, with the Israelites in hot pursuit (the Bible, Book of Judges, chap. 7).
The public seems most familiar (and comfortable) with the use of propaganda as a wartime activity, a notion that has contributed to the generally negative connotations associated with the term. In times of political conflict, propaganda becomes most manifest to the public as groups use it to achieve their goals. Propaganda of this sort must be viewed in its specific historical context, for without this context, such symbolic manipulations can later appear to be gross distortions of reality, racist, naive, and essentially silly. “Who would have believed that?” we exclaim, looking at wartime posters showing the Japanese soldier as a barbaric, apelike subhuman. The fact is that, within the historical context, such impressions were readily accepted as part of the mythology created by the reality of the conflict (e.g., the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor), and the collective public mentality that develops is eager to believe such stereotypes.
Messages have greater impact when they are in line with existing opinions, beliefs, and dispositions. Jacques Ellul (1965) said, “The propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning” (p. 4). The propagandist uses belief to create belief by linking or reinforcing audience predispositions to reinforce propagandistic ideology or, in some cases, to create new attitudes or behaviors or both. Rather than try to change political loyalties, racial and religious attitudes, and other deeply held beliefs, the propagandist voices the propagandee’s feelings about these things. Messages appear to be resonant, for they seem to be coming from within the audience rather than from without.
North Korea built a city called Kijong-dong or Peace Village a few miles from the Demilitarized Zone that separates North Korea from South Korea. The multinational troops on the South Korean side call the city “Propaganda Village.” Some of the buildings have windows painted on and other structures appear to be shells. Commander Robert Watt of the combined
Southern forces said, “North Korea created all this in hopes of persuading South Koreans to defect, as in: What a nice city. I’d like to live there” (Wharton, 2018, p. 2). Whether a complex of buildings, an office, a photograph, a logo, an Internet image, or a fake city, a visual symbol is a key to a propagandist’s desired image.
Counterpropaganda is likely in a free society where media are competitive. Where the media are completely controlled, counterpropaganda can be found underground. Underground counterpropaganda may take as many media forms as the propaganda itself. Some forms of underground counterpropaganda, such as handbills, slogans, and graffiti, are obvious, but other important forms of counterpropaganda are theater, literature, video, film, and websites. During the communist anti-American propaganda in Cold War Eastern Europe, young people adopted Western clothing and listened to forbidden American jazz in protest. They were accused of propagating degenerate American culture and arrested. Once they were branded as outlaws, they began to attract others to their cause (Applebaum, 2012, pp. 416–420).
The propagandist is influenced by past models through allusions to historical figures, methods, and impulses for current propagandistic activity. For example, the idea that freedom is worth dying for was the basis for Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech in the time of the American Revolution. The same idea provided the impulse for the anticommunist slogan “Better dead than Red” almost 200 years later. In another culture, the Middle East, present-day propaganda can be traced back to the social-historical context of the origins of Muhammadanism in the seventh century and the subsequent spread of the Islamic religion. Fourteen centuries later, Mohammed’s charge to his disciples to convert the infidels and to be willing to die fighting for the faith is often distorted by terrorist groups and forms the ideological base for a significant amount of the propagandistic content that is disseminated through modern technologies. When insurgents commit what Americans may think are “suicidal acts,” they do so believing that a death for the cause will ensure them a place on the right hand of God. Each incident of propaganda is thus historically based, yet each act of propaganda also takes place at a specific point in history and is a product of its time. It is highly unlikely that the propaganda of Adolf Hitler would have worked in Germany during a time of prosperity. Time, both past and present, shapes the internal dynamics of the model.