Signs, symbols, and media used in contemporary propaganda
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Contemporary propagandists with money and imagination can use a very wide range of signs, symbols, and media to convey their messages. Signs are simply stimuli—“information bits” capable of stimulating, in some way, the human organism. These include sounds, such as words, music, or a 21-gun salvo; gestures (a military salute, a thumbed nose); postures (a weary slump, folded arms, a sit-down, an aristocratic bearing); structures (a monument, a building); items of clothing (a uniform, a civilian suit); visual signs (a poster, a flag, a picket sign, a badge, a printed page, a commemorative postage stamp, a swastika scrawled on a wall); and so on and on.
A symbol is a sign having a particular meaning for a given reactor. Two or more reactors may of course attach quite different meanings to the same symbol. Thus, to Nazis the swastika was a symbol of racial superiority and the crushing military might of the German Volk; to some Asiatic and North American peoples it is a symbol of universal peace and happiness. Some Christians who find a cross reassuring may find a hammer and sickle displeasing and may derive no religious satisfaction at all from a Muslim crescent, a Hindu cow, or a Buddhist lotus.
The contemporary propagandist can employ elaborate social-scientific research facilities, unknown in previous epochs, to conduct opinion surveys and psychological interviews in efforts to learn the symbolic meanings of given signs for given reactors around the world and to discover what signs leave given reactors indifferent because, to them, these signs are without meaning.
Media are the means—the channels—used to convey signs and symbols to the intended reactor or reactors. A comprehensive inventory of media used in 20th- and 21st-century propaganda could cover many pages. Electronic media include e-mail, blogs, Web- or application (app)-based social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and electronic versions of originally printed media such as newspapers, magazines, and books. Printed media include, in addition to those just mentioned, letters, handbills, posters, billboards, and handwriting on walls and streets. Among audiovisual media, the Internet and television may be the most powerful for many purposes. Both can convey a great many types of signs simultaneously; they can gain heavy impact from mutually reinforcing gestures, words, postures, and sounds and a background of symbolically significant leaders, celebrities, historic settings, architectures, flags, music, placards, maps, uniforms, insignia, cheering or jeering mobs or studio audiences, and staged assemblies of prestigious or powerful people. Other audiovisual media include public speakers, movies, theatrical productions, marching bands, mass demonstrations, picketing, face-to-face conversations between individuals, and “talking” exhibits at fairs, expositions, and art shows.
The larger the propaganda enterprise, the more important are such mass media as the Internet and television and also the organizational media—that is, pressure groups set up under leaders and technicians who are skilled in using many sorts of signs and media to convey messages to particular reactors. Vast systems of diverse organizations can be established in the hope of reaching leaders and followers of all groups (organized and unorganized) in a given area, such as a city, region, nation or coalition of nations, or the entire world. Pressure organizations are especially necessary, for example, in closely fought sales campaigns or political elections, especially in socially heterogeneous areas that have extremely divergent regional traditions, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and educational levels and very unequal income distributions. Diversities of these sorts make it necessary for products to be marketed in local terms and for political candidates to appear to be friends of each of perhaps a dozen or more mutually hostile ethnic groups, of the educated and the uneducated, and of the very wealthy as well as the poverty-stricken.
Evolution of the theory of propaganda
Early commentators and theories
The archaeological remains of ancient civilizations indicate that dazzling clothing and palaces, impressive statues and temples, magic tokens and insignia, and elaborate legal and religious arguments have been used for thousands of years, presumably to convince the common people of the purported greatness and supernatural prowess of kings and priests. Instructive legends and parables, easily memorized proverbs and lists of commandments—such as the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity and the Hindu Manu-smriti (Laws of Manu)—and highly selective chronicles of rulers’ achievements have been used to enlist mass support for particular social and religious systems. Very probably, much of what was said in antiquity was sincere, in the sense that the underlying religious and social assumptions were so fully accepted that the warlords’ spokespersons, the pharaohs’ priests, and their audiences believed all or most of what was communicated and hence did not deliberate or theorize very much about alternative arguments or means of persuasion.
The systematic, detached, and deliberate analysis of propaganda—in the West, at least—may have begun in Athens about 500 bce, as the study of rhetoric (Greek: “the technique of orators”). The tricks of using sonorous and solemn language, carefully gauged humour, artful congeniality, appropriate mixtures of logical and illogical argument, and flattery of a jury or a mob were formulated from the actual practices of successful lawyers, demagogues, and politicians. Relatively ethical teachers such as Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle compiled rules of rhetoric (1) to make their own arguments and those of their students more persuasive and (2) to design counterpropaganda against opponents and also (3) to teach their students how to detect the logical fallacies and emotional appeals of demagogues.
Early students of rhetoric also examined what contemporary analysts would call the problem of source credibility—what speakers can say or do to convince their hearers that they are telling the truth, are well-intentioned, are public-spirited, and so forth. For example, an Athenian lawyer defending an undersized man on trial for murder might instruct him to say to a jury: “Is it likely that an undersized man like me, so often ridiculed for being clumsy with a sword, would have attacked and killed this very tall war veteran who is famous everywhere for his swordsmanship?” But a tall and strong defendant might be told to invert the plea: “Would any man of my unusual height, who is rather well known to have slain 300 Persians in sword fights, have allowed himself to be drawn into a quarrel with this puny man—knowing full well that a jury of reasonable Athenians would be inclined from the start to hold me guilty if someone killed him?” So well did Greek rhetoricians analyze the arts of legal sophistry and political demagoguery that their efforts were imitated and further developed in Rome by such figures as Cicero and Quintilian. Aristotle’s Rhetoric and similar works by others have, indeed, served as model texts for Western scholars and students from antiquity to the present day.
There have been similar lines of thought in other major civilizations. The Buddha in ancient India and Confucius in ancient China, both advocated, much as Plato had, the use of truthfulness, “good” rhetoric, and “proper” forms of speech and writing as means of persuading people, by both precept and example, to live the good life. In the 4th century bce in India, Kautilya, a Brahman believed to have been chief minister to the emperor Chandragupta, reputedly wrote the Artha-shastra (“The Science of Material Gain”), a book of advice for rulers that has often been compared with Plato’s Republic and Niccolò Machiavelli’s much later work The Prince (1513). Kautilya discussed, in some detail, the use of psychological warfare, both overt and clandestine, in efforts to disrupt an enemy’s army and capture his capital. Overtly, he said, the propagandists of a king should proclaim that he can do magic, that God and the wisest men are on his side, and that all who support his war aims will reap benefits. Covertly, his agents should infiltrate his enemies’ and potential enemies’ kingdoms, spreading defeatism and misleading news among their people, especially in capital cities, among leaders, and among the armed forces. In particular, a king should employ only Brahmans, unquestionably the holiest and wisest of men, as propagandists and diplomatic negotiators. These morally irreproachable experts should cultivate the goodwill of their king’s friends, and of friends of his friends, and also should woo the enemies of his enemies. A king should not hesitate, however, to break any friendships or alliances that are later found to be disadvantageous.
Similar advice is found in Bingfa (The Art of War) by the Chinese theorist Sunzi, who wrote at about the same time. “All warfare,” he said, “is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”
The spread of all complex political systems and religions probably has been very largely due to a combination of earnest conviction and the deliberate use of propaganda. This mixture can be detected in the recasting in various times and places of the legends of the messiah in Christianity and Judaism, of heroes of the Hindu Mahabharata, of the Buddha, of the ancestral Japanese sun goddess, of the lives of Muhammad and his relatives, of the Christian saints, of such Marxist heroes as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, and Joseph Stalin, and even in the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
Scattered and sometimes enlightening comment on political and religious propaganda has occurred in all major civilizations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was much writing on election tactics. In 16th-century Italy, Machiavelli discussed, very much like Kautilya and Sunzi, the uses of calculated piety and duplicity in peace and war. In Shakespeare’s plays, Mark Antony (in Julius Caesar) and the Duke of Buckingham (Richard III) display the principles of propaganda and discuss them in words and concepts that anticipate 20th-century behavioral scientists. They refer to such propaganda stratagems as the seizure and monopolization of propaganda initiatives, the displacement of guilt onto others (scapegoating), the presentation of oneself as morally superior, and the coordination of propaganda with violence and bribery.
Modern research and the evolution of current theories
After the decline of the ancient world, no elaborate systematic study of propaganda appeared for centuries—not until the Industrial Revolution had brought about mass production and raised hopes of immensely high profits through mass marketing. Near the beginning of the 20th century, researchers began to undertake studies of the motivations of many types of consumers and of their responses to various kinds of salesmanship, advertising, and other marketing techniques. From the early 1930s on, there have been “consumer surveys” much in the manner of public opinion surveys. Almost every conceivable variable affecting consumers’ opinions, beliefs, suggestibilities, and behaviour has been investigated for every kind of group, subgroup, and culture in the major capitalist nations. Consumers’ wants and habits were studied for a limited time in the same ways in the socialist countries—partly to promote economic efficiency and partly to prevent political unrest. Data on the wants and habits of voters as well as consumers are now being gathered in the same elaborate ways in many parts of the world. Beginning in the early 21st century, many Web sites (especially social networking platforms) and Internet service providers, as well as thousands of applications developed for use with browsers and smartphones, collected massive amounts of personal data about the consumers who used them, generally without their informed consent. Such data potentially included consumers’ ages, genders, marital status, medical histories, employment histories and other financial information, personal and professional interests, political affiliations and opinions, and even geographic locations on a minute-by-minute basis. The collected data was then sold to information or data brokers, who aggregated it and sold it to advertising firms, who in turn used it to identify potential customers for their corporate clients and to make their commercial messages more effective.
Large quantities of such information were also collected about voters and drawn upon for nationwide political advertising campaigns costing billions of dollars annually. Such messages have taken up a high percentage of advertising space or time on social networking platforms and other popular Web sites, in newspapers and magazines (both electronic and printed), and on radio and television. Critics have argued that advertising expenditures on such a scale, whether for deodorants or presidents, tend to waste society’s resources and also to preclude effective competition by rival producers or politicians who cannot raise equally large amounts of money. A rising tide of consumer resistance and voter skepticism has led to various attempts at consumer education, voter education, counterpropaganda, and proposals for regulatory legislation. Most such proposals in the United States have been unavailing.
As far back as the early 1920s, there developed an awareness among many social critics that the extension of the vote and of enlarged purchasing power to more and more of the ignorant or ill-educated meant larger and larger opportunities for both demagogic and public-spirited propagandists to make headway by using fictions and myths, utopian appeals, and “the noble lie.” Interest was aroused not only by the lingering horror of World War I and of the postwar settlements but also by publication of Ivan Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned reflexes and of analyses of human motivations by various psychoanalysts. Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922) was particularly relevant to the study of leaders, propagandists, and followers, as were Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).
In 1927, an American political scientist, Harold D. Lasswell, published a now-famous book, Propaganda Technique in the World War, a dispassionate description and analysis of the massive propaganda campaigns conducted by all the major belligerents in World War I. This he followed with studies of communist propaganda and of many other forms of communication. Within a few years, a great many other social scientists, along with historians, journalists, and psychologists, were producing a wide variety of publications purporting to analyze military, political, and commercial propaganda of many types. During the Nazi period and during World War II and the subsequent Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, a great many researchers and writers, both skilled and unskilled, scholarly and unscholarly, were employed by governments, political movements, and business firms to conduct propaganda. Some of those who had scientific training designed very carefully controlled experiments or intelligence operations, attempting to quantify data on appeals of various types of propaganda to given reactors.
In the course of this theory building and research, the study of propaganda advanced a long way on the road from lore to science. By the second half of the 20th century, several hundred more or less scholarly books and thousands of articles had shed substantial light on the psychology, techniques, and effects of propaganda campaigns, major and minor.
Eventually nearly every significant government, political party, interest group, social movement, and large business firm in the advanced countries developed its own corps of specialized researchers, propagandists, or “opinion managers” (sometimes referred to as information specialists, lobbyists, legislative representatives, or vice presidents in charge of public relations). Some have become members of parliaments, cabinets, and corporate boards of directors. The most expert among them sometimes are highly skilled or trained, or both, in history, psychiatry, politics, social psychology, survey research, and statistical inference.
Many of the bigger and wealthier propaganda agencies conduct (overtly and covertly) elaborate observations and opinion surveys, among samples of the leaders, the middle strata, and the rank and file of all social groups, big and little, whom they hope to influence. They tabulate many kinds of data concerning those contents of the Internet, the press, films, television, and organizational media that reach given groups. They chart the responses of reactors, through time, by statistical formulas. They conduct “symbol campaigns” and “image-building” operations with mathematical calculation, using large quantities of data. To the ancient art of rhetoric, the “technique of orators,” have been added the techniques of the psychopolitical analyst and the media specialist and the know-how of the administrators of giant advertising agencies, public relations firms, and governmental ministries of information that employ armies of analytic specialists and “symbol-handlers.”
It is a commonplace among the highly educated that people in the mass—and even people on high educational and social levels—often react more favourably to utopian myths, wishful thinking, and nonrational residues of earlier experiences than they do to the sober analysis of facts. Unfortunately, average citizens who may be aware of being duped are not likely to have enough education, time, or economic means to defend themselves against the massive organizations of opinion managers and hidden persuaders. Indeed, to affect them they would have to act through large organizations themselves and to use, to some extent, the very means used by those they seek to control. The still greater “curse of bigness” that may evolve in the future is viewed with increasing concern by many politically conscious people.
