Propaganda

Propaganda is "any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly". Governments have always tried to control people. Those in authority want control of the people’s hearts, minds and allegiances, and block or censor dissident voices. Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds: the battlefield and the minds of the people via propaganda. The “good guys” and the “bad guys” can often both be guilty of misleading their people with distortions, exaggerations, subjectivity, inaccuracy and even fabrications, in order to receive support and a sense of legitimacy. The good guise and the bad guise. Black and white. A fight for supremacy, for government. The king is dead, long live the king. We can learn how their game is played for how to deal with (counteract) these propaganda wars .

In western nations, where most people believe propaganda happens in other nations, people are in for a surprise. The military-industrial-machine is rife with propaganda, and it is not always easy to detect, or when detected, to find the source of it, and why it is done.

The term “propaganda” first came into common use in Europe as a result of Pope Gregory XV creating the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. This was a commission of cardinals charged with spreading the faith and regulating church affairs in heathen lands. A College of Propaganda was set up to train priests for the missions. The word came into common use again when World War I began.

No matter the word used, the battle for our minds is as old as human history. The Greeks had games, theater, assembly, law courts, and festivals for propagandising ideas and beliefs. The conflict between kings and Parliament in England was a struggle in which propaganda was involved. Propaganda was one of the weapons used in the movement for American independence, and in the French Revolution.

War propaganda

Propaganda of some sort has been used in warfare for centuries. But all the social, economic, industrial, and military factors that make propaganda a large-scale part of war, first made themselves seriously felt in World War I when it became a formal branch of many governments in the form of institutions such as the British Ministry of Information, the German Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, the American Committee on Public Information (in World War I), the Office of War Information (in World War II), and their counterparts in many other countries.

The function of war propaganda is to picture military successes on the propagandist’s side, project armed might and economic power the adversary has to face, and the moral superiority of the cause against which the adversary is fighting. And to inform the people back home with a free flow of information that stimulates the war effort, strengthens the nation to hold steadfast through a long conflict, to take losses courageously, to make sacrifices bravely, to buy bonds generously, and to cooperate in every way possible in the great national effort for victory.

Perception management

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered “perception management” to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and accept more U.S. interventionism, but that propaganda structure continues to this day getting the public to buy into endless war …

Rewriting history

Most (if not all) of the techniques used in rewriting history (revisionism) are for deception or denial and vary from using forged documents (the fog) as genuine sources (or inventing reasons to distrust genuine documents), to exploiting opinions by taking them out of their historical context.

Disinformation

Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.

Countermoves

Learn how propaganda works to detect it. Then counteract propaganda with propaganda without becoming the petty tyrant you fight. And authorities can not stand not being taken serious.

Related

• Covert operations
• Psychological warfare

News and watchdogs

• FAIR
• PR Watch
• SpinWatch

Books

Fallacies

• How to Detect Propaganda (pdf) - Adapted from: The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1937 http://www.mindivogel.com/uploads/1/1/3/9/11394148/how_to_detect_propaganda.pdf
• Love is a Fallacy (pdf) - story by by Max Shulman p.10 https://www.dartmouth.edu/~aporia/spring08.pdf
• Propaganda and debating techniques http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-propaganda.html

Sleeper Effect

• The Influence of Speaker Credibility on Information Recall (pdf) - Michael E. Corrie http://www.uwlax.edu/urc/JUR-online/PDF/2003/corrie.pdf
• Detecting and Explaining the Sleeper Effect (pdf) - Darlene B. Hannah & Brian Sternthal http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.455.3259&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• The Sleeper Effect in Persuasion: A Meta-Analytic Review (pdf) - Tarcan Kumkale and Dolores Albarracın http://home.ku.edu.tr/~tkumkale/sleeper.pdf