John Brown: Subtlety is one of the paradoxes of propaganda
[John Brown is a former diplomat who compiles the Public Diplomacy Press Review, available free upon request at www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/pdpr]
When I give my course, "Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Policy" -- 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," a 1935 film -- considered by some a propaganda classic -- that celebrates the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.
As the students ate 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 Bush's "mission accomplished" landing on the aircraft carrier Lincoln.
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, "The way to carry out good propaganda is never to appear to be carrying it out at all." Or, as John Pike, the director of a Washington defense think tank, puts it, "Anybody who knows about propaganda knows the first rule of propaganda is that it should not look like propaganda."
"When you are persuaded by something," says Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross, "you don't think it is propaganda." As the White House, the Pentagon -- and we -- should note, this is one of the paradoxes of propaganda: The best propaganda doesn't appear to be propaganda. ...
Read entire article at San Francisco Chronicle
When I give my course, "Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Policy" -- 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," a 1935 film -- considered by some a propaganda classic -- that celebrates the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.
As the students ate 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 Bush's "mission accomplished" landing on the aircraft carrier Lincoln.
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, "The way to carry out good propaganda is never to appear to be carrying it out at all." Or, as John Pike, the director of a Washington defense think tank, puts it, "Anybody who knows about propaganda knows the first rule of propaganda is that it should not look like propaganda."
"When you are persuaded by something," says Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross, "you don't think it is propaganda." As the White House, the Pentagon -- and we -- should note, this is one of the paradoxes of propaganda: The best propaganda doesn't appear to be propaganda. ...