Propaganda

“ And now we sadly suspect that in fighting fire with fire, that is in fighting propaganda with propaganda, we descended by degrees to use the same despicable methods of distorting truth for the sake of influencing people to a certain desired end. ”

“ I have often thought during these past years what an ironical eye Providence must have been turning on National Propaganda—on all the disingenuous breath which has been issued to order, and all those miles of patriotic writings dutifully produced in each country, to prove to other countries that they are its inferiors! ”

“ We have discussed the pros and cons of propaganda—the propaganda, that is to say, by each master of his particular point of view—and have concluded that, if certain safeguards are adopted and honestly adhered to, such propaganda is desirable. But there is one particular form of propaganda which no one, if he has any reverence at all for the individuality of his pupils and the freedom of the world, can regard as anything but an abomination. And here we meet with the most serious criticism which can be, and has been, levelled against the project of political education. ”

“ You can dislike an interpretation; you can kill a man for believing it; you can propagandize him out of believing it; but you cannot sit down and prove that it is untrue. Facts and logic are useful in propaganda, but they cannot be elevated to the point where you can say, "Is it propaganda or is it true?" Almost all good propaganda—no matter what kind—is true. ”

“ Above all, we must renounce the propaganda psychosis, and we must admit that even good propaganda is never literature and that even great literature is seldom propaganda. We have those, of course, who will rise to point out that such and such a book or novel or play was excellent propaganda for such and such a cause or event. ”

“ We mention these facts of every day life to illustrate the permeating and driving force of an idea, when constantly kept before the mind. And what advertisement and fashion are in the commercial and social life, Propaganda and Publicity are in the world of thought. The policy of propaganda is to enlist the active co-operation of every vehicle of thought for the furtherance of an idea and to keep that idea ever before the public. One readily sees the tremendous responsibilities, and understands the flagrant abuses of those called to create and direct Public Opinion. ”

“ There never in any land was any propaganda so cynical, so unblushing as the propaganda that for weary weeks has now screamed in our ears—'No Change.' The blood of four dread years, and then—'No Change!' The agony of the world's most awful Gethsemane, and at its end—'No Change!' ... ”

“ Since War and Navy Department usage never put the Corps of Chaplains, the PX system, the safety campaigns, or the anti-VD announcements under the rubric of propaganda, it might be desirable to narrow down the definition to exclude those forms of propaganda designed to effect private or nonpolitical purposes, and make the definition read:
Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or mass-produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military, economic, or political. ”

“ All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda. ”

“ The objective of a propaganda is to promote the interests of those who contrive it, rather than to benefit those to whom it is addressed; in advertisement to sell an article; in publicity to state a case; in politics to forward a policy; in war to bring victory. This differentiates it from the diffusion of useful knowledge; the evangel of a mission ”

“ Propaganda, indeed, makes strange bed-fellows. In this new praetorian guard of the temple of American patriotism are found the Hearst newspapers, an element of the Knights of Columbus and of the Irish-Americans, the German-Americans, and finally patriotic societies of this country. ”

“ Destroy radically belief in chiefs and leaders, parliaments and public unions, newspapers and workers’ federations, exploiters and exploited;
See to it, in a word, without relaxation, that those to whom our propaganda is addressed are turned into irreconcilable enemies, theoretical and practical, of all domination and exploitation of man by man or by his environment. ”

“ With its centuries of experience this is probably the most efficient organization for propaganda in the world. Probably most apologetics is propaganda. No religion and no age has been entirely free from it. ”

“ In order to find understanding among the masses, we consciously practiced a popular [volksgebundene] propaganda. We have taken complexes of facts which were formerly accessible only to a few specialists and experts, carried them to the streets, and hammered them into the brain of the little man. ”

“ The manufacturers, on the other hand, will call such material “propaganda” and blame either the newspaper which publishes those figures or the economist who compiled them, or the public relations counsel who advised collating the material.
The only difference between “propaganda” and “education,” really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda. Each of these nouns carries with it social and moral implications. Education is valuable, commendable, enlightening, instructive. ”

“ This is no spontaneous and vague uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people -- a blind and instinctive recoil from hurt. On the contrary, the propaganda is intellectual; the movement is based upon economic necessity and is in line with social evolution; while the miserable people have not yet revolted. ”

“ The same is true, as far as I know, of all my fellow workers, but I do not by any means want to deny that I and my fellow workers selected news and quotations following a certain tendency. It is the curse of propaganda during war that one works only with black and white. Only a few great minds remain independent. ”

“ What forms is the propaganda to take? Every form that is prescribed by the situation, by opportunity, and propensity. It may be now serious, now jocular; but it must always be bold. It must never leave [179] a means unused, never leave a fact of public life unobserved, to keep minds alert, to give aliment and expression to discontent, to stir hate against exploiters, to make the government ridiculous, and to demonstrate its impotence. But above all, to arouse boldness and the spirit of insurrection, it must continually preach by example. ”

“ More subtle, and more dangerous, is the insidious propaganda everywhere disseminated to poison the public mind and produce a general spirit of suspicion and depression. The country is permeated with whispers. ”

“ I observe even in railway trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda, unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-report. And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news from propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to send forth from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our state. ”

“ With my prejudice it is natural that I should suggest the Liberty Bell as a positive symbol of the thing we fight for. It is possible to draw its form on a wall—not to ward off evil, but to inspire fortitude.
Propaganda must be independent. It is a fighting arm ”

“ The tremendous forces of propaganda are now common property. They are available for the unscrupulous and the destructive as well as for the constructive and the moral. This gives us a new interest in its technique, namely, to inquire if anywhere there is an opportunity for regulative and protective interference with its indiscriminate exploitation. ”

“ Technical writings on visual education, religious conversion, labor organization, practical politics, revolutionary agitation, and on commercial advertising have frequent bearing on propaganda analysis.
Propaganda cannot be analyzed in a logical vacuum. Every step in the operation is intensely practical. There is nothing timeless about it, other than that common sense which is based on the nature of man. ”

“ The Direction of Public Opinion is the ultimate triumph of propaganda. This is obtained when our principles pass into the warp and woof of the social textures which are always in the making on the great loom of our nation's life. Ideas have their full value when they are extended to social and political issues. ”

“ A good argument can be presented to the effect that the skills brought from the social-science into the propaganda field are more valuable once they are employed full time in that field than an attempt to apply political science, or sociology, or economics, each as an individual compartment, to the field of propaganda. ”

“ Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings. ”

“ The new psychological warfare, a cause as well as a means of World War II, arose from the subjection of other considerations to propaganda. The propaganda addict takes everything with a ton of salt; what he does believe is lost in what he doesn't believe. The ordinary controls of civilized life—regard for truth, regard for law, respect for neighbors, obedience to good manners, love of God—cease to operate effectively, because the propaganda-dizzy man sees in everything its propaganda content and nothing else. ”

“ I have been reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open propaganda. ”

“ Is it possible that a few pious phrases offered on occasion can deceive the American people as to the nature of a propaganda organization that is shouting from the housetops in every corner of the country and every day of the year? ”

“ It is useful to know what the enemy propagandist thinks he is doing, what he considers the obstacles to his propaganda. Such considerations inevitably get to be embodied in the [Pg 128] propaganda itself. A tone of extreme defiance, poor international cooperation, war bluster and so on may often spring from the desire to divert a hungry or discontented home public from its real worries at home to imaginary worries abroad. ”

“ But the propaganda genie, having emerged from its bottle in clouds of smoke and dirt, entirely refuses to subside now the struggle is over. It is one of the horrid forces with vitality derived from the war which continues to pursue an independent existence. ”

“ The present writer has for twenty-one years been carrying on a propaganda for Socialism, and has a sturdy conviction that his time has not been wasted.
We take certain opinions and courses of action for granted; they come to us easily, and when in a poem or other work of art we encounter the advocacy of such things, it does not seem to us propaganda. Take, for example, that favorite theme of poets, the following of our natural impulses; it is pleasant to do this, and the poet who gives such advice awakens no opposition. ”

“ It must be said, however, that propaganda by any other name is just as sweet, and that the conviction of the propagandist that he is not a propagandist can be a real asset. Morale services provided the American forces with news, entertainment, and educational facilities. Most of the time these morale facilities had huge parasitical audiences—the global kibitzers who listened to our broadcasts, read our magazines, bought our paper-bound books on the black markets. ”

“ Propaganda, conducted by the means which advertisers have found successful, is now one of the recognized methods of government in all advanced countries, and is especially the method by which democratic opinion is created.
There are two quite different evils about propaganda as now practised. On the one hand, its appeal is generally to irrational causes of belief rather than to serious argument; on the other hand, it gives an unfair advantage to those who can obtain most publicity, whether through wealth or through power. ”

“ It was significant that the art of propaganda, perfected to the point of art by the original perpetrators of the war, should become the means of showing us the wondrous shape of things to come.
So well indoctrinated were our people, so thoroughly documented had we become, that it occurred to many to venture opinions on the state of man in this almost perfect state of the future. It was obvious, even to the prophets, that man would engage in activities other than pushing buttons to start and to stop things, to change climate or a record, to launch a war, a ship or a new hydro-electric plant. ”

“ But it is still more difficult to stop, or even to lessen, such propaganda once it has been started, because the preliminary condition for any active propaganda work is that a large number of individual persons and organizations should be interested in it. ”

“ Propaganda.—Our system of education turns young people out of the schools able to read, but for the most part unable to weigh evidence or to form an independent opinion. They are then assailed, throughout the rest of their lives, by statements designed to make them believe all sorts of absurd propositions, such as that Blank's pills cure all ills, that Spitzbergen is warm and fertile, and that Germans eat corpses. The art of propaganda, as practised by modern politicians and governments, is derived from the art of advertisement. The science of psychology owes a great deal to advertisers. ”

“ Our policy of aggressiveness, if it be true and resolute, will find expression in an intelligent, active and persevering propaganda. Propaganda is the dissemination of ideas, with the view of giving them a strong foothold in the mind. The gradual development of the message it carries and the recurrence of its lessons at stated intervals are the principal factors of this great force. To be efficient and successful our propaganda among our non-Catholic brethren will assume two distinct forms: The open and the silent form. ”