dence, accusations that Iran has been pursuing a weapons-oriented nuclear program
have currently been treated as accepted fact by mainstream media, including Rupert
Murdoch’s The Times of London and the New York Times.2 Sanctions have been
implemented against Iran and stronger sanctions threatened, with Iran responding by
counter threats. There are some alarming similarities with the pre-World War I highly
propagandized environment, with the important difference that computer-assisted
modern warfare may allow little or no time for populations to curb war-provoking
decisions of their leaders. Renewed brinksmanship, supported by propaganda, brings
renewed fears of war by miscalculation. We have a strong incentive to prevent such
miscalculation by recognizing and countering the propaganda that makes such situ-
ations possible. Hence an important incentive to examine propaganda in its many
dimensions.
The art of mass persuasion is embedded in contemporary societies, those of
liberal and neo-conservative democracies included. Public relations methods are
intertwined with all major functions of modern life. During the 1930s, President
Roosevelt pioneered the use of radio for gaining public support for his progressive
programs through his so-called fireside chats. Today, whether one deals with Exxon or
Greenpeace, with multinational corporations, the coalition that disrupted the World
Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999, and more recently the “Occupy Wall
Street” movement that began on September 27, 2011, techniques of mass persuasion
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are involved. From the viewpoint of discourse analysis, there is little reason to speak of “propaganda” on only one side of a hotly contested issue when both sides are using
techniques of persuasion to the hilt. We can sympathize with those charged with gov-
erning a country who see that a campaign of information dissemination is needed to
forestall poorly grounded opposition to much-needed action. Only when there is full
appreciation of the need and justification for some forms of public information can
there be a properly measured response to the ubiquitous phenomenon of propaganda
in today’s world.
It may well be thought that with the arrival of the Internet the heyday of propa-
ganda is over. We do not have to listen to some official party line about, say, a conflict
in the Balkans. We can go to a website operated by Serbs, Croatians, Albanians, etc.
Search engines put us in touch with our choice of official, heterodox, or iconoclastic
viewpoints. Although it is true that the Internet has provided us with a very different
communications world, it is premature to suppose that the power of propaganda will
be lessened. First, not everyone can afford to make full use of the resources offered by
the Internet. Some lack the computer hardware, others cannot afford the monthly
fee charged by a service provider. Those who are online may lack the time or the spe-
cialized knowledge to know or find out who is telling the truth about, for example,
issues such as anthropogenic climate change or genetically modified organisms. We
can access many different points of view, but do we know the credentials of those
expressing them?
The primary objectives of this book are to define what is meant by propaganda, to
assist in understanding how it works, and to come to grips with ethical problems sur-
rounding its use. The specific media may change, but principles of human nature have
remained fairly constant over the millennia. We can learn from studying techniques
used in ancient Greece and Rome. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, among
others, catalogued and analyzed the rhetorical art. Also, because so much in the way
of opinion-shaping goes on in areas other than war and revolution, it seems inadvis-
able to restrict the focus of this study to the most obvious and reprehensible uses of
propaganda in politics. Advertising and public relations are two other areas of interest.
The definition of “propaganda” is not settled, though the use of this word is as cur-
term is too exclusive. We want to study communication practices that mislead people,
that get them to do things they would not do were they adequately informed. The extent
to which the term “propaganda” can be defined to include al such cases is a matter for
argument—the objective is not to hit upon a satisfactory definition for its own sake, but
to understand and evaluate the overall phenomenon of mass persuasion, particularly
the sort where a persuadee comes to feel, or should come to feel, deceived as a result of
succumbing to a deceptive message.
This form of evaluation amounts to an ethics of persuasion and brings into play
questions of means and ends, truth-telling, deception and integrity, and suchlike. The
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ethical questions lead into ethical-political matters, such as whether to have legal controls over deception in communication or to have laws that discourage a small minor-
ity from effectively controlling systems of communication on which the majority
must rely for political awareness. These will be dealt with in due course. It should be
acknowledged that much of the inspiration for this work derives from the powerful,
penetrating, and wide-ranging work of Jacques El ul, the “Bordeaux prophet” as he has
been called. There will be many references to his work in what follows.
DEFInITIon
There are many definitions, explicit and implicit, of the term “propaganda.” In some
ways the term has been discredited for serious analytical purposes, but it continues
to be part of the arsenal in wars of words. It is common to identify an opponent’s
communications as propaganda while maintaining that only one’s own side is telling
the truth. There is a strong association, in English-speaking countries, between the
word “propaganda” and the ideas of lying or deception. This association may date
from the time when a committee of (mainly) cardinals was convened by Pope Gregory
XV in 1622, primarily to oversee missionary activity. It was called the Congregatio de
Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), continuing a name
given to meetings of Pope Gregory XIII with three cardinals in 1572–85 with a view
to combating the Reformation.3 Protestants no doubt would have viewed the term
negatively. Early usage of “propaganda” referred to the committee itself rather than
to its activity. Later it came to be applied to the activity of spreading either faith or
political doctrines.
In Latin countries, where “propaganda” means advertising, the word is less con-
nected to the idea of sinister manipulation, although it is, of course, likely to be affected in time by one’s perceptions of what is propagated. In more recent years it has been taken
to mean, according to Webster’s Third International Dictionary, “dissemination of ideas, information or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause or a
person.” But this characterization of “propaganda” as neutral misses its negative conno-
tation. Politicians and bureaucrats generally avoid using the term to describe their own
activities, tending to reserve it for those of their opponents, although the difference may
not be perceptible to an unbiased third party.
Lenin and Goebbels did not mind applying the term “propaganda” to describe
their attempts to mould opinion. The Allies in both world wars characterized such
opinion-forming activity by the enemy as propaganda and treated it as largely com-
posed of lies, while their own information dissemination was treated as the truth.
Exceptions exist: Winston Churchill’s information officer, Brendan Bracken, among
other officials, openly avowed his work as propaganda and defended the use of “good
propaganda” against “bad propaganda.”4 That strategy can work under the right
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circumstances, where attention is focused on the question of definition. Otherwise, it is wiser to accept that in public consciousness there wil be, for the most part, a connotation of deception or manipulation in English language usage.
Kinds of Definition
Descriptive Definition
Before embarking on the task of examining and evaluating different definitions of pro-
paganda, it is worth reflecting first on the nature of definition itself. Sometimes we
do not know the meaning of a word, and we go to the dictionary to look it up, or we
ask someone whom we have found knowledgeable about such things. Or we have in
mind one meaning of a term but sense that some speaker is making use of a different
meaning. The word “consumerism” in the late 1960s came to mean the movement to
ensure better value and safety in consumer products, such as automobiles, edible goods,
clothing, and suchlike. Later the term came to be used in a different way to refer to the
propensity to consume to excess. To clarify meanings we can ask the speaker, consult
someone likely to be familiar with the term, or look up the word in a dictionary. The
problem with dictionaries is that they tend to be out of date regarding very recent word
adaptations or coinages. For this, a good search engine is likely to be more helpful, for
example, by putting the word, together with “definition,” into Google.
Descriptions of word usages can vary in terms of accuracy, completeness, and
overall truth. Dr. Samuel Johnson famously made an error in his lexicon when he gave
the meaning of “pastern” as “the knee of a horse.” When a lady asked why he defined
the word that way, he replied, “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” It is a feature of
descriptive definitions that they be true or false, adequate or inadequate, comprehen-
sive or limited.
Stipulative Definition
Different from descriptive definitions are those in which a person does not lay claim
to describing or reporting how others use a particular word but rather announces or
stipulates that this is how he or she will be using it. Anyone can stipulate any meaning for a term. Although clearly useful in science, stipulations can also be confusing and
misleading. When a word such as “pacifism” is stipulated to apply to certain behaviour
in rats, it is easy to suppose that experiments with these rats tell us something about
pacifism in general. Yet, they do no such thing, unless there is independent evidence
to link the stipulated behaviour to what we would recognize as pacifism in our human
behaviour, since that is what the word in its ordinary application is all about.
Although stipulative definitions are not true or false, they may be good or bad,
advisable or inadvisable, helpful or confusing. They may also be deliberately used for
the purpose of confusing people and for furthering propaganda aims. For example,
a government might stipulate that people who have been unemployed for a certain
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length of time are no longer to be considered in the labour market and therefore are not to be classed among the “unemployed.” It is not difficult to see how a government could “improve” its unemployment record by altering the stipulated criteria in
the definition of unemployment. It would be easy to “eliminate” poverty by defining
poverty at such a low income level that in order to be poor you would have to be
starving to death (and thereby soon removing yet another statistic on the poor side
of the ledger).
Hegemonic Definition
The preceding example suggests the need for a new name for the kind of definition
where the definers seek to impose their will on others through control over language
usage. Borrowing from Gramsci and Michel Foucault’s ideas about hegemonic dis-
course, we might call this definition “hegemonic definition.” Lewis Carroll provides
a very concise expression of this kind of definition in the dialogue between Humpty-
Dumpty and Alice in Through the Looking Glass.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just
what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many dif-
ferent things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s al .”5
The grim reality of this kind of definition can be found when the State, through leg-
islation and interpretation in its courts, defines words such as “terrorism” in ways that
suit its political and military purposes rather than following consistently any reason-
ably acceptable understanding of the term, or defines “torture” (when referring to its
own practices) narrowly, with a view to avoiding the perception that it is in violation
of international law. We have more to say about distortion of meanings in connection
with George Orwell below.
Not all attempts to redefine words are hegemonic. Sometimes words are defined
in ways that seek either to give greater coherence to existing usage or to give us greater
insight into the nature of objects referred to by a term. One name often given to this
form of definition is rational reconstruction. Another is real definition. As an example of the latter, the definition of a human being as a “rational, self-reflecting, conceptu-alizing and artistically expressive animal” attempts (successfully or unsuccessfully)
to pick out what is “really” or “essentially” human. Definitions of what constitutes
a human being can and often do have a political impact (consider Karl Marx’s early
treatment of the idea of human essence as species being). But if such inquiries are
motivated by concern for truth, as distinct from being a convenient means for moti-
vating people to change existing political structures, they would not constitute hege-
monic definition, or what we might otherwise identify as propaganda.
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Persuasive Definition
Worthy of special attention in the context of trying to define “propaganda” is
what Charles Stevenson, in his
influential Ethics and Language, called “persuasive definition.” When hotly disputed matters are at stake, people often make use of
definitions that tend to favour their side of a given argument. We need to recognize
that language has uses other than mere description: it can exhort, evaluate, threaten,
and express emotions. As Stevenson analyzes persuasive definition, it involves taking
a word with a high emotive content and altering its descriptive content “usually by
giving it greater precision within the boundaries of its customary vagueness” but with-
out making “any substantial change to the term’s emotive meaning.” This definition is used, consciously or unconsciously, “to secure, by this interplay between emotive and
descriptive meaning, a redirection of people’s attitudes.”6Not surprisingly, then, a term
such as “democratic” which has a favourable emotive sense today, is likely to be defined
differently in an ideological defence of socialism from the way it would be defined
by a defender of capitalist ideology. The socialist is likely to lean towards definitions
that stress equality in some form, while the capitalist is more likely to emphasize free-
dom, such as the freedom to engage in commercial contracts without government
interference.
Definitions can be persuasive in other ways than that described by Stevenson.
Instead of leaving the emotive content unaffected, one can choose descriptive words
that create in an audience an emotional or cognitive reaction desired by the one doing
the persuasive defining. The words chosen may be emotive and tendentious, but if they
have some plausibility, the audience may be affected in the way desired. As an example,
consider Patrick Hurley’s two illustrative definitions of “Liberal”—one directed at cre-
ating opposition to liberalism, the other at favouring it.
1. “Liberal” means a drippy-eyed do-gooder obsessed with giving away other people’s
money.
2. “Liberal” means a genuine humanitarian committed to the goals of adequate hous-
ing and health care and of equal opportunity for all of our citizens.7
A characterization presented in a form that resembles a definition can have great
impact, as with Oscar Wilde’s humorous reference to foxhunting as “the unspeakable