The Party is kept in power by judicious reconstruction of the records to give full
support to whatever policy it favours at a given time. A Party slogan is: “Who controls
the past controls the future.” Another, “Ignorance is strength,” means that, by effac-
ing inconvenient memories, it is possible to be devoted all the more strongly to the
cause of the moment. That is why doublethink is so important. As Goldstein wrote:
“Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc [short for English Socialism, the name
of the ruling party], since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception
while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.”
Essays
Orwell’s nostalgic love of things rural, which is evident in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as in his choice of living in seclusion on a Scottish island, combines with other
features of his thinking to impress some with a view of him as a Tory anarchist. But to
be passionately anti-Stalin and to be apprehensive about the possibility of socialism
heading in that direction is not the same as to be anti-socialist. There was an egalitar-
ian streak in Orwell, which emerged in his support of the working class, even though
his relatively privileged upbringing led him to recoil against the living habits of many
sections of the class whose interests he championed. Like Camus, Orwell was moti-
vated by an ethic of solidarity with the human race, leading him to choose for a while
a life of poverty in London and Paris, about which he wrote knowledgeably. Orwell
had his baggage of prejudices, against Roman Catholics (Irish in particular) and gays,
for example. G.K. Chesterton, who was not Irish, excited his great antipathy, perhaps
because Chesterton was so adept at using words in defence of causes Orwell opposed
and in ways that Orwell objected to, as explained in his essay Notes on Nationalism.
Curiously, Chesterton and Orwell both opposed modern technology, were attracted
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to the traditional British way of life and the countryside, and were passionate lovers of words, genuine insight, and novel forms of expression. Both hated jargon, especially
the use of acronyms divorced from the etymologies of words. They both revered lan-
guage as a revealer of historical continuity. Both were at one time propagandists for
the state, Chesterton in World War I and Orwell in radio broadcasts to India in World
War II. One of Orwell’s earliest writings appeared in a publication by Chesterton.
Entitled “A Farthing Newspaper,” the article deals with corporate influence on public
opinion through the news media, a concern that Chesterton shared.40
Orwell’s essays provide penetrating insights into the nature and power of propa-
ganda. One of his earliest, “Boys’ Weeklies,” describes the way imperialist ideology was
instilled in young minds through adventure stories and comic books, such as Gem and
Magnet. One of the offensive things he notes is the stereotyping of other nationalities, usually in uncomplimentary ways, with frequent use of derogatory epithets, such as
“Froggies” and “Dagoes.” The working class was also treated in comic fashion or as semi-
villains: “As for class-friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism
and civil war—not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years’ issue of the two
papers you might perhaps find the word ‘socialism,’ but you would have to look a long
time for it.” A little later, he observes that the clock in these weekly magazines stopped
at 1910, when “Britannia rules the waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unem-
ployment, dictatorships, purges or concentration camps.” The impact of the boys’ weekly
magazines was a transmission of values appropriate to capitalist, imperialist Britain to an
extent greater than people might suspect. Orwell writes:
Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen
by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including
many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they
are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the
Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly,
do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern
which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe
that this is unintentional.41
I have put the comment “All the better because it is done indirectly” in italics because
Orwell here touches on themes central to our concerns: the most effective propaganda
is not recognized as such, and its message is often best presented obliquely.
In his essay Notes on Nationalism,42 Orwell describes a certain form of closed-
mindedness that has an affinity with propaganda. He uses a persuasive definition for
the word nationalism (as he recognizes and states at the outset), including within its
scope such things as Communism, “political Catholicism,” and the more amorphous
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concepts of anti-Semitism, Trotskyism, and pacifism. In this, he has usefully spelled out a recognizable and significant phenomenon that deserves to have a name,
even though calling it nationalism is confusing. In his definition, it involves obses-
sion, instability, and indifference to reality. It is a mentality, he says, that excludes
or deforms the truth. (Perhaps a better word for what he is describing would be
“fanaticism.”) It assumes that human beings can be classified in the same way we clas-
sify insects and that millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.”
Depending on what form of nationalism a person adopts, certain facts will be found
unpalatable and therefore not acceptable. For example, the pro-Soviet finds it hard to
admit the truth of the Stalin-induced famine in the Ukraine in 1933. The anti-Semite
finds unbelievable the fact that six million Jews were systematically murdered by gas,
bullets, or other means by the Nazis during World War II.
Nationalism, for Orwell, is the “habit of identifying oneself with a single nation
or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that
of advancing its interests.” He distinguishes nationalism in this sense from patriotism.
Patriotism involves devotion to a place and way of life, but in Orwell’s view it lacks the
“wish to force others to adopt this.” Nationalism, by contrast, is “inseparable from the
desire for power.” The nationalist becomes so preoccupied with advancing the unit to
which devotion is given that objective treatment of things affecting their basic value
is impossible. Literature opposing a particular person’s nationalism is treated as bad
literature regardless of its literary merit. Inconsistencies coexist in the nationalist mind, as portrayed by Orwell. The nationalist “spends part of his time in a fantasy world in
which thin
gs happen as they should—in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was
a success or the Russian revolution was crushed in 1918—and he will transfer fragments
of this world to the history books whenever possible.”43One can see today something
of this “nationalist” spirit in the so-called Tea Party movement in the United States,
which builds on a largely mythical treatment of the historic “Boston Tea Party” to enlist
patriotic feelings against government power, particularly regulation. The package of
arguments in support of freedom from government presents taxation as the enemy
of freedom while overlooking the benefits produced by taxation, such as regulations
designed to protect investors’ interests from being undermined by insider trading and
other abuses. Public works and programs provide the infrastructure, including roads,
sewer systems, education, etc., that allows private enterprise to flourish. Agitators
against the “socialism” of increased government involvement in public health care
sometimes forget that Medicare and Medicaid were and are government initiatives. The
nationalist spirit of the Tea Party group also tends to look uncritically at government
military expenditures, including weapons of mass destruction.44 “Jesus loves nukes”45
aptly conveys the simplicity of mindset that a studied appreciation of the life and teach-
ings of Jesus along with Christian Just War theory would surely repudiate or find deeply
problematic. That the spirit of “Tea Party” nationalism has been deliberately fostered
by corporate interests, including funding from the billionaire oil (and other interests)
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magnates, Charles and David Koch, has been nicely documented in Taki Oldham’s, (Astro)Turf Wars, also called The Billionaires’ Tea Party.46
One of Orwell’s most frequently cited essays concerning propaganda is “Politics
and the English Language.” Just as many of his works lament the perversion of lan-
guage in the service of political or commercial ends, here his aim is to rescue good
English for its own sake and for the sake of clear thinking. Fighting propaganda means
fighting mental laziness. “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad
habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take
the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to
think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight
against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional
writers.” An example of lazy thinking is the misuse of metaphors, turning them into
clichés which no longer have evocative power. For instance, the expression “toe the
line” conveys the idea that everyone must stand with their toes touching a given line,
as runners do before the starting pistol goes off; writing this as “tow the line” shows a
failure to grasp the sense of the original imagery. A second source of fuzzy thinking is
the elimination of simple verbs in favour of extended phrases. Everyone understands
the word “kill” and its negative connotations. This truth is obscured by using phrases
such as “terminate with extreme prejudice” (meaning to assassinate) or the Gulf War’s
“collateral damage.” Pretentious diction, meaningless words, and use of double or
triple negatives are also denounced in Orwell’s essay.
Orwell saw the political speechmaking of his own time as a defence of the inde-
fensible, in which euphemisms, question-begging, and “sheer cloudy vagueness”
played a large part. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabit-
ants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire
with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”47 The extraordinary thing about this observation is that exactly the same word for exactly the same kind of activity
was used in the Vietnam War many years later. Euphemisms still abound in bureau-
cratic tracts; the Central Intelligence Agency’s manual, Psychological Operations in
Guerilla Warfare, uses the word “neutralize” in a context where “kill” is a synonym
by inference. The manual was designed for CIA operatives in Nicaragua during the
early 1980s, and members of the Armed Propaganda Teams, as they were called, were
told, “It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court
judges, police and state security officials, etc. For psychological purposes, it is neces-
sary to take extreme precautions, and it is absolutely necessary to gather together the
population affected, so that they will be present, take part in the act, and formulate
accusations against the oppressor.”48 Orwell’s rules for clarity include the elimination
of any nonfunctional word; the use of the active voice instead of the passive wherever
possible (further attention to “deleted agent of the passive” is provided in Chapter 4
below); and the replacement of foreign phrases, scientific words, or jargon if an every-
day English equivalent is possible.
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Jacques Ellul
There is probably no other thinker who has thought as deeply about propaganda in
all its dimensions and ramifications as Jacques El ul. What sets him apart from other
analysts is his rare if not unique combination of expertise in history, sociology, law,
and political science, along with careful study of biblical and Marxist writings. He
lived through some of the century’s most pervasive propaganda periods, from the call
to arms from Spain in the late 1930s, to the phoney war, the years of Nazi occupation,
the rise of liberation movements, and the Cold War. At the end of World War II, he
had a brief experience as a holder of political power in the Bordeaux city administra-
tion. He came to have a profound distrust for the notion that political solutions can
be found for human problems and wrote The Political Illusion 49 as a testament to the constraints he saw likely to confront an idealized approach to world betterment. His
study of propaganda, Propagandes, translated as Propaganda, appeared originally in 1962, the year when French rule in Algeria ended. He wrote a special study of FLN
( Front de Libération Nationale) propaganda intended for a second edition of his book, but it never appeared in that form.50
Some have viewed Ellul as a Calvinist and a pessimist, but his works belie any
attempt to categorize him as a fatalist. From printed interviews and by reading widely
among his writings, it becomes clear that he is far from adopting a position of hope-
lessness concerning political involvement. He does believe that human nature is thor-
oughly flawed and that it is a pervasive human characteristic to be swayed by illusions.
Opportunists can exploit this tendency; others may be as much dupes as dupers.
Ellul’s message is not to remove oneself from political action and to “cultivate one’s
garden.” It is, rather, to free oneself of illusions. These may be packaged by an official
propaganda arm of a state, or of some movement, or by commercial interests. In every
case the illusions challenge an ind
ividual’s search for, and affirmation of, his or her
unique identity.
El ul’s studies of the history of institutions gave him an extraordinarily rich back-
ground for the understanding of today’s power structures.51 When he writes about
technological society, he does so from a perspective incorporating many social changes
based on numerous scientific and technological advances over three millennia. For
instance, his study of recruitment by the French Army in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries gives him insights into the techniques of persuasion or control on
matters of life-and-death significance.
With that background, El ul sounds the alarm against one of the most threaten-
ing illusions he sees facing the world since the 1950s: the faith that human ingenuity,
in the form of technology, is going to solve all our problems. This faith allows that
new gadgetry may create problems, but these can be solved by more refined inven-
tions. Against this faith and ahead of his time, El ul warns in The Technological Society (1964) that human beings are losing their control over technology. He presents the
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frightening notion that technology has developed a pattern of “self-augmentation”
( auto-croissance), which continues whether this growth benefits society or not. Ellul is not concerned with science fiction but is looking at social realities, recognizing that
scientists and technicians have livelihoods to make and noting ordinary human pro-
pensities, such as the desire to have influence and to turn a profit. His description of
the scientist’s dilemma in wanting to be cautious before allowing a new discovery to
be marketed, yet not wanting to thwart the companies funding his or her research, has
contemporary relevance. The case of Dr. Nancy Olivieri in Toronto is a highly publi-
cized example of a researcher refusing to be silent about possible dangers relating to
a particular drug use. When, in 1998, her research found unexpected risks associated
with a drug manufactured by her corporate sponsor, Apotex, Inc., the company threat-
ened her with legal action should she disclose the risks to patients at the Hospital