Exploring the Links between Propaganda and Persuasion

Up next in this IAMCR 2023 session is Nelson Ribeiro, whose interest is in patterns of political propaganda. He begins by referencing Orwell’s 1984 and the approaches to fabricating the past and rewriting history that the book describes; these approaches are somewhat similar to the way that the Italian fascists and German Nazis rewrote the past – and in such a way that the lie was so big that ordinary people could not even conceive of it being fabricated.

Similarly, lies circulated in Western media during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s, and their endorsement by US Congress substantially helped in developing the argument for the first Gulf War. More recently, of course, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was also based on a fabricated narrative about threats to Russia from the immoral West. Jacques Ellul called this tactic pre-propaganda, which prepares citizens for a specific action and ensures that they are sensitive to some level of influence; the media are a critical tool in this process.

The relativisation of truth, and the replacement of truth with the preferred perspective of the party leader, terrified Orwell, and enables leaders to control both the future and the past. This leads ordinary people to act against their own interest; we have see this recentlyin Putin’s Russia, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Trump’s USA. Part of this is also the control of language, were words are carefully manipulated through the perverse use of metaphors, the employment of pretentious words, the utilisation of meaningless words, and a reliance on an alternative vocabulary – from Kelleyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’ to Putin’s ‘special military operation’ and beyond. The very term ‘propaganda’ has become a negatively connotated insult reserved for political enemies, even though Jacques Ellul had a more neutral meaning of ‘mass persuasion’ in mind – which can also be used to protect the people from threats.