Propaganda Techniques Quotes

But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.

The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.

The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface. Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars.

I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

Repetition, Herschensohn wrote, is “the oldest and most effective propaganda technique.

All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.

If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.

The Wall is nothing more than a talking point Trump uses to trigger his racist and xenophobic base. MAGA minions have been brainwashed by Nazi propaganda techniques to see foreigners as evil monsters who want to exterminate white America, and Trump as their protector who was sent by God.

The propaganda techniques are so sophisticated, governments have convinced people to attack anyone who points out the uncomfortable truth.

The technique of acquiring dictatorship over what has been a democracy has been familiar since Greek times, and always involves the same mixture of bribery, propaganda and violence.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car of his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two difference. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless the may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry -- that was Adolf Hitler's technique. No matter whether it was true or not -- for (Hitler) meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn't dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seed it, it was God's truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it -- shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night...when ten million join in it becomes history.

I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...) I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar... ...like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when they're only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...

The comic on the top of the stack catches my eye. Is this the end for Commander Justice? I wish, but of course it isn’t. I flip through the first few pages before tossing the candy-colored propaganda aside. “You really shouldn’t read this crap,” I tell Carl when he finally comes back into the room. “It can’t be doing anything for your confidence.” “I need to keep up with his latest crime-fighting techniques.” “No, you don’t. You need to shoot him in the face.

In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization—the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in their interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the nonstop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

In the Pavlovian strategy, terrorizing force can finally be replaced by a new organization of the means of communication. Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern of thought in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovlian theoreticians, of a good propaganda technique, and the polls a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.

Hence, what he wants—and it is openly admitted—is to implement nationalistic imperialism with methods he has borrowed from Marxism, including its technique of mass organization. But the success of this mass organization is to be ascribed to the masses and not to Hitler. It was man's authoritarian freedom-fearing structure that enabled his propaganda to take root. Hence, what is important about Hitler sociologically does not issue from his personality but from the importance attached to him by the masses. And what makes the problem all the more complex is the fact that Hitler held the masses, with whose help he wanted to carry out his imperialism, in complete contempt.

Mitchell and Jessen were advocating torture tactics that had been originally designed to break men and force them to spout lies and propaganda, but they claimed that these techniques were not torture, and that they would elicit the truth, not lies and propaganda. In the upside-down world of the global war on terror, their explanations were widely accepted.

Though many critics have drawn a comparison between Trump’s alternative facts and the propaganda technique that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, called “the big lie” (meaning a lie so huge that no one would believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”), we think historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson expressed an equally vital concern: “What we should fear today,” he wrote, “is not the Big Lie but the profusion of little ones: an untallied daily cocktail of lies prescribed not to convince of some higher singularity but to confuse, to distract, to muddy, to flood. Today’s falsehood strategy does not give us one idea to organize our thoughts, but thousands of conflicting lies to confuse them.

Primary education and suscepitibility to propganda Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the 19th and 20th centuries was to make the individual susceptible to super-propaganda. There is no chance of raising the intellectual level of Western populations sufficiently and rapidly enough to compensate for the progress of propaganda. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible. In fact what happens and what we see all around us is the claim that propaganda itself is our culture and what the masses ought to learn. Only in and through propaganda have the masses access to political economy, politics, art, or literature. Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment.

Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.

If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do, partly by drugs as I foresaw in Brave New World, partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man, and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even. And so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think this is the danger: that actually people may be in some ways happy under the new regime, but they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy.

Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

You’ve said, “You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry and it will be refuted tomorrow.” How does your approach to the world as a scientist affect and influence the way you approach politics? Nature is tough. You can’t fiddle with Mother Nature, she’s a hard taskmistress. So you’re forced to be honest in the natural sciences. In the soft fields, you’re not forced to be honest. There are standards, of course; on the other hand, they’re very weak. If what you propose is ideologically acceptable, that is, supportive of power systems, you can get away with a huge amount. In fact, the difference between the conditions that are imposed on dissident opinion and on mainstream opinion is radically different. For example, I’ve written about terrorism, and I think you can show without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power. I don’t think that’s very surprising. The more powerful states are involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most powerful, so it’s involved in massive terrorism, by its own definition of terrorism. Well, if I want to establish that, I’m required to give a huge amount of evidence. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t object to that. I think anyone who makes that claim should be held to very high standards. So, I do extensive documentation, from the internal secret records and historical record and so on. And if you ever find a comma misplaced, somebody ought to criticize you for it. So I think those standards are fine. All right, now, let’s suppose that you play the mainstream game. You can say anything you want because you support power, and nobody expects you to justify anything. For example, in the unimaginable circumstance that I was on, say, Nightline, and I was asked, “Do you think Kadhafi is a terrorist?” I could say, “Yeah, Kadhafi is a terrorist.” I don’t need any evidence. Suppose I said, “George Bush is a terrorist.” Well, then I would be expected to provide evidence—“Why would you say that?” In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can’t produce evidence. There’s even a name for it—I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It’s called “concision.” He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn’t have me on Nightline. First of all, he says, “Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it.” But the other answer was, “He lacks concision.” Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t talk. I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

...the polarizing political movements of twenty-first-century Europe demand much less of their followers. They do not espouse a full-blown ideology, and thus they don't require violence or terror police. They want their clercs to defend them, but they do not force them to proclaim that black is white, that war is peace, and that state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don't deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it's been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.

In all ages, the technique of the Black Magician has been essentially the same. In all spells the words are deprived of their meanings and reduced to syllables or verbal noises. This may be done literally, as when magicians used to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or by reiterating a word over and over again as loudly as possible until it has become a mere sound. For millions of people today, words like communism, capitalism, imperialism, peace, freedom, democracy, have ceased to be words, the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee-reflex. It makes no difference if the magic is being employed simply for the aggrandizement of the magician himself or if, as is more usual, he claims to be serving some good cause. Indeed, the better the cause he claims to be serving, the more evil he does…. Propaganda, like the sword, attempts to eliminate consent or dissent and, in our age, magical language has to a great extent replaced the sword.

Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity. As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous.

The very concept of fathers as protectors is so politically incorrect that researchers must hedge their findings with politically acceptable weasel words: “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.” In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule. While men are assumed more likely to commit sexual than physical abuse,333 sexual abuse is much less common than severe physical abuse and is almost entirely perpetrated by boyfriends and stepfathers (who are falsely classified as “fathers” in most statistical studies). Yet feminists would have us believe that father-daughter incest is rampant, and feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy, rationalizing the forced removal of fathers and creating the very problem they claim to be solving. “An anti-male attitude is often found in documents, statements, and in the writings of those claiming to be experts in cases of child sexual abuse.” These scholars document techniques by social service agencies to systematically teach children to hate their fathers, including inculcating in the children a message that the father has sexually molested them. “The professionals use techniques that teach children a negative and critical view of men in general and fathers in particular,” they write. “The child is repeatedly reinforced for fantasizing throwing Daddy in jail and is trained to hate and fear him.” From the father’s perspective, the real child abusers have thrown him out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.

Can fascism still exist? Clearly Stage One movements can still be found in all major democracies. More crucially, can they reach Stage Two again by becoming rooted and influential? We need not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas. Collectors of Nazi paraphernalia and hard-core neo-Nazi sects are capable of provoking destructive violence and polarization. As long as they remain excluded from the alliances with the establishment necessary to join the political mainstream or share power, however, they remain more a law and order problem than a political threat. Much more likely to exert an influence are extreme Right movements that have learned to moderate their language, abandon classical fascist symbolism, and appear “normal.” It is by understanding how past fascisms worked, and not by checking the color of shirts, or seeking echoes of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the opening of the twentieth century, that we may be able to recognize it. The well-known warning signals—extreme nationalist propaganda and hate crimes—are important but insufficient. Knowing what we do about the fascist cycle, we can find more ominous warning signals in situations of political deadlock in the face of crisis, threatened conservatives looking for tougher allies, ready to give up due process and the rule of law, seeking mass support by nationalist and racialist demagoguery. Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their “mobilizing passions,” and try to co-opt the fascist following. Armed by historical knowledge, we may be able to distinguish today’s ugly but isolated imitations, with their shaved heads and swastika tattoos, from authentic functional equivalents in the form of a mature fascist conservative alliance. Forewarned, we may be able to detect the real thing when it comes along.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed. The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word “liberty.” It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said—and it should serve as a warning to us to be on our guard against all the tempters who promise us New Liberties for Old 5 —that wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have “planners for freedom” who promise us a “collective freedom for the group,” the nature of which may be gathered from the fact that its advocate finds it necessary to assure us that “naturally the advent of planned freedom does not mean that all [sic] earlier forms of freedom must be abolished.” Dr. Karl Mannheim, from whose work6 these sentences are taken, at least warns us that “a conception of freedom modelled on the preceding age is an obstacle to any real understanding of the problem.” But his use of the word “freedom” is as misleading as it is in the mouth of totalitarian politicians. Like their freedom, the “collective freedom” he offers us is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.7 It is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme. In this particular case the perversion of the meaning of the word has, of course, been well prepared by a long line of German philosophers and, not least, by many of the theoreticians of socialism. But “freedom” or “liberty” are by no means the only words whose meaning has been changed into their opposites to make them serve as instruments of totalitarian propaganda. We have already seen how the same happens to “justice” and “law,” “right” and “equality.” The list could be extended until it includes almost all moral and political terms in general use. If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates. It has to be seen to be understood how, if one of two brothers embraces the new faith, after a short while he appears to speak a different language which makes any real communication between them impossible. And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.

Armies and governments the world over have a definite technique for provoking hate. By speeches and films and other kinds of propaganda they create an image of the enemy in which he is the incarnation of evil, the symbol of suffering, the fountainhead of the cruelty and injustice of all times.

Along with enraged responses to Zeppelin air raids, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the use of poison gas in the trenches, these demonisations prompted outrage in the United States and other neutral states at the moral vileness of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. Bad things were undoubtedly done, but the propaganda technique of encouraging pro-war sentiment in one’s own country by claiming that the enemy commits atrocities is both too tempting to resist and too commonplace to ignore. Its effect is to make going to war against a supposed such enemy more acceptable, providing a moral justification and the requisite preparedness to make and accept sacrifices.

if you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs ... partly by these new techniques of propaganda, they will do it by ... bypassing the rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions ... and so making him actually love his slavery."

Innuendo Americans call this technique of using accurate facts in propaganda "innuendo." Facts are treated in such a fashion that they draw their listener into an irresistible sociological current The public is left to draw obvious conclusions from a cleverly presented truth and the great majority comes to the same conclusions. To obtain this result, propaganda must be based on some truth that can be said in few words and is able to linger in the collective consciousness. In such cases the enemy cannot go against the tide which he might do if the basis of the propaganda were a lie or the sort of truth requiring a proof to make it stick. On the contrary the enemy now must provide proof, but it no longer changes the conclusions that the propagandee has already drawn from the suggestions.

It is absolutely disgusting to see the same propaganda techniques being used in Florida in 2022 as they did in 2009 at the Desoto Solar Farm.

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

Bernays not only knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to get people excited about being manipulated, a process he describes in detail in his 1947 book, The Engineering of Consent. The book enumerates a variety of persuasive techniques, including propaganda, advertising, and other forms of mass communication, that he used to create seemingly any desired response from the public.

Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.

Nazism, fascism, and communism were belief systems adopted passionately by millions of well-educated men and women. Taken together, all of the totalitarian ideologies were self-contained and delivered through a one-way flow of propaganda that prevented the people who were enmeshed in the ideology from actively participating in challenging its lack of human values. Unfortunately, the legacy of the twentieth century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. In an age of propaganda, education itself can become suspect. When ideology is so often woven into the “facts” that are delivered in fully formed and self-contained packages, people naturally begin to develop some cynicism about what they are being told. When people are subjected to ubiquitous and unrelenting mass advertising, reason and logic often begin to seem like they are no more than handmaidens for the sophisticated sales force. And now that these same techniques dominate the political messages sent by candidates to voters, the integrity of our democracy has been placed under the same cloud of suspicion. Many advocacy organizations—progressive as well as conservative—often give the impression that they already have exclusive possession of the truth and merely have to “educate” others about what they already know. Resentment toward this attitude is also one of the many reasons for a resurgence of the traditional anti-intellectual strain in America. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience, and share with one another in a robust and dynamic dialogue that enriches what the “experts” are telling them with the wisdom of the groups as a whole, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best. If well-educated citizens have no effective way to communicate their ideas to others and no realistic prospect of catalyzing the formation of a critical mass of opinion supporting their ideas, then their education is for naught where the vitality of our democracy is concerned.

They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic.

They want a mission, a challenge! When we follow the type of advertising appeal used by Madison Avenue to sell toothpaste, when we use commercial techniques in our vocation literature, do not the hearts of the young spurn our distance from the Cross? Do not we recruit fruits of propaganda rather than fruits worthy of penance?

These subtle menticidal forces operate both within the mind and outside it. They have been strengthened in their effect by the growth in complexity of our civilization. The modern means of mass communication bring the entire world daily into each man’s home; the techniques of propaganda and salesmanship have been refined and systematized; there is scarcely any hiding place from the constant visual and verbal assault on the mind. The pressures of daily life impel more and more people to seek an easy escape from responsibility and maturity. Indeed, it is difficult to withstand these pressures; to many the offer of a political panacea is very tempting, to others the offer of escape through alcohol, drugs, or other artificial pleasures is irresistible.

A newly-released series of video documentaries — The Labour Files — based on material leaked from Britain’s Labour Party revealed how the right-wing within the party mortified the former party leader, the far-left Jeremy Corbyn, costing him his position. The documentary uncovers Israel’s role in orchestrating the departure of Corbyn who had been a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights. Evidence reveals that the Israel Lobby within the Labour Party — supported by other pro-Israel camps in Britain — campaigned against the left-wing Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism. The right-wing party establishment manipulated these allegations to its own political advantage, which eventually led to the election of the pro-Israel Keir Starmer as party leader in 2020. While the future course of Labour’s left wing is uncertain, one thing is for sure — Israel is an apartheid regime. The Zionist lobby has been using hybrid warfare techniques to procure worldwide legitimacy for Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. As the Labour Files reveal, Israel has waged a war of fabricating narratives and counter-narratives. In this sort of warfare with limitless bounds, the only positive that can be drawn is that everyone is a soldier. At a time when great powers have given in to the deceptive Israel lobby and no Muslim state is in any position to challenge Israeli advances in Palestine using conventional methods, we need to focus on building our capacity to effectively counter the Zionist narrative. With the right-wing ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, set to return after elections next month, the plight of Palestinians will only exacerbate. It is high time we stopped blatantly labelling one another as ‘Yahoodi Agents’ and started educating ourselves. The least we can do for Palestinians is continue exposing the pro-Israel elements engaged in the widespread dissemination of Zionist propaganda.

The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus” labor who were then “free” to work in its precocious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order. To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful. Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.

Denotation means the word’s “actual” or “dictionary” meaning. When, in addition to this “actual” meaning, a word implies or suggests something further, the things it implies or suggests are its connotations. These connotative or implied or associated meanings frequently hold overtones of approval or disapproval; and too often, the overtones outweigh the word’s “actual” meaning. Take a word like propaganda. In simplest terms, it denotes information, put forth in a systematic effort to spread opinions or beliefs. Thus, whether it’s classed as good or bad should depend on whether you agree or disagree with the opinions or beliefs in question.

This repetition of the “Big Lie,” it should be noted, is a propaganda technique developed by the Nazis.

GOEBBELS AND HITLER had a conference about the Grynzspan agitation. “He decides: Let the demonstrations continue,” Goebbels wrote. “Pull back the police. The Jews should for once feel the anger of the people.” Party leaders called their subordinates, and the Gestapo sent out, by Teletype, rules to guide the rioting throughout Germany that was to be the consequence of Ernst vom Rath’s assassination. It was to be savage but orderly. The burning of synagogues was permitted “only if there is no danger of fires for the neighborhood.” Jewish homes and businesses “may be destroyed but not looted.” And foreigners “may not be molested even if they are Jews.” It began at 1:00 in the morning on November 10, 1938. Otto Tolischus reported on it for The New York Times. “There was scarcely a Jewish shop, cafe, office or synagogue that was not either wrecked, burned severely, or destroyed,” he said. “Before synagogues, demonstrators stood with prayer books from which they tore leaves.” The wealthy synagogue on Fasanenstrasse “was a furnace.” Twenty-five thousand people were sent as hostages to concentration camps. It was called Kristallnacht, Crystal Night, because it happened at night and a lot of plate glass was broken, and because the word “crystal” simultaneously distracted from, and raised a toast to, the ferociousness of the rioting—and perhaps finally also because the word echoed the title of one of Goebbels’s favorite books on propaganda technique, Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion. Goebbels had successfully used vom Rath’s assassination to crystallize German anti-Semitism.

The Big Lie: This is a propaganda technique and logical trick (fallacy). The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The source of the big lie technique is in a particular passage, taken from chapter 10 of James Murphy’s translation of Mein Kampf. (Adolf Hitler,

In the Encyclopedia of social sciences, Harold lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science, warned that the intelligent few must recognize "the ignorance and stupidity of the masses." And not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests." They are not the best judges; we are. The masses must be controlled for their own good, and in more democratic societies where force is unavailable, social managers must turn to a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda. Note that this is a good Leninist doctrine. The similarity between progressive democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism is rather striking, something that Bakunin predicted long before.

Under such a propaganda barrage, the Arbenz government fled the country before many real bullets could fly. Phillips later termed the technique, which he would use again, “the big lie.

As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine [techniques of propaganda] with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational [information] essential to the maintenance of individual liberty.

He explained Adi’s propaganda technique of choosing a big lie and repeating it incessantly until everybody believed it;