by Hugo Mercier
of close personal ties for conversion has been repeatedly observed,
from Mormons to Nichiren Shoshu Buddhists, or medieval
Cathars.55
Even if people are recruited by friends or family, conversion
can entail some social costs inflicted by those not already con-
verted, ranging from misunderstanding to persecution. In these
conditions, doesn’t conversion reflect a feat of persuasion, get-
ting someone to accept, on trust alone, a new set of beliefs, often
accompanied by costly personal obligations? On the contrary,
it seems that people who convert find something to their liking
in their new group. Summarizing the lit er a ture on New Religious
Movements, psychologist Dick Anthony notes that “the psycho-
logical and emotional condition of most converts improves
rather than declines after joining.”56 Even costly be hav iors can
be beneficial. Mormons have to donate 10 percent of their in-
come and 10 percent of their time to the church. Yet it is not too
hard to see why some people would prefer to live in a commu-
nity in which every one shares so much, enabling Mormons to
124 ch ap t er 8
“lavish social ser vices upon one another.”57 Even early Christians,
who, at times, were at great risk of persecution, likely benefited
from the support networks created by their adhesion to this new
cult.58 By contrast with these practical aspects, the apparently
exotic beliefs associated with new religions play a minor, post hoc
role. As economist Laurence Iannaccone put it, “Belief typically
follows involvement. Strong attachments draw people into reli-
gious groups, but strong beliefs develop more slowly or never
develop at all.”59
New religious movements can grow by offering people a mode
of social interaction they enjoy, without involving mass conver-
sion. But what happens when a religion becomes ubiquitous or
dominant? Aren’t its priests, then, able to dictate the people’s
thoughts and be hav ior?
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church attempted
to impose on the Eu ro pean peasantry be hav iors that weren’t in
their obvious interest, from regular church attendance and con-
fession all the way to the tithe, a 10 percent tax on what ever the
peasants gathered each year. Moreover, the church also spread
beliefs supporting the existing, iniquitous status quo. Kings had
a divine right to rule. Priests taught that a view of the rich as
merely lucky rather than deserving was “akin to covetousness,”
the root of all evil.60
This is what Marxist scholars have called the dominant ideol-
ogy: a worldview created by the upper classes, justifying their
position, that they impose on the rest of the population.61 For
Marx and Engels, “The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the
means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking,
the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are
subject to it.”62 Getting wide swaths of the population to accept
an ideology in which their misery is deserved, making them
d e m a g o g ue s, p r o p he t s, p r e a c he r s 125
resignedly accept their fate, would be the most impressive feat
of mass persuasion ever accomplished.
In line with this vision, the Catholic Church is often described
as ruling supreme over the Eu ro pean Middle Ages. A mixture of
deference, ignorance, and fear of hell would have enabled the
church to make a sheepish population obey its injunctions and
accept its doctrine.63 Humbert de Romans, a thirteenth- century
Dominican who preached in poor areas of southern France, pro-
vides a very diff er ent perspective on how this was working out
for the church. Humbert was prob ably pretty good at his job—
he later rose through the ranks to become the head of the Do-
minican order— yet he despaired of what he saw on the ground.
The church, for all its power, was barely able to get the poor
to conform to the bare minimum of its doctrinal requirements:
to be baptized, to know the “Our Father,” to take communion
once a year.64 Humbert complains of people going to church only
to “pass the night gossiping to each other, not only about vain
subjects, but about evil and indecent ones.”65 What about spe-
cial occasions? The flock did enjoy saints’ days, yet it wasn’t the
church that benefited, but “inn keepers and prostitutes.”66 Believ-
ers also went on pilgrimages, the occasion for “more sin, some-
times, than a participant committed in all the rest of the year put
together.”67
The poor not only turned religious ceremonies into opportu-
nities for debauchery but actively resisted any costly be hav ior
the church attempted to impose. Humbert deplores “the neglect
of penance or fasting” and “the reluctance to pay tithes.”68 His-
torian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie notes how “the conflict over
tithes . . . runs like a thread through peasant protests; it consti-
tutes, from Catharism to Calvinism, a common denominator,
more obvious than any dogmatic continuity, which is often
absent.”69
126 ch ap t er 8
How do the people’s crusades fit into this picture of disobe-
dience? Didn’t the church manage to persuade thousands of poor
people to perform the ultimate sacrifice on its behalf? As men-
tioned earlier, the poor often saw such crusades as an opportunity
for pil aging, rather than a spiritual calling. In any case, these cru-
sades weren’t a brainchild of the church hierarchy.70 Indeed, the
church sometimes actively fought them, and for good reason, as
the “eschatological y inspired hordes of the poor,” after they had
looted any Jewish dwel ing in sight, “soon turned on the clergy.”71
At the height of the first Shepherd’s crusade, “the murder of a
priest was regarded as particularly praiseworthy.”72 It seems the
shepherds didn’t get the memo about dominant ideology.
As well as refusing to comply with the costly be hav iors the
church demanded of them, the medieval masses also rejected
the bulk of Catholic doctrinal orthodoxy. Historians of ideas
have noted how, all the way to the Enlightenment, “deep- seated
and per sis tent paganism frequently camouflaged with the most
superficial veneer [of Chris tian ity].”73 In his meticulous study
of a French vil age in the thirteenth century, Le Roy Ladurie
notes a variety of decidedly not-so-Christian goings-on. Upon the
death of a house hold head, other members keep his hair and nail
clippings, “ bearers of vital energy,” through which the house
absorbs some of the deceased’s magical properties. A girl’s first
menstrual blood is saved to be used later as a love potion. Um-
bilical cords are preciously preserved, as they are thought to
help win lawsuits (no refunds allowed).74 It is not surprising
that Humbert, our Dominican preacher, would reproach peas-
ants for being “much prone to sortilege” and �
��so obstinate, nay
even incorrigible, that they simply cannot be stopped, either by
excommunications, or by any other kind of threat.”75
Among the beliefs squarely rejected by the poor were those
supposed to make them docilely accept their condition. Humbert
d e m a g o g ue s, p r o p he t s, p r e a c he r s 127
might have taught that covetousness was a sin, but he still
remarked how “the masses are accustomed to regard the rich of
this world as the lucky ones,” and are eager to complain about
“the poor state of church government,” which they (often, right-
fully enough) blame on “bad bishops.”76 Throughout the
Middle Ages, the Catholic Church’s efforts to impose unappeal-
ing beliefs and costly be hav iors on the population through mass
persuasion are a litany of failures.
The pattern observed in Catholic medieval Eu rope recurs in
eco nom ically dominated classes throughout the world.77 Far
from having imbibed the dominant ideology, everywhere people
practice “the arts of re sis tance” with the “weapons of the weak,”
to borrow the titles of two influential books by sociologist James
Scott.78 Even the strongest of power asymmetries, that between
masters and their slaves, cannot make the subordinates accept
their plight, which slaves keep fighting by any means available,
ranging from “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance,”
all the way to “arson” and “sabotage.”79
The dominant ideology thesis has a point: the dominant
classes weave narratives of the status quo as the best of all pos-
si ble worlds, their superior position well deserved. Oftentimes,
these narratives crowd communication channels, from manu-
scripts to airwaves. But this does not mean that people farther
down the social ladder are buying any of it. On the contrary,
these narratives are resisted everywhere, and alternative narratives
created— including millenarian visions when an opportunity for
revolution arises.
9
PROPAGANDISTS,
CAMPAIGNERS,
AND ADVERTISERS
Propagandists
While he was in jail, working on Mein Kampf, Hitler thought a
lot about propaganda. He described the masses as credulous: a
“crowd of human children,” “feminine in its character” ( children
and woman had long been associated with emotionality and
gul ibility). Accordingly, effective propaganda must rest on “ste-
reo typed formulas . . . per sis tently repeated until the very last
individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”1
Once he had been elected— mostly on an economic, anticom-
munist platform— and had consolidated his power, Hitler, with
the help of Joseph Goebbels and the propaganda ministry, turned
his theory into practice. Together, they would develop the most
ignominious mass persuasion attempt in history, in par tic u lar as
it aimed to build up German anti- Semitism, vilifying Jewish
people in movies, radio programs, books, posters, educational
materials, and so forth.
How effective was this “propaganda barrage”?2 To obtain fine-
grained data on German anti- Semitism, economists Nico
Voigtländer and Hans- Joachim Voth looked at surveys from 1996
128
p r o p a g a nd is t s, c a mp a i g ne r s, a d v e r t ise r s 129
and 2006.3 They mea sured whether anti- Semitism is still higher
among Germans who were exposed to the Nazi propaganda ma-
chine, in par tic u lar those born in the 1920s and 1930s. They
found that indeed these cohorts expressed stronger anti- Semitic
sentiments: Germans born in the 1920s and 1930s agreed with
statements such as “Jews have too much influence in the world”
between 5 and 10 percent more than those born at any other time.
Even if Nazi propaganda is responsible for only a small share
of the anti- Semitism currently pre sent in Germany, it certainly
seems to have contributed to the prob lem. But did it do so
through brute repetition, as Hitler thought? Voigtländer and
Voth looked at the regional variations in the availability of
propaganda— how many people owned radios, the number of
cinemas where they could watch propaganda films, and so forth.
If mere repetition were effective, areas with greater exposure to
propaganda should see the sharpest rise in anti- Semitism. In fact,
the sheer exposure to propaganda had no effect at all. Instead,
it was the presence of preexisting anti- Semitism that explained
the regional variation in the effectiveness of propaganda. Only
the areas that were the most anti- Semitic before Hitler came to
power proved receptive. For people in these areas, the anti-
Semitic propaganda might have been used as a reliable cue that
the government was on their side, and thus that they could freely
express their prejudices.4 Another study that focused on the ef-
fects of radio broadcasts yielded even stronger results: radio
propaganda was “effective in places where antisemitism was his-
torically high,” but it had “a negative effect in places with histori-
cally low antisemitism.”5
Ian Kershaw, the historian we encountered in the last chapter
scouring the rec ords of Nazi Germany to understand Hitler’s
popularity, also analyzed the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda.
He reached similar conclusions. The Germans didn’t heed the
130 ch ap t er 9
calls to boycott Jewish stores and to ostracize the Jews more
generally. It was only through “terror and legal discrimina-
tion” that the Nazis achieved “the economic (and increasingly
social) exclusion of the Jews from German life.”6
Kershaw argues that other dimensions of Nazi propaganda
were even less effective than the attempts to turn all Germans
into rabid anti- Semites. The push to enforce compulsory eutha-
nasia of the handicapped was widely resisted.7 Attacks on com-
munism appealed to those already on the right but were an “al-
most unmitigated failure . . . among German industrial
workers,” communism’s natu ral constituency.8 Indeed, Nazi pro-
paganda failed to persuade the majority of German workers to
contribute willingly to the war effort, many electing to resist
through absenteeism.9 As soon as the war took a turn for the
worst— after Sta lin grad in particular— messages from the pro-
paganda ministry fell on deaf ears. Goebbels’s “unvarying mes-
sage of victory was becoming monotonic and ignored by the
public,” who trusted the BBC over official government pro-
grams.10 Nazi propaganda even failed to generate much liking
for the Nazi Party, whose local officials, often incompetent and
corrupt, were universally despised.11 One of the great ironies of
these conclusions is that Kershaw reached them partly through
an examination of work done by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the
Nazi intel igence agency. Some of its reports are indeed scath-
ing, such as this note from the SD office in Schweinfurt (a small
city of central Germany): “Our propaganda encounters rejection
everywhere among the population because it is regarded as
wrong and lying.”12
What about the German armies that fought to the death
battles they were certain to lose? Aren’t they the ultimate proof
of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda? Studies of German sol-
diers consistently show that “po liti cal values played a very
p r o p a g a nd is t s, c a mp a i g ne r s, a d v e r t ise r s 131
minor part in sustaining their motivation for combat.”13 Instead,
as for soldiers everywhere, the main impetus came from the sup-
port of the small group they were embedded in, people they
had fought alongside for many years, and with whom shared
hardships had created special bonds of loyalty.14 Fear also played
a role: fear of being executed if a desertion attempt failed (as
thousands of German soldiers were), fear of dying as a POW in
the wrong hands (few POWs on the eastern front ever came
back, while the relatively lenient treatment of POWs on the west-
ern front prompted many desertions).15
Kershaw, summing up his findings, notes how “the effective-
ness of [Nazi] propaganda . . . was heavi ly dependent on its
ability to build on existing consensus, to confirm existing values,
to bolster existing prejudices.”16 Whenever propaganda ran
against public opinion, it failed abysmally. On the whole, little
or no mass persuasion took place. Were the Nazis just particu-
larly bad at propaganda, or do we observe the same pattern in
other regimes?
The USSR also made abundant use of propaganda not only
during the war but also in the preceding de cades, in par tic u lar
when Stalin was consolidating his power. Early Soviet propa-
ganda efforts failed to resonate with the population. Commu-
nist concepts had to be jettisoned in favor of more congenial nar-
ratives: patriotism replaced internationalism, the cult of heroes
replaced impersonal historical forces.17 In turn, this strategy back-
fired badly when many of the heroes were killed during the
show trials of the late 1930s. Soviet propaganda never quite re-
covered. Indeed, even at the apex of Stalinist propaganda,
Rus sian workers and peasants “ adopted many tactics of passive
re sis tance,” and actively sought out “alternative sources of in-
formation.”18 As elsewhere, it is mostly those who benefited
