by Propaganda
the buyer is buying an identity along with the product.26 It seems worthwhile to
include such pervasive forms of influence under the rubric “propaganda,” although
usage shows some resistance to doing so. The reason for extending the term has to
do with imparting a certain logical consistency to usage, which can often be some-
what arbitrary. Advertising, public relations, and the like share enough features with
propaganda, as more narrowly understood, to make their inclusion useful from the
standpoint of studying the ethics of propaganda.
An interesting idea, relevant to the definition of propaganda, has been
advanced by Douglas Walton. He argues that in some contexts, such as a court-
room in an adversarial legal system, where people expect presentations to be one-
sided, the term “propaganda” is out of place. What would be deceptive if heard
alone becomes balanced by hearing the other side. In this view, talk of “propaganda”
becomes appropriate only when a communicator pretends to be neutral and yet
engages in deceptive, one-sided presentations of facts, arguments, and imagery.
Walton terms such a situation “dialectical shift,” because one moves from one type
of discourse to another without signaling the change to the audience.27 The idea
seems worth pursuing, but, as might be said of our own definition, it appears to pre-
suppose the understanding of “propaganda” in its negative sense. Some qualification
may be needed once we acknowledge that the term also has an established neutral
sense. Also in need of development or refinement is the scope of the contexts to
which his comments are applicable. If newspapers identify themselves as committed
to a particular political party, does this mean that nothing they say in favour of that
party will be propaganda (as negatively construed)? There would appear to be limits
to the application of this principle, so that deliberate deception, such as spurious
statistics, faked imagery, and suchlike, would still qualify as propaganda even when
the newspaper displays its political colouring prominently.
The question of the definition of propaganda continues to be an open one, given
the existence of such diversity in the interpretation of the concept. Some suggest giv-
ing up use of the term in serious discussions, so as to avoid misunderstanding. For the
purposes of this book, it should be sufficient to have the rough parameters for the
understanding of the concept provided by this discussion.28
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TWo MAJoR PRoPAgAnDA THEoRISTS: gEoRgE oRWELL
AnD JACQUES ELLUL
Many writers have been preoccupied with the question of individual freedom and
the domination of the crowd; for instance, we can name Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, G.K. Chesterton, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Elias
Canetti, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Martin Heidegger deserves to be men-
tioned for his Being and Time, but he cannot escape ignominy for his support for
Nazism in 1933. The list is easily expanded if we think of playwrights such as Henrik
Ibsen and Arthur Miller or sociologists such as Gustav Le Bon, Wilhelm Reich, and
Sergei Chakotin. Another powerful voice raised in defence of individual autonomy is
that of Noam Chomsky, about whom more will be said later.
Two outstanding writers will serve, in the rest of this chapter, as an introduction
to the general phenomenon, as distinct from the definition, of propaganda—George
Orwell and Jacques Ellul. Both were gravely concerned about the future of the indi-
vidual in mass-mediated society, and both played an effective role in rallying forces to
oppose the threat of monolithic culture. People from both the Left and Right have
claimed Orwell as defending their side. El ul’s fate has been that of the prophet more
welcomed elsewhere than in his own land: in France, he was far too independent a
thinker to gain a strong and steady following. In polarized politics one must declare
allegiance to one or other of different rival camps, with no ambiguity: El ul was all for
depolarization.
There are many similarities between Orwell and Ellul, but perhaps one differ-
ence is the biblical roots of Ellul’s thinking and his committed Christian involve-
ment. Orwell’s orientation is more secular. Both thinkers sought to expose the forces
at work integrating an individual into a larger system and frustrating an individual’s
self-development and freedom. My hope for this book is that it will be perceived as a
continuation of their efforts in that regard.
george orwell
George Orwell, whose birth name was Eric Blair, was born in India in 1903 and edu-
cated at Eton, later serving in Burma with the Indian Imperial Police. An early work
of his, Burmese Days, recounts his disgust with the cultural chauvinism of the British ruling class, their philistinism, and lack of interest in the culture they were dominating. He also wrote about the psychological pressure a crowd can impose on a per-
son in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” Orwell fought with a splinter group on the
Republican side against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. His testament to that
period, Homage to Catalonia, is filled with references to propaganda.
Orwell’s best-known works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, have left
a powerful imprint on modern consciousness. From the former come memorable,
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pointed, and oft-quoted (adapted) phrases, such as “some ... are more equal than others” and “four legs good, two legs bad”; from the latter come expressions such as “new-
speak,” “Big Brother,” and “doublethink.” A flourishing publication, the Quarterly
Review of Doublespeak, has carried on his work of exposing misuse of language for propagandistic purposes by tracking attempts by corporations or government to
use language to mislead people. For instance, a directive to those working in the US
Environmental Protection Agency said that they should not speak of “acid rain” but
refer instead to “poorly buffered precipitation.” The Pentagon once referred to its pur-
chase of “wooden interdental stimulators” instead of “toothpicks” (possibly to justify
a higher price?). As William Lutz, author of Doublespeak points out, people today
are not fired or laid off; they are subject to “restructuring,” “downsizing,” “workforce
readjustments,” or “negative employee retention.”29 The slogan “War is peace” does
not seem far removed from the thinking involved in naming the MX intercontinental
ballistic missile “Peacekeeper.” In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, strict controls prevent deviation from the Party line; in today’s world, economic and political structures
help to accomplish many of the same results. A deception perpetrated on the pub-
lic by some official source accomplishes, as we often see, a given objective. It is later
found to be a deception, but the mass media are no longer interested in publicizing the
truth, partly because the correction arrives too late to undo the damage caused, partly
because exposure of the deception would also
incriminate the media as negligent or
dupes. It is not in the interest of the media to injure their own credibility by such
exposure. Examples of this kind of thing can be found regularly by tuning in to alter-
native media such as Extra! published by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting);
its website is
Orwell can be credited with a particularly strong and lasting battle for liberty on
the language front. Other writers and thinkers of his time were aware of the enslav-
ing effects of propagandistic language, but none brought this awareness so effectively
and passionately to public attention. Orwell is distinguished by his attention to pro-
paganda not only in the political realm but also in connection with advertising and
commerce, as in his Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He exposed propaganda wherever it
occurred, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum. “One of the dreariest
effects of this war,” he wrote of the Spanish Civil War, “has been to teach me that the
Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.”30 After an
interview with Harry Pol itt, the General Secretary of the British Communist Party,
he judged that Pol itt had “evidently decided I was politically unreliable.”31
Orwell could put up with some distortions in detail in order to make a truthful
overall point but not the use of distortions of objective reality for pragmatic pur-
poses. He was inclined to accept at first the tactical arguments of the Communists
against his own POUM militia—POUM stands for Partido Obrero de Unificación
Marxista, the United Marxist Workers’ Party; it was called Trotskyist by the
Communists—but he parted from Communists and Left-oriented intellectuals
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who made truth totally subservient to practical necessity. He fiercely and bitterly resented misleading expressions, such as “objectively Fascist” applied to the POUM,
especially when made by people in comfortable surroundings many hundreds of
miles from scenes of suffering and death.
Orwell recognized the need for use of political force, including suppression of
opinion in extreme circumstances, but he refused to accept the perversion of judg-
ment about literary merit. “To say ‘X is a gifted writer, but he is a political enemy and
I shall do my best to silence him,’ is harmless enough,” Orwell wrote. “Even if you end
by silencing him with a tommy-gun you are not really sinning against the intellect.
The deadly sin is to say ‘X is a political enemy: therefore he is a bad writer.’”32 Orwel
respected certain limits, fixed by demands for nothing other than truth itself, in the
pursuit of political goals, however important and justified they might be. This is a
contrast to Frantz Fanon’s “In every age, among the people, truth is the property of
the national cause.... In [the] colonialist context there is no truthful behavior: and the
good is quite simply that which is evil for ‘them.’” Jean-Paul Sartre comes to a similar
conclusion to Fanon regarding the truth in “A Plea for Intellectuals.”33
It is clear that the Spanish Civil War, and the misreporting of it, profoundly
shaped Orwell’s attitude to truth. His later popular writings dramatize and powerfully
express the deep antipathy he developed to distortions of truth in a time of war. One
feature that makes the deceptions he has in mind different from ordinary lies is that
they operate through presupposition rather than direct statements. False statements
are more transparent than presuppositions and can more easily be challenged.
I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence
where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely
denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot hailed as the
heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and
eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never hap-
pened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what
ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
He is surprisingly contemporary in his worries about truth. What is peculiar to our
age, he wrote, “is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote,
or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes;
but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.”
But totalitarianism destroys the notion that there could be a body of neutral fact. Nazi
theory denies that “the truth” exists, he wrote:
There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science.” There is only “German Science,”
“Jewish Science,” etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare
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world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened.34
Nineteen Eighty-Four
As a satire, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been successful at highlighting many
tendencies in modern political life. In 1993 the Liberal Party in Canada was elected on
a platform that included a commitment to get rid of a general sales tax on goods and
services. In the run-up to this election, Liberal Leader Jean Chrétien stated unequivo-
cally that he would scrap the tax if elected.35 When the tax was not abolished, Liberals
claimed that there was never any such commitment, it was misunderstood, there
was only a commitment to “harmonize” federal and provincial sales taxes, etc. US
President George Bush (senior) made the expression “Read my lips, no new taxes”
famous when he abandoned in June 1990 his campaign promise at the Republican
convention in August 1988 to hold the line on taxes.36
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the political leaders of Oceania, one of three political
groups in its world, have figured out how to control a population for an indefinitely
long period of time: it is only necessary to foment hatred and to eliminate memories
and independent thinking. War is necessary to limit the abundance of goods, since
otherwise people would have sufficient time and leisure to ask themselves why they
allow a privileged elite to rule over them. The population is taught the language of
Newspeak, designed to narrow the range of thought.37 In Newspeak every concept is
expressed “by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” As al iances shift, people might ask themselves
whether the enemy, who was previously their ally, can be all that bad. To avoid that,
records must be effaced and rewritten to show, for example, that a previous ally never
was an ally and that any enemy always was an enemy. Names given to government
functions are not politically neutral but shape the thinking of people in a desired way.
For example, the government institution deali
ng with falsification of records is called
the Ministry of Truth, or “Minitrue” in shortened Newspeak. The Ministry of Peace,
or Minipax, is the ministry concerned with war.
Devices keep people under regular surveillance. Called “Big Brother,” these col-
lectively are considered to be the guardian of the people, watching them constantly for
their own good. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, has the problem that,
as a worker in Minitrue involved in changing records, he sees things as they are, not as
they are supposed to be. This is very dangerous, because the Thought Police are always
on the alert for any thinking that might undermine the state. To survive, Winston
must engage in Doublethink:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out,
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knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was
impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it
was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when
it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again; and above al , to apply the same
process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis
you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the
use of doublethink.38
Winston cannot efface memories that conflict with Party demands of the moment,
although O’Brien, the Party’s inquisitor, tries to straighten out his thinking. First
O’Brien notes that the past does not exist in some place as a world of solid objects.
Winston has to admit that the past lies in records. Since the Party controls the records,
the Party also controls the past. O’Brien quotes the reasoning of Emmanuel Goldstein,
once a leading party figure: “Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth.”39
