But it’s war propaganda done with some style and artistry, with touches of pathos, and the occasional satirical side-swipe at other enemies – like the great line, completely un-pc nowadays, of course, when a young village lad is being urged to do his part in defending the British Isles. ‘You know what “morale” is, don’t you?’ someone asks him. ‘Yes,’ he declares, ‘it’s what the wops ain’t got!’ There’s black humour, rousing British cheeriness and flashes of shocking realism which knock against the rural idyll cliché, all of which make it a more powerful piece of cinema, and therefore a more powerful piece of propaganda.
Propaganda can be blunt or subtle, blindingly obvious or relentlessly and cleverly suggestive, but its aim has always been to persuade and get everyone on message, whatever the method. It’s been used by regimes to lie, dissemble, exhort, convert and cover up. Totalitarian regimes have created huge ministries of propaganda, while democracies have given birth to their bastard offspring – the PR companies and spin doctors.
Propaganda films were hugely popular during the Second World War
It’s been wildly successful, but thankfully we usually end up seeing through it. In works of fiction like George Orwell’s 1984, the propaganda ministry realizes that to really change people’s minds it needs to change the language itself. If you can’t say it, you won’t think or feel it. So the Newspeak dictionary gets slimmer and slimmer as more and more words are ‘disappeared’. Newspeak, where only prescribed words can be used, is the propagandists’ dream.
Newspeak
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words’ (1984)
Newspeak (pronounced New-speak) is the fictional language created by George Orwell in his novel 1984. It’s closely based on English but with a vastly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. The aim of the totalitarian government of Oceania is to make language so basic, so sterile that any alternative way of thinking to that prescribed by the regime (thoughtcrime) is impossible. In a nightmarish twist on Sapir–Whorfism, how can you have ideas of freedom or rebellion if there are no words for them?
‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,’ explains the character Syme, a Newspeak specialist, ‘because there will be no words in which to express it … [We’re] cutting the language down to the bone … Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.’
Richness of language is anathema to the Party. Words must be stripped of superlatives or negatives and reduced to the absolute minimum. ‘Uncold’ for warm; ‘unlight’ for dark. Good and evil and all nuances in between are distilled into six words: good, plus good, doubleplusgood, ungood, plusungood and doubleplusungood.
Many of Orwell’s Newspeak words appear to be modelled on Esperanto. For instance, in Esperanto the opposite of good, bona, is malbona, and its extreme is malbonega – literally ‘very ungood’. When he travelled to Paris in 1928 for his ‘down and out’ period, Orwell is thought to have stayed with his aunt Nellie and her partner, Eugène Lanti, a leading Esperantist. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, Orwell told a friend that he had gone to Paris ‘partly to improve his French’, but had to leave his first lodgings because the landlord and his wife only spoke Esperanto – ‘and it was an ideology, not just a language’. So, whether out of antipathy to Esperanto or a fascination with a language constructed for political aims, Orwell was clearly inspired.
‘Thoughtcrime’ would be impossible and everyone would speak ‘Newspeak’ in Orwell’s 1984
In 1984, Newspeak was still being introduced as an official language, but the expectation was that Oldspeak, the Newspeak term for English, would have disappeared by 2050; all literature from the past – apart from technical manuals – would be unintelligible and untranslatable. The ‘all men are equal’ passage from the Declaration of Independence would be reduced to a single word: crimethink.
Orwell’s 1984 introduced an astonishing number of words and concepts denoting totalitarian authority into the English language – Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, doublethink, unperson, thoughtcrime. Chilling slogans resonating as clearly today as they did over sixty years ago – ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’
It’s an idea far more powerful and frightening than the most destructive of weapons: loss of language leads to loss of our history and, ultimately, loss of our selves.
In the Western liberal tradition we’re pretty sniffy about overt propaganda – for us, it’s a negative, dishonest tool – but other systems and ideologies see it as a positive means of motivating the population and keeping it under control.
One of the first modern propagandists was Josef Goebbels, who became Hitler’s Reich Minister for Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Public Enlightenment and Propaganda). It’s chillingly ironic that he should use the inference of the Enlightenment in his title when he was the master of the dark arts, but then ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Makes You Free’), the slogan that adorned the entrance to the extermination camps, was hardly a promise they kept.
As editor of Der Angriff (The Attack) Goebbels masterminded Hitler’s attacks on his opponents, which were particularly effective in the election of 1932, when Hitler become Chancellor. He used radio, cinema and spectacular demonstrations, which culminated in the famous Nuremberg rally. His showmanship helped to get the Nazi message across and then keep the German people firmly corralled within the Nazi ideology, but his techniques were just as often crude. He was interested in effectiveness, not art. ‘Good propaganda is successful,’ he declared. ‘Bad fails to achieve its desired result.’
To this end Goebbels exploited racism, xenophobia and envy to the limit and sold the idea of the master race and the thousand-year Reich. His power and influence dwindled the more successful the Nazi Party was in extinguishing any opposition. There was simply less need for that sort of propaganda when no one dared complain or criticize, and by the beginning of the war his main task had been accomplished. What he did understand, however, was the need for the German people to have some light relief from the rigours of war and he became the David Selznick of the Nazi movie industry, producing an endless supply of frothy comedies and romances from the famous UFA studios on the outskirts of Berlin. It’s hard to imagine Nazi comedies now.
The propaganda – the control of what people were to believe, and the way they were to live – went far beyond overt messages and the production of films. Goebbels’ influence was pervasive. Holiday complexes and cruise ships were built for the Nazi worker. The KdF (Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy) became the largest tourist operator in the world, and Goebbels’ ministry was even given the task of enticing foreign tourists to spend their holidays in Germany. By 1939 over 25 million people had been on KdF holidays – though, unsurprisingly, few came from overseas. KdF also built the first VW Beetle and marketed it as the workers’ car – a subtle blend of propaganda and advertising.
The thing about propaganda is, it doesn’t matter what the message and purpose is – it could be anything – the point is finding ways of promoting it and ensuring that people believe it. Take Stalin in the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao in China, masters of propaganda both – they could give Goebbels a run for his money. They used similar methods to the Nazis, but they were promising different results: a utopian socialist society, rather than the thousand-year Reich.
Adolf Hitler demonstrated impressive showmanship
All these dictatorships made extensive use of the printed word, speeches and, especially, posters. Stalin’s ambitious Five Year Plans, with their slogans exhorting workers to up their quotas and defeat the imperialists, were none too subtle, but the images of a smiling benevolent Uncle Joe did much to win the proletarian heart. In China, propaganda was taken to a new level with Mao’s continual revolutions within the revolution, each new wave designed to direct and control, under the guise of improving the nation and the lives of the people.
The Hundred F
lowers Movement of 1957, for example, was a short-lived experiment in asking intellectuals to criticize the direction of the revolution. ‘Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land,’ was Mao’s initial premise. But when the criticisms became personal attacks on him he ruthlessly squashed it and effectively killed off any further intellectual debate.
German propaganda was explicit and forceful. This example compares healthy German children with hungry, barefoot Russian children
Propaganda turns language upside down. It twists meaning and says the opposite of what it does. (It’s all in 1984 – have a look again. ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’) In his attempts to neutralize any further division within the party, Mao launched ‘The Great Leap Forward’ in 1958. Propaganda was used extensively to mobilize the masses and change the country from a predominantly agrarian economy to an industrial one. But there was no leap forward. The opposite happened, with catastrophic results. An estimated 20–40 million people died of starvation as the economy went into freefall.
And that’s where another side of propaganda kicks in. When the reality is not as the propaganda promises, just keep pumping out the message until people are swamped. Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ was one of the tools of revolution which flooded the consciousness of millions of citizens with the wisdom and pithy sayings of the Chairman. It was impossible to escape the message. The People’s Liberation Army General Political Department printed a total of 1,005,549,800 copies of the book, in sixty-five languages. That’s over a billion ‘hits’ of propaganda in a pre-internet age.
Chairman Mao with peasants during the Cultural Revolution of 1966
Of course, as well as making some fine war films, Western society has put out its fair share of outright wartime propaganda. Lord Kitchener’s recruitment campaign during the First World War was more direct than anything dreamed up by the communist propagandists, and Uncle Sam was no slouch either. Today’s messages, though, are couched in subtler and more entertaining ways. The US Defense Department, through the US Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis, has developed its own video game, ‘America’s Army’, to try to lure new recruits. Available as a free download, it’s been a huge success with over 8 million registrations.
Today’s politicians in general, though, have a much tougher job getting their message across in what the PR chaps would call ‘a crowded marketplace’. As ad man Don Bowen says, ‘Political slogans are still useful because they sum up the approach that the political party is moving in. The difficulty is there’s always somebody with an antithetical political statement that they’re trying to get over. So, unlike propaganda, when there’s only one story in town, which was true in Nazi Germany and in Mao’s China, here there are many stories. We have choices. There isn’t just one beer that says, “Probably the best lager in the world,” there’s another beer that says, “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” And there’s another beer that’s saying something else. So you never just get your own way.’
Well, that’s democracy for you. And in a democracy, people are free to pick and choose, and there are many, many different voices we can listen to, or ignore. And, generally, we prefer the simpler message. Don’t make it too complicated, or it’ll just get lost. Hitler knew that very well. ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly,’ he said. ‘It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’ Which is as true today as then. A slogan like Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ struggles to be heard, so little wonder he has to repeat it every time he’s on the radio or TV.
Does ultimate resistance to the power of state propaganda depend on there being so many channels of communication, so many messages, that no one authority or idea can dominate? It’s true that even within totalitarian regimes the profusion of social network sites like Twitter and Facebook is chipping away at their hegemony. The events in the Middle East and the Maghreb in 2011 show just how difficult it is to contain information and channel people’s thoughts. When a young street seller in Tunisia sets himself alight because he can no longer fight the system which makes scraping a living almost impossible, and a very short time later his story is texted and tweeted and posted round the world – that’s when ideas can’t be corralled. When so-called ‘citizen journalists’ can upload pictures and videos of events to the internet in a matter of minutes, then the windows of communication are well and truly open.
‘Stalin Leads Us to Victory’, 1943
We can now share our ideas, our anger, our frustrations with thousands of people at the touch of a button. When the financial crash in Iceland happened in 2008, it was a Facebook campaign by ordinary Icelanders that ultimately persuaded the government to support an investigation into the people responsible for the banking collapse. If the government wouldn’t take action, the people would. Goebbels would not have liked that. And could he possibly have imagined a world where WikiLeaks existed, a world where he couldn’t control the message, because, with a click of a mouse, someone, somewhere with access to government secrets and confidential documents can upload them to the web?
The language of Twitter, texting and social network sites may not be the most elegant, but it shows that we humans have this innate need to communicate, be it banal gossip, love stories or life-changing revolution.
The Future
So how will the storytellers of the digital age gain and keep our attention? Will language still be as powerful as it is today? Will it be controlled by an elite of media owners, the neo-Brahmins of the twenty-first century, or democratized so that we all become producers rather than consumers? What does the future look like on Planet Word?
In an elegant, light-filled building worthy of a sci-fi movie, MIT’s elegant new Media Lab houses a division called ‘The Future of Storytelling’. The idea is tantalizingly simple and almost impossible to envisage.Yes, we will undoubtedly have immersive 3D screens, and video games that involve physically wearing a suit to mimic the movements in the game (because they’re already invented). And, yes, we’ll be able to roll up a screen like a newspaper and put it in our pocket, and have adverts directed at us personally as we walk around the cities of the future (like in Spielberg’s movie Minority Report). And, yes, we’ll be able to create stories across space with interactive screens linked to the web: families will be able to create their own histories or mythologies, to preserve images and voices for future generations. But will all this new technology change what we want to say?
Communications theorist Marshall Mcluhan was wrong: the medium is really not the message. The message is the message. Humans will continue to be addicted to chatter and gossip, to talk of love and sex and sometimes of death. We will go on flirting and cracking jokes and making up wild stories that have no sense. In other words, the same things we talked about when we all sat around a fire at the end of the day, roasting a zebra or slab of sperm whale. What is different is that the global village which Mcluhan predicted in the early 1960s is now a reality, and the realization of it has been the biggest transformation in our species’ evolution since … well, maybe the invention of language itself. What is certain is there will be many more stories to tell.
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