Joseph Goebbels was a master of propaganda, using film and photography to make Nazi leader Adolf Hitler seem an almost Messianic figure in the eyes of the German people.
The Post-Truth Era: Dissing Information Propaganda - powerful images, selective vision
Propaganda is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view”. Derived from the Latin propagare (to propagate or spread), propaganda is a mechanism for the psychological and/ or emotional manipulation of a population to influence their opinion and behaviour. This could be simply aimed at convincing someone to vote a certain way, or, in cases such as the self-styled Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh), to commit acts of violence or murder. Propaganda as we know it today is a relatively modern phenomenon. During the 19th century improvements in education led to more people becoming literate, while at the same time mass media began to emerge, first in print and later film, radio and TV. The ability to control what information people consumed became highly important to many of those either in or seeking power. Propaganda is inherently subjective rather than objective, and presents facts selectively. Inconvenient truths are often omitted or distorted, while messages to be promoted are amplified and idealised. Language is often evocatively phrased to produce an emotional rather than a rational response. Identifying propaganda has always been a problem, as few who use it ever define it was such. For example, one ideology may view materials produced by those with opposing viewpoints as propaganda, but claim their own, even if clearly biased, to be educational.
Cartoon network
The final consequence
Who are they kidding?
Almighty problems?
Printed materials were already well-established as propaganda tools as the 20th century dawned, but there were still a great many people who had neither the ability, access or inclination to read the press. The invention of motion pictures gave propagandists a powerful means of emotionally manipulating the population in a form that all could follow and, crucially, would actively seek out as entertainment. Animation was often a favoured format for propagandists as it allowed them to present any position they liked without the need to back it up with real footage, and stylise and demonise those opposing them. The rise of television and later the internet gave propagandists an even wider reach, and still today some privately owned news networks are clearly biased against any public figures or ideologies disliked by the owners.
Imagery can have a huge influence on how people perceive certain subjects. In advertising, products and places are visually presented with great care to make them attractive and appealing. Propaganda often does the opposite, and in one notable case managed to turn almost an entire outwardly civilised nation into the perpetrator of history’s largest crime - the Holocaust. The citizens of Nazi Germany were continually fed content by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, led by Joseph Goebbels, which successfully created a climate of intolerance and conformity that allowed the regime to pass severe and unjust laws. Films such as The Eternal Jew successfully dehumanised those the Nazis wanted to destroy, comparing them to rats and vermin, to the degree where industrialised extermination was deemed an acceptable form of action.
Children are especially vulnerable to propaganda, as they lack the levels of critical reasoning and contextual comprehension needed to inform their perceptions. This vulnerability is rooted in developmental psychology, as children actively try to make sense of their world by absorbing stimuli at face value and through imitation. For example in Nazi German schools anti-Semitic references were presented as authoritative educational texts. At the other end of the scale, sometimes people attack genuine academic materials as propaganda. In November 2016 in Tennessee, USA, a mother named Michelle Edmisten (above) demanded that a Junior World History book from UK publisher Pearson be banned because it contained innocent references to Islamic history and art which she asserted could “indoctrinate” non-Muslim children.
The very first use of word propaganda was in a religious context, when in 1622 a document called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith) was published by the Catholic Church as a plan to spread Catholicism into new territories. The freedom to believe and practice any religion peacefully and freely is a cornerstone of any modern democracy, and yet religious intolerance has risen sharply in recent times in the UK, fuelled by propaganda pertaining to the numbers, motivations and activities of refugees in UK. In July 2016, just a month after the EU referendum, of which immigration was a key issue for many, the Home Office confirmed that police had recorded a 41% increase in hate crime over the same period for 2015. Many victims were either Muslim, or people simply believed to be Muslim (including many Christians) because they were non-white.