Propaganda [Paperback]

Orwell's electronic miracles monitored citizens directly or indirectly. Huxley's miracles were far more therapeutic or medical. But routine surveillance or treatment is inefficient and overwhelms any state that would depend on omniscience or envelopment. Ellul foresaw tools both electronic and human that would so condition subject-audiences that close monitoring and careful prescriptions would be unneeded.

Ellul also argued that this "Brave, New World" could not but subvert democracy and decency. Once the will of the citizen is not his or her own, then democracy in any meaningful sense is at least devalued and perhaps transformed into reassuring internment.

Perhaps Ellul's most important insight was that the educated believed themselves immune to propaganda when, due to their proclivity for reading and watching news and other governmental outflow, such "intellectuals" were actually far more vulnerable than masses who did not receive propaganda as often.

So turn off the set and log off the internet and settle in with a truly life-changing read.

And this is as it should be. After all, the propagandist is operating in full force right now, as he was in the 1960's when the book was written, and he is not using controlled labs to do it. He is doing it on a mass scale in real society and achieving results. Therefore a serious attempt to understand propaganda "in its actual place" and "as it is used" is valuable and enlightening. Ellul is not interested in "building" a technique for propaganda from the ground up, or in "proving" that it is possible. This much has already been done as evidenced by plain facts!! He is acknowledging what has already been achieved and is looking at these systems from many angles to determine their nature and tease out an understanding so we can know more what we are facing.

You will find many less than intuitive but fascinating notions in the book.

For instance: Education increases the ingestion of propaganda. In fact it is a prerequisite. It is no wonder Saddam Hussein worked to increase literacy in Iraq -- all the better to try to propagandize the people with words and mold them into a cohesive whole. Another idea: Democracies like the U.S. are very vulnerable to propaganda. In fact, this form of government makes propaganda all the more necessary, since you must work on people's minds more than their bodies (it is not a dictatorship.) People in democracies should expect to be heavily and relentlessly propagandized.

These are just a few samples of the many fascinating (and horrifying) ideas and insights in this volume.

One thing to note: Jacques Ellul is also a theologian and Christian, and he doesn't make much of a secret of that in his book or his other writings. I am not a Christian myself (I'm an atheist), but I frankly think Ellul's Christianity not only DOESN'T cloud Ellul's sharp powers of logic and observation, but it does him a bit of service in his examination of propaganda and its harmful effects on the human being. He makes few bones about the idea that propaganda has a tendency to separate man from himself and his true spirituality and/or personality. This he relates among the other harmful effects on the world at large in the form of exploitation and war.

All I can say is read this book: You'll never look at things the same way afterwards.

As for the reviewer who complained about Ellul's study being limited to one nation's systems of propaganda, this criticism was also levelled against American mass communications researcher, Christopher Simpson, whose 1996 book titled SCIENCE OF COERCION used declassified archives to trace government's hidden funding of an entire new academic discipline, namely Communications. These two books, read alongside a book of essays by involved academics (some government-funded, others not) edited by Simpson and named UNIVERSITIES AND EMPIRE, Robert McChesney's RICH MEDIA, POOR DEMOCRACY, former ABC TV Producer of Children's Programming Dennis Mazzocco's NETWORKS OF POWER, and Chomsky & Herman's seminal content analysis study MANUFACTURING CONSENT provide a fairly inclusive frame of reference for studying propaganda systems, albeit primarily those of the western hemisphere. Let us not forget University of California Professor Emeritus Peter Dale Scott, whose booklength confessional poem COMING TO JAKARTA re-examines his silence while faculty colleagues accepted grants from the U.S. military and CIA to target native Indonesian student leaders, trade unionists, and intellectual elites for assassination during the early 1970's.

I am not a scholar or academic, yet wanting to understand the principles at work whenever I submit to the soothing rays of television, or enter the comforting parameters imposed on a world in chaos whenever I pick up a daily newspaper, weekly advertiser and/or magazine led me to continue seeking out the critical analysis offered by these books. Christopher Simpson's succint formulation of what had previously been a subconscious preoccupation of mine just about sums it up: "How do we come to know what it is that we think we know." The advantage in Simpson's book is that the footnotes can send a reader or media professional to documentation of the 'wizard' behind Media Oz. In one most startling case, given what we think we know about Harry Truman and his interpretation of American constitutional principles, a single footnote can lead down a historical rabbit hole, or is it really Orwell's 'memory hole'? If not THE Cold War, at least A Cold War is never too far off.