Propaganda example:
Afghanistan is just the beginning on the war against terror. Across the world, and across the years, we will fight these evil ones, and we will win.
-- George W. Bush, Fort Campbell, Ky., Nov. 21, 2001.
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training
of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts,
processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time
placed within their field of vision. The whole art consists in doing this so
skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the
process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not
and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster,
consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating
those who are already educated or who are striving after education and
knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and
only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect...The more modest
its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration
the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be.
"The art of
propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and
finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention
and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The receptivity of the great
masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of
forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective
propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these
slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to
understand [or believe].
"The war propaganda of the English and Americans
were psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own people
as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrors
of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this,
the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirm
what his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the
truth of his government's assertions, while on the other hand it increased
his rage and hatred against the vile enemy For the cruel effects of the
weapon, whose use by the enemy he now came to know, gradually came to
confirm for him the 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbarous enemy, which he had
heard all about; and it never dawned on him for a moment that his own
weapons possibly, if not probably, might be even more terrible in their
effects.
"The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and
ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one
right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an
objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set
it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own
right, always and unflinchingly.
The broad mass of a nation does not
consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even
individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain
mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own
propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the
foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. The masses are then in
no position to distinguish where foreign injustice ends and our own begins."
Adolph Hilter
Excerpt from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf:
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