If you won't see it, you can't fight it
The impact of propaganda at its best — that is, at its most effective — depends on our
not seeing it for what it is, mistaking it for "news" or "entertainment," and/or some other content that appears to have no covert intention. Thus disguised, propaganda works far more efficiently, and often for far longer, than when it comes at us
as propaganda — as, say, in TV and radio spots, ad banners on the Web, billboards, videos in taxicabs, or any other medium that bluntly
sells a product or a candidate. So bald a pitch — known, among the spooks, as "white propaganda" — tends to provoke resistance, as when a telemarketer calls, or a panhandler approaches. By contrast, winning propaganda — as Edward Bernays explains in his eponymous classic(1928) — neutralizes your suspicion by working its "persuasion" into some comic or suspenseful narrative, or journalistic exposé, or (seeming) "fad" or "craze,"
so that such "gray propaganda" sneaks past your defenses, lodges in your mind without your knowing it,
and stays there until you somehow learn the truth, and — crucially — accept it.
Such truth can hurt, so that accepting it is often difficult — unless, of course, it tells you what you want to think is true. We have no trouble spotting propaganda from "the enemy," whoever that may be: propaganda that we disagree with, and therefore call it "propaganda" as that word is commonly deployed, as a mere synonym for "lies." If, on the other hand, the enemy says something true, and (naturally) we want to think it's false, our dismissing it
as "propaganda" in the pejorative sense
is itself that very kind of propaganda, meant to have you thinking that true claims are false, and falsehoods true. (Not everyone who does this is aware of what s/he's doing, but speaks out of wishful thinking, tribalistic and defensive.) If, however, the enemy's propaganda comes at us disguised as something else — something thrilling, beautiful or fun — we can absorb it just as easily as we often do with propaganda hidden in domestic news or entertainment. (Dr. Goebbels
was especially adept at managing that sort of masquerade, such as the films of Leni Riefenstahl, and other spectacles with no explicit hints of pending war or genocide.)
Comment: More form Mark Crispin Miller: