As the social world becomes more free and diverse, the task of inducing submission becomes more complex and the problem of unravelling the mechanisms of indoctrination more challenging. ibid.
I think there is a good reason why the propaganda systems works that way – it recognises that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them. Professor Noam Chomsky
State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day. Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’. These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked (‘retaliation’, ‘protective reaction’ etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that US power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence – wholesale as opposed to retail terror – during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not ‘terror’ ... ‘security forces’ only retaliate and engage in ‘police action’.
These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as ‘reactive’ and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of ‘terrorism’ ... Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror. Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection & Third World Fascism
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. Noam Chomsky
US Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture. Noam Chomsky
In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants. Noam Chomsky
There’s two targets for propaganda: one is what’s sometimes called the political class … then there’s 80% of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not to think and not to pay attention to anything and they’re the ones who usually pay the cost. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1992 Youtube
By selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis, and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. ibid.
The Wilson administration established the first official government propaganda agency in the United States called the Creole Commission on Public Information. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1989, ‘Propaganda Model Language Manipulation and US Foreign Policy’
The news isn’t there to tell you what happened. It’s there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear. Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men II: Dangerous
I think most things I read on the Internet and in newspapers are propaganda. Everyone from The New York Times to Rupert Murdoch has a point of view and is putting forth their own propaganda. They’re stuck with the facts as they are, but the way they interpret and frame them is wildly different. Frank Miller
I ran the paper [Daily Express] purely for propaganda, and with no other purpose. Lord Beaverbrook, evidence to Royal Commission on the Press March 1948
My father was a master of propaganda. Lord Beaverbrook
It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked. Harold Pinter
Ever since the start of industrial history the ruling classes have sought propaganda methods to divert the attention of the workers from the ineptitude and savagery of capitalism. Imperialism and Race have been used with recurrent fervour for this purpose – and with great success. Both issues are closely interlocked. Hand in hand with propaganda about the glories of empire – so assiduously used to drug the militancy of the worker in the last century – went the notion that those conquered by British marauders were in some way intrinsically inferior to them. For the British such notions were tinged with colour. For the colonised peoples were almost all black or brown, while the British colonists, including those in Australia and America, were white. Thus all white men were great men, and all black men were ignorant illiterate savages. This was no accidental conclusion. It was the deliberate propaganda of 19th century imperialists. Paul Foot, article 1965, ‘Imperialism and Race Ideologies’
The wretched history of the Daily Herald since its takeover by the TUC 50 years ago proves how self-destructive is reformist, social democratic propaganda. A workers’ paper is useless unless its propaganda is backed and enriched by organisation and agitation. Unless workers see their paper as a guide to action and organisation as well as arguments against the Tories and their system, the paper is bound to lose out to the big battalions. Paul Foot, article September 1973, ‘How the TUC Killed Workers’ Paper’
What Eddy got from Freud was indeed this idea that there is a lot more going on in human decision-making. Not only among individuals but even more importantly among groups. This idea that information drives behaviour. Pat Jackson, colleague of Edward Bernays
Bernays really is the guy within the United States more than anybody else who brings to the table psychological theory as something that is an essential part of how from the corporate side we are going to appeal to the masses effectively. Stuart Ewen, Public Relations historian
50,244. Now it was here at Fitzmaurice Place, Berkeley Square, just down the road from the old MI6 headquarters that the political warfare executive was based. Now so secretive was this outfit that even the government didn’t refer to it by its real name: it was referred to as the Political Intelligence Department or PID. And it was responsible for all propaganda, whether black, white or a bit of both. Conspiracies: Nazi Invasion
All propaganda is a lie even when it’s telling the truth. George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. George Orwell, 1984
The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only be influenced in a negative way. ibid.
It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose – a political, social and religious purpose – that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs. George Orwell
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. George Orwell, Animal Farm