Stiles begins by building out a historical foundation of the last 130+ years of propaganda techniques:1
- · The selling of war, starting in World War I
- · The manufacture of ideas and consent
- · The mass consolidation of news media into just six conglomerates
- · The ever-more-intimate relationship between the American Intelligence Agencies and Hollywood
Stiles outlines the history following World War One, reminding us that there was a brief and futile pushback against the use of propaganda by the government against the people. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis was formed in 1938, dedicated to protecting democracy from the threat of propaganda. (Spoiler: it failed.) But this Institute identified seven main techniques of propaganda, most still widely in use today:
- Name Calling: A device to discredit an opponent without refuting his claim.
- Glittering Generalities: A device that identifies a position with “virtue” by use of words like truth, freedom, democracy, liberty, etc.
- Transfer: An appeal which seeks to carry over the authority, sanction, or prestige of something we respect.
- Testimonial: A device to use the opinion of an expert authority for propaganda purposes.
- Plain Folks: An appeal to win confidence by appearing to be like the common people being addressed.
- Card-Stacking: An appeal that uses under-emphasis or over-emphasis to dodge issues and evade facts.
- Band Wagon: An appeal that encourages us to follow the crowd because “Everybody is doing it.”
True Solutions
Educating yourself in the tools of propaganda are the most important steps. Ways to identify propaganda include: understanding the models being used to influence you, following the money, learning from whistleblowers, asking questions, and digging deeper.
Trusting yourself to see through the fog, looking carefully at how words are being used, and committing to “Live Not By Lies” [B1] as Alexandr Solzhenitsen proposed are the primary antidotes to the propagandistic abuse of language we are all experiencing and the tyranny that follows in its wake.