How Propaganda Works How Works

HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS HOW WORKS PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS JASON STANLEY Princeton Oxford Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket design by Chris Ferrante Excerpts from Victor Kemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, translated by Martin Brady © Reclam Verlag Leipzig, 1975. Used by permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All Rights Reserved ISBN 978– 0– 691– 16442– 7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955002 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro and League Gothic Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed. — JOSEPH GOEBBELS, REICH MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA, 1933– 45 CONTENTS Preface IX Introduction: The Problem of Propaganda 1 1 Propaganda in the History of Political Thought 27 2 Propaganda Defined 39 3 Propaganda in Liberal Democracy 81 4 Language as a Mechanism of Control 125 5 Ideology 178 6 Political Ideologies 223 7 The Ideology of Elites: A Case Study 269 Conclusion 292 Acknowledgments 295 Notes 305 Bibliography 335 Index 347 PREFACE In August 2013, after almost a decade of teaching at Rutgers University and living in apartments in New York City, my wife Njeri Thande and I moved to a large house in New Haven, Connecticut, to take up positions at Yale University. Along with the move in academic affiliations came space. Soon thereafter, my stepmother, Mary Stanley, called me with a request. Could she send me some boxes of books from my father’s library? The request filled me with fear as well as anticipation. I spent half my childhood in the house she shared with my father. The walls of every room were filled with books. The shelves were double stacked; behind each row of books was another. Only my father knew the complex code that unlocked the mystery of its organizational system, and he had passed away in 2004. Mary told me that she would be sending me the contents of a room or two, to clear out a little bit of space in the house. Who knew what we would receive? With trepidation, we agreed. My father Manfred Stanley was a sociology professor at Syracuse University, where he was for many years the direc- tor of the Center for the Study of Citizenship at the Maxwell School for Citizenship and Public Affairs; Mary Stanley was also a professor at Syracuse, and his colleague and coconspira- tor in the Center. He began his career as an Africanist, with a X PREFACE dissertation in anthropology. Sometime during his early career as a professor, in the 1960s, he moved from East African Stud- ies to Sociology, where he regularly taught the theory courses. During his career, he published one book.1 My father, like my mother Sara Stanley, was a survivor of the Holocaust. No doubt as a consequence, he devoted his academic career to a theoretical repudiation of authoritarianism in all of its various guises. He argues in his work that no system that usurps the autonomy of persons can be acceptable, even if it is in the name of greater social efficiency or the common good. The lessons of history show that humans are too prone to confuse the furtherance of their own interests with the common good, and their subjective explanatory framework with objective fact. I owe a substantive intellectual debt to my father and my stepmother Mary. Their project on democratic citizenship has shaped and molded my own. One way of seeing my father’s work is as devoted to explaining how sincere, well-meaning people can be deceived by self-interest into unwittingly pro- ducing propaganda. My goal in this book is to explain how sincere, well- meaning people, under the grips of flawed ideology, can unknowingly produce and consume propaganda. In the service of acknowledging my debt, I will explain the central themes of his written work, and their joint project, as a preface to my project in this book. My father’s dissertation concerns the destructive effects of British colonialism on the Gikuyu. Its focus is on the Gikuyu land tenure system, a manner of managing land so central to Gikuyu identity that, as Jomo Kenyatta writes, “[i]n studying the Gikuyu tribal organization it is necessary to take into con- sideration land tenure as the most important factor in the social, political, religious, and economic life of the tribe.” The Gikuyu land tenure system was radically different from the system of private property at the basis of British society; “it was a man’s pride to own a property and his enjoyment to allow collective use of such property.”2 The dissertation explains how PREFACE XI the British belief that their particular system of private property was universal led to unbridgeable misunderstandings between even well-intentioned British colonialists and the Gikuyu people. The moral of colonialism is that it is much harder to make “objective” decisions on behalf of others even for the sake of their own good. Even those British colonialists who were sincere and well meaning found it impossible to distinguish between genuinely liberal values, their own local cultural practices, and naked self- interest. My father’s view of autonomy was richer than mere non- domination by others. His worldview required every citizen to be provided with a liberal education, the goal of which would be to foster the capacity for autonomous decision making about one’s life plans, where this involved the kind of reflec- tion that, for him, allowed for genuine autonomy. The descrip- tion of the contours of an education that could play this democratic role takes up another portion of his academic writings. The target of my father’s book is what he often called “technicism,” the view that scientific expertise and technological ad- vancements are the solution to the problems of the human condition. My father saw two chief dangers in the technicist worldview. First, it seeks to replace a liberal education with vocational technical skills. The technicist educational system therefore seeks to rob us of the capacity for autonomy. Sec- ondly, a technicist culture encourages a tendency to defer one’s practical decisions to the epistemic authority of experts. As he writes, Some societies are organized so as to restrict the distribu- tion of important forms of authoritative agency to particular ruling elites. In other societies all normal members of society are considered “responsible free agents.” Even in most of these, however, certain people are designated as more equal than others. Why? Because their mastery of a particular cognitive area of discourse or practice seems to make it socially desirable that they be granted the right, XII PREFACE under certain circumstances, to intervene in the freedom of other agents. Such privileged people are normally called “professionals.”3 Of course, modernity demands trusting professionals; we must, after all, see the doctor. There are also salient cases in which distrust of experts is key to propaganda; the case of cli- mate change denial is the salient example (though, even here, the form of the distrust has taken the shape of the mobiliza- tion of an alternative domain of pseudoexperts, such as the “junk science” commentators discussed in this book). Never- theless, history shows that even the well meaning are likely to conflate the products of genuine scientific expertise with the imposition of their own subjective values. The British imposed their own conception of private property onto the Gikuyu inhabitants of the land they had occupied, under the misguided belief that their system of property rights was part of universally valid economic theory. The British mistakenly saw their system of private property as part of the universal values liberalism should spread. He saw similar forces at work in the United States, in the education system and the mass media. My father does not solve the difficult problem of distin- guishing legitimate versus illegitimate deference to experts, of drawing on knowledge without being subordinate to it. But he is clear about the dangers of technicist culture.4 Technicism was a central mechanism liberal democracies employed when the illegitimate subordination of others took place. For example, it is the mechanism so ably described by Khalil Muham- mad in his work on the role social science played in the first half of the twentieth century in the subordination of Ameri- can citizens of African descent.5 Muhammad there shows how social scientists convinced of their own objectivity used sta- tistical methods to give an objective covering to racial bias. Patricia Hill Collins has drawn our attention to the way that “knowledge validation processes” that privilege quantitative PREFACE XIII methods also obstruct our access to social reality: “[i]individ- ual African- American women’s narratives about being single mothers are often rendered invisible in quantitative research methodologies that erase individuality in favor of proving pat- terns of welfare abuse.”6 Even if statistics are accurate, they nev- ertheless can serve a propagandistic role in domination and oppression, by obscuring the narratives that would explain them. This is a use of the ideals of scientific objectivity and the common good in pursuit of social control. In this book, I define political propaganda as the employ- ment of a political ideal against itself.

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