Propaganda primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to promote a certain program, which may not be objective and may uniquely provide a fictitious reality to motivate a certain form of thinking, or make use of a certain language. to generate an emotional atmosphere rather than a sensible response to the information being presented.
Propaganda is found in news but also in journalism, government, marketing, entertainment, arts, education, and is often associated with government-prepared material such as initiatives, political campaigns, health and wellness projects, large companies, non-religious organizations, the media.
In the 20th century, the English term propaganda was typically associated with a manipulative method. A wide range of materials and media are used to share propaganda messages, which have changed with the design of new modern technologies, consisting of paintings, cartoons, posters, books, films, radio programs, television programs and Internet sites. More recently, the digital age has spawned new methods of advertising sharing, for example, algorithms and bots are currently being used to produce computational propaganda and bogus or distorted information and disseminate it on social networks.
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How the Term Propaganda Was Born
Propaganda is a Latin word, singular feminine ablative of the gerundive type of propagare, which means “spread out” or “propagate”, therefore propaganda indicates what must be propagated. Originally this word originated from a new administrative body of the Catholic Church (parish) created in 1622 as part of the Counter-Reformation, called Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propaganda of the Faith), or informally simply Propaganda. Its task was centered on the “circulation” of the Catholic creed in non-Catholic countries.
From 1790, the term also began to be used to refer to advertising. The term began to take on a negative connotation from the mid-nineteenth century, when it was used in politics.
Propaganda in the 20th Century
Propaganda was conceived as a kind of influence created to develop social consensus. In the 20th century, the term propaganda arose along with the wave of mass media, consisting of newspapers, radio and cinema. When scientists began examining the impact of media, they used the concept of an idea to describe exactly how people might be affected by emotionally resonant messages.
Let’s take the news as an example: have you ever noticed that the style of the news is more or less the same all over the world? For what reason? The reason is that the format has been tested over time by those who control the media, by the propaganda system. A fast, syncopated pace, where tragic news follows one another at a sustained speed, is the ideal style to prevent the viewer from thinking about making any sensible reflection.
For some scholars, propaganda is the expression of views or activities deliberately carried out by individuals or groups to influence the views or actions of other individuals or groups for intended purposes and also through psychological controls. Propaganda creates the lifestyles and beliefs of human beings through hidden threads that the propagandist manipulates.
In the 1920s and even 1930s, propaganda was sometimes referred to as omnipotent. Bernays acknowledged in his book Propaganda that “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who regulate this hidden system of society constitute an occult government. We are regulated, our minds are modeled, our preferences formed, our suggestions suggested, mostly by men we never actually knew.
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History of Propaganda
Primitive models of propaganda have been a human activity for as long as there is reliable recorded evidence. The Behistun inscription, 500 years BC, detailing Darius I’s rise to the Persian throne, is considered by most chroniclers to be a very early example of propaganda.
Another striking example of propaganda during ancient history are the last Roman civil wars during which Octavian and Marcus Antonius defamed each other for obscure origins, wickedness, cowardice, debauchery, luxury, drunkenness. This defamation took the form of vituperatio, an ancient Roman genre of invective, which was definitive for shaping Roman public opinion at the time.
Another very early example of propaganda came from Genghis Khan. The emperor would send some of his men in front of his military to spread rumors to the adversary. In most cases, his army was actually smaller than many of his enemies.
The Roman emperor Maximilian I used the power of writing for propaganda in order to build his image and arouse patriotic feelings in the population. Propaganda during the Reformation, aided by the spread of the press throughout Europe, and particularly within Germany, meant that new ideas, ideas and doctrines were made available to the public in ways that had never been seen before the 16th. Century.
During the era of the American Revolution there were newspapers and printers specializing in the subject in support of the Patriots. The negative connotations of the term propaganda are related to the previous social and political changes that occurred during the French revolutionary movement from 1789 to 1799 between the beginning and the middle of the 19th century.
The initial massive and organized propaganda of the government’s propaganda was caused by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. After the defeat of Germany, military officers such as General Erich Ludendorff realized that British propaganda had indeed contributed to their defeat. Adolf Hitler believed this view, thinking that it was one of the main reasons for the collapse of morale and the revolts on the German home front in 1918.
In Mein Kampf (1925) Hitler affirmed his theory of propaganda, which provided an effective basis for his rise to power in 1933. Chronicler Robert Ensor explains that “Hitler … places no limits on what can be done with propaganda; people will think anything, provided they are told something that is emphatically sufficient. , so that discordant opinions are silenced or suffocated in slander “.
Much propaganda in Nazi Germany was created by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Goebbels. Goebbels claims propaganda as a means of getting into the minds of the masses. The icons used for propaganda are ideals such as justice, freedom and dedication to one’s nation. World War II saw the continued use of propaganda as a battle weapon, based on the experience of the First World War, by Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive, together with the United States Office of War Information.
Propaganda and Cinema
At the beginning of the 20th century, the invention of cinema provided propaganda creators with an effective tool for advancing military and political beliefs when it came to reaching a large swath of the population and also producing approval or creating real or imaginary enemies. Cinema was probably the most important mass media in influencing the masses in the twentieth century. The power of the big screen is to create large and engaging emotions that completely break down the barriers of rationality.
In the years following the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet government financed the Russian film industry with the aim of making propaganda films, such as the 1925 film. Battleship Potemkin, which proclaims communist ideals. In World War II, Nazi directors created very emotional films to develop important support for striking Poland. The 1940s and 1930s, which saw the surge of totalitarian states and the Second World War, are probably the golden age of propaganda.
Leni Riefenstahl, a director who works in Nazi Germany, has developed some of the best known propaganda films, such as Triumph of the Will. In 1942, the propaganda melody Niet Molotoff was made in Finland during the war, mocking the failure of the Red Army in the Winter War. In the United States, animation became prominent, mostly to influence younger audiences and to aid the US war initiative. For example, Der Fuehrer’s Face (1942), makes fun of Hitler and also advocates the value of freedom.
Some American war films in the early 1940s were developed to develop a patriotic mood and encourage citizens to have to make sacrifices to beat the Axis powers. Others were intended to help Americans accept their allies in general, as in films like Know Your Ally: Britain and Our Greek Allies.
Aside from his war films, Hollywood has done its part to improve American morale in films where it showed how big screen stars were doing their part against Axis risk, in features such as Stage Door Canteen (1943). Polish filmmakers in Britain developed the anti-Nazi film Calling Mr. Smith (1943) about Nazi criminal offenses in German-occupied Europe and the lies of Nazi propaganda.
The West and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides have used radio, television and film programs to influence their own populations and the rest of the world. Through a front company called the Bedford Publishing Company, the CIA has distributed over 1 million books to the Soviets over 15 years, including novels by George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabakov, James Joyce, and Pasternak in an effort to promote the anti-communist belief and belief in Western values.
But propaganda films aren’t just films commissioned by the Soviet Union or the Nazis. It is safe to say that all mainstream cinema is propaganda cinema. It is a statement that may surprise you but which is easily demonstrable through data. Mainstream cinema requires huge investments of money. Hollywood, for example, only produces about 200 films a year, as the major television networks of Western countries produce a limited number of films per year.
These budgets are approved by a very small number of people: managers, TV executives, producers, etc. These people are strongly influenced, directly or indirectly, by the propaganda and political ideologies through which they have won their leadership roles. It could be argued that it is not always true, that they are often industrial projects created to do business and entertainment, but the economic result is never the only motivation behind a project that costs millions of dollars.
In this discourse, however, the most refined spectator who does not watch mainstream or blockbuster films might think that auteur cinema, or the so-called arthouse film, it is a world that is not at all influenced by the dynamics of propaganda. This argument is almost always totally false for the great European auteur cinema, the one we see in the great festivals, which wins the great prizes.
The explanation here is even simpler: all the greats Art films are financed through a system of public money managed by bureaucrats. They are bureaucrats who do that work precisely because they are part of the propaganda system. Funds are therefore systematically granted or not granted depending on the alignment that the project has with the ideology of propaganda and the issues connected to it at that time. There is no interest in avant-garde art.
In this way, propaganda creates a very long list of false artists, false myths, false arthouse films intended for the target of the most intellectual and most advanced public. It is a niche audience that is also the most dangerous for the propaganda system, the one that thinks the most, the one that is most aware. Covering this target is absolutely necessary to include these potential free thinkers within the ideological enclosure.
There are obviously exceptions. For example the American independent cinema is largely financed by private capital. The lower the budget of an independent film, the more difficult it becomes for it to be captured by propaganda. Propaganda can easily get its hands on only what is expensive, spectacular.
The Independent cinema with a very low budget, which today has proliferated all over the world thanks to digital technologies for about ten years, can be totally impervious to the influence of propaganda. Obviously this completely depends on the mind and worldview of the author who creates it: even in the total independence, he could still be hostage to the thought forms of propaganda.
Cinematographers have constantly rebelled against this structural weakness of the cinematographic medium through the avant-garde movements. Avant-garde films are much more than bizarre cinematic experiments to renew the aesthetic form of language. The avant-garde represent the counter-history, the particular vision of the artist in contrast to the official version. At least until the artist is also reabsorbed by the dynamics of propaganda, as has happened for many directors of the French Nouvelle Vague, for example.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm books e Nineteen Eighty-Four describe the use of propaganda in dystopian societies imaginary. Propaganda was used extensively by Communist forces in the Vietnam War as a means of controlling people’s views.
During the Yugoslav battles, propaganda was used as a military approach by the governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Croatia. Propaganda was used to create fear and hatred, but above all to provoke the Serbian population against other ethnic groups.
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Recognize Propaganda
Recognize e unmasking propaganda has always been complicated. The main problems are separating propaganda from other types of persuasion. Propaganda often takes on a neutral tone that attempts to influence the feelings, perspectives, views, as well as actions of a specific target audience for ideological, commercial or political purposes through the controlled transmission of messages using mass media networks.
Propaganda can often be recognized by the rhetorical techniques used in its style. Propaganda often creates and uses slanderous labels and emotional generalizations. With the rise of the web and social media, propaganda today has 4 particular characteristics: it triggers solid emotions; simplify the details; attracts the hopes, anxieties and desire of a targeted audience; and attacks its detractors.
In some cases, propaganda is evaluated on the basis of the intention and objectives of the private individual or the institution that developed it. According to historian Zbyněk Zeman, propaganda can be white, black or gray. White propaganda honestly discloses its data and intentions. Gray propaganda has an undisclosed or ambiguous resource or intent. Black propaganda claims to be published by the enemy.
Opposition to white propaganda is often found easily and can discredit the source of the propaganda. Opposition to gray propaganda, when revealed, could create some degree of public outcry. Opposition to black propaganda is often inaccessible and can even be dangerous, due to the fact that there is no public knowledge of the methods and resources.
The propagandist seeks to alter the means by which individuals use a problem or circumstance for the function of changing their actions and thoughts for their own interest. Propaganda acts as a censorship effect, not by loading people’s minds with accepted information, but by preventing people from being confronted with opposing points of view.
What collects propaganda in addition to various other forms of advocacy is the propagandist’s desire to alter people’s recognition through deception and complication instead of persuasion and understanding. The leaders of an organization recognize that the information is one-sided or false, but this may not be true for those who help spread the propaganda, who become real human repeaters.
War propaganda
In the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians used mythical imagery to stir up feelings against Sparta. Helen of Troy was even portrayed as an Athenian, whose mother Nemesis would avenge Troy. During the Punic Wars, extensive propaganda campaigns were carried out on both sides. To dissolve the Roman system, Hannibal took the Latin inmates he had generously treated to their hometowns, where they helped distribute his propaganda. The Romans on the other hand attempted to portray Hannibal as a person devoid of humanity and who would surely quickly lose favor with the gods.
Propaganda is an effective weapon in times of war; in specific situations, it is used to dehumanize and create hatred towards an alleged opponent, external or internal, creating a wrong psychological image to soldiers and citizens. This can be done using negative or racist terms. The goal was to demoralize the opponent by making him think that what was being told was actually real. Many wartime propaganda initiatives require the population to feel that the enemy has inflicted an injustice, which can be fictitious.
The population must also think that their country’s reason for the war is obvious. Propaganda is used in the form of information, especially of a misleading nature, used to advertise a political reason or point of view. In this perspective, the details offered do not necessarily have to be wrong but must instead be relevant to the objectives of the system.
Propaganda is also one of the approaches used in emotional warfare, which can also include covert flag operations in which the identity of agents is portrayed as that of an adversary country. The term propaganda can also refer to false information suggested to bolster the mood of individuals who already believe in propaganda goals. If people believe in something wrong, they will regularly be assailed with doubts.
In the Soviet Union during World War II, the propaganda created to solicit private citizens was handled by Stalin. On the other hand, the informal rumors about German atrocities were well established and convincing. Stalin was a Georgian who spoke Russian with a strong accent. This created problems to make him a national hero, so starting in the 1930s all new images of Stalin were retouched to eliminate his Georgian facial features and make him a credible Soviet hero. Only his eyes and even his popular mustache continued to remain unaffected.
Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits any kind of war propaganda together with any kind of defense of religious or national hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence by law.
Ordinary people don’t want war. However, it is the leaders of the nation who identify the plan and it is always easy to drag individuals with them, whether it is a democracy or a fascist tyranny or a parliament or a communist tyranny. People can be constantly offered the Leaders Offering Process. It is very easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being hit, beat the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and even expose the nation to the threat. It works the same in any kind of country.
Propaganda and Marketing
Propaganda shares strategies with marketing and public relations, each of which can be considered propaganda that promotes a company or forms the perception of an organization, brand or person.
After claiming victory in the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah campaigned for greater popularity among Arabs by organizing mass rallies where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah combined elements of the local dialect with classical Arabic to achieve public outside Lebanon. Billboards and banners were created to celebrate the war, along with numerous merchandise products featuring Hezbollah’s logo design, flag color and Nasrallah imagery. T-shirts, baseball caps and various other war memorabilia have been marketed for all ages.
Journalistic theory generally holds that news must be impartial, giving the public an accurate background and a neutral assessment of the topic. On the other hand, promotions have evolved from typical commercial promotions to also include paid items or programs disguised as information. These usually present a problem in a very subjective and also often misleading light, mainly implicit in persuading rather than informing.
They typically only use subtle propaganda strategies beyond the much more obvious ones used in traditional commercial advertisements. If the visitor thinks that a paid promotion remains in fact news, the message that the advertiser is trying to interact will surely be much more easily “believed” or “internalized”. Such promotions are considered obvious examples of covert advertising as they take on the appearance of objective information rather than the appearance of propaganda.
Propaganda and Politics
Propaganda is on TV and also in news programs that influence mass target markets. Propaganda has become much more common in political contexts, in particular, to refer to certain efforts funded by governments, political groups. At the beginning of the 20th century, propaganda was used in the form of celebratory mottos.
Disinformation is being adopted in the media and also in the education system, without the need for direct government intervention in the media. Such permeating propaganda can be used for political purposes: by giving people the wrong idea of the high quality or plans of their government, they might be led to deny particular proposals or specific observations, or overlook the experience of others.
Advertising also has a lot in common with government propaganda campaigns, which are designed to solicit or inhibit certain types of behavior. Propaganda can use flyers, posters, televisions and radio broadcasts, as well as any other medium. Propaganda feeds on the political left, as well as the right, and also on the main centrist parties.
Propaganda and Totalitarianism
Propaganda is the tool by which totalitarian regimes which are a completely different thing from dictatorships. The dictatorship is based on a small dominant group that imposes its social contract with violence and force. Citizens obey or pretend to obey out of fear, but inside I can still be free.
Totalitarianism . is a much more advanced and refined way of conquering power because it mainly uses thought and the world of ideas created by propagandaIn the world of thought and ideas, everything can be possible: inventing data that does not exist and passing it off as true, creating statements that cannot be demonstrated, materializing what is not visible.
Research institutes and prestigious universities where the battle of ideas is played are one of the main battlefields of propaganda. Through them it is possible to invent facts and events that never existed, scientific truths that can be manipulated to conquer power and control, ideologies and philosophies ready to be used for their own goals.
The totalitarian state does not seek the conquest of outer space but of inner space, through propaganda. The creation of an ideology and a large following of faithful to this ideology becomes fundamental. There is therefore no need to control the masses through physical coercion. It is the citizens themselves who believe in ideology who become the secret police of the totalitarian state, ready to denounce even close relatives and friends who are not aligned with those ways of thinking.
The totalitarian state is therefore much more pervasive than dictatorship and creates deep conflicts within society, within families, social groups and in the mind of the individual. When an individual is a prisoner of ideological fanaticism, he can do anything. A mother can go so far as to denounce her child who refuses to believe in propaganda and to have him hanged. It already happened.
Propaganda Tools
Typical media for sending propaganda messages are news, government documents, historical alterations, junk science, books, flyers, movies, radio, television, and posters. Some propaganda campaigns follow a strategic broadcast pattern to indoctrinate the target audience. This could start with a simple broadcast, such as a flyer or an advertisement released from an advertisement. In general, these messages will certainly include directions on how to acquire more information, via an Internet site, a radio program, and so on.
The method consists of transforming the individual from the recipient of the information to the requestor of the details with the support, and then into the believer of the point of view with the brainwashing. Numerous techniques based on the study of research on social emotions are used to generate propaganda. Often these same techniques are devoid of logic, as propagandists make use of arguments that, while sometimes persuasive, are not verifiable.
Postage stamps have often been tools for government advertising, such as in North Korea. Stalin’s visibility on various Soviet postage stamps is another example. In Nazi Germany, Hitler often appeared on postage stamps in Germany and also in some of the occupied countries.
In 2018, several whistleblowers revealed developments in digital propaganda techniques revealing that online intelligence strategies used in mind warfare had been combined with emotional profiling that uses social network information illegally acquired for political campaigns in the United States in 2016 to assist. Donald Trump from Cambridge Analytica. The company initially denied breaking the laws, but later confessed to breaking UK regulation.
Propaganda in Psychology
The area of social psychology includes research on propaganda and persuasion. Communication theory emphasizes that people can be persuaded by the credibility, reliability, attractiveness and competence of the communicator. The likelihood of the discussion and the persuasion suggest that a number of factors, for example, the degree of suffering of the recipient of the message influence the level to which people allow to be persuaded.
Since these uncertainties are undesirable and cause cognitive dissonance, people will certainly be anxious to eliminate them, and for this reason they are sensitive to the peace of mind of those in power. Consequently, the propaganda is usually aimed at people who are currently accepting the program or opinions presented. This procedure uses an individual’s propensity to independently select “acceptable” sources of information as a way to preserve control over populations.
In the mass information society we live in, individuals are forced to choose quickly superficially rather than cautiously. The 4 principles followed in propaganda are: (1) rely on feelings, never argue; (2) insert propaganda into the model of “us” versus an “adversary”; (3) reach out to both groups and individuals; (4) hide the propagandist for as long as possible.
Just recently, behavioral science studies have become substantial in planning and understanding propaganda campaigns, including for example the push theory that was used by the Obama campaign in 2008 after that adopted by the government’s behavioral analysis team. of the United Kingdom.
The behavioral approaches later got into a terrible conflict in 2016 after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had applied them with hacked Facebook data on countless personal profiles to motivate them to elect Donald Trump. Propaganda is not necessarily about reaching a population with its message, but it can also function as a way to intimidate citizens and signal the resistance of its program, the ability to preserve its control and power over society; by spending resources on propaganda, the program can warn citizens of its strength and dissuade them from trying to counter it.
Propaganda and Education
In the 1950s, the concept of propaganda as well as education and learning experienced a surge in the culture of consumerism. This concept was studied by Vance Packard in his 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders. The work on the website of the European theologian Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is in connection with larger themes concerning the connection between humans and technology. The media messages did not offer to inform or motivate, he said. They just confuse by arousing feelings and also oversimplifying concepts, limiting human reasoning and judgment.
Propaganda can be administered by dangerous methods.the Disinformation history of certain foreign groups or countries can be encouraged or tolerated in the education system. Considering that few people actually critically analyze what they learn in school, such misinformation will surely be repeated by reporters along with parents, thus reinforcing the idea that the product of misinformation is indeed a “known fact”, even if no one repeats it. misconception is capable of indicating a reliable source.
In the 1980s, some scholars recognized that news as well as journalism can serve as propaganda when the interests of the organization and government are magnified by the news media. The style of propaganda is a concept studied by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky which suggests that the media are influenced by economic interests. He argues that the way the media are structured and operate (advertising revenue, media ownership or accessibility to resources) creates a fundamental conflict of interest that makes them serve as propaganda for powerful political and industrial interests.
Mass media are companies that sell a product to advertisers and benefit from access to information from government and corporate sources to produce their content. There are therefore “filters” that shape the material presented by the media: ownership of the medium, dependence on advertising and marketing earnings, access to information sources, threat of litigation and commercial reaction, and even anti-communism and “belief in fear”.
The first three, ownership, financing, and advertising procurement, are the most essential. The model is mainly based on the characterization of the US media, but Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic political economic structure, and the model has subsequently been applied by other scholars to media in other countries.
Propaganda for Children and Youth
Of all the potential targets for propaganda, children, adolescents and young people are among the most helpless because they are the least ready with the critical reasoning and contextual understanding they need to identify if a message is. a propaganda or other. The attention that children give to their environment during development, due to the stabilization process of their understanding of the world, pushes them to indiscriminately propaganda.
Children are highly imitative: Studies in the 1960s indicated that mainstream socialization, education and television programming can be seen as propaganda tools for indoctrination purposes. The use of propaganda in institutions was extremely widespread in the 1930s and also in the 1940s in Germany in the form of the Hitler Youth.
In Nazi Germany, the education and learning system was completely co-opted to indoctrinate young Germans with anti-Semitic beliefs. From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi party has targeted German youth as one of their unique target markets for its advertisements. Schools and curricula mirrored what the Nazis aimed to instill in German youth through the use and promotion of racial theory. Anti-Semitic advertising photo books were distributed in schools during the Nazi dictatorship. This was achieved through the National Socialist League of Teachers, of which 97% of all German instructors were members in 1937.
Mass Media and Propaganda
The news on the news all revolves around the feeling of fear, often providing approximate and unverifiable data. The news and i mainstream media always proclaim themselves absolute truth. No news is really deepened, not even on a superficial level. You quickly move on to the next piece of news that triggers a new emotion of fear, anger or frustration. The rhythm must always remain sustained, neurotic, sobbing, dissociated from logic. After images of suffering and death, the perfect and happy family of the commercial arrives.
The only moments of respite on the news are those dedicated to gossip, sport, and rarely to culture. Art and culture, if any, are never independent art and culture but products made by the system itself that promotes itself through a form of hidden advertising, that is, an advertising promotion in the form of news.
The television audience is so dazed, as countless studies show, that they do not understand at all that often the cultural and entertainment products presented at the end of the news are self-promotions. The viewer’s mind is now occupied with fear and a series of troubling thoughts about the news that has been delivered.
The rhythm of the television language is designed precisely to prevent the viewer from reasoning. The succession of tragic news, insane commercials, junk fiction and gossip creates a cognitive dissociation. The situation is comparable to that of a man on a small boat that is sinking in the open sea: while it sinks, he is not given any solution or creative idea to deal with the dangerous situation, but jokes, grotesque suggestions for purchases, and zany characters. that try to make people laugh.
When this phenomenon of cognitive dissociation between emergency situations, entertainment and consumption lasts for several hours a day, the individual enters a sort of “metaverse”, a state of hypnosis that becomes the normality of his existence. Hypnosis is a state in which the etheric body is detached from the physical body which the hypnotist can take possession of and use.
Propaganda cinema cannot achieve these results which are obtained with a daily and constant administration. Television has effectively been a member of the family for decades and not a film that has a beginning and an end in the space of a couple of hours. The model of television propaganda is to propose unique samples.
Each category has its own champions, rich and famous. Champions of sport, champions of entertainment, champions of politics. The whole structure of entertainment propaganda is founded on competition. This distance between the unique television sample and the viewer creates a hidden message that is suggested millions of times: you are worth nothing, with your insignificant life, but by turning on the TV you can see the samples.
The way the unique champions are proposed is a kind of humiliation for the common person which leads to idolatry and dreams. One day you dream of becoming unique, rich and famous champions, and in the meantime you become their fans. Fanaticism towards unique champions or one’s own football team frequently leads to episodes of violence.
But why is it that the media of all Western and developed countries always seem to speak in unison about the same news, they seem to plan the same programs and the same editorial lines at the same time, as if there were a single publisher? Could there be organizations that plan the media flows of all the most important mass media in the world? According to various writers, intellectuals, and former secret service agents, there is a single direction with a very precise pyramid structure. On the lower floors are the news agencies, individual media and journalists who completely ignore this system, or I call it a “conspiracy theory”.
In recent years, the local characteristics of the television stations of different nations have dissolved. The British and American reality shows are the same as you find in Italy or Germany. The billboards in the streets show characters dressed alike. Successful TV series are the same all over the world.
It is a long and unstoppable process that began after the end of the Second World War, with the birth of television itself and its installation in families all over the world. But who invented television and organized its worldwide distribution? A long topic that requires a thorough understanding of the historical events of the last two centuries, which is impossible to deal with here.
In fact, propaganda affects the emotionality of the human being and tries in every way to annihilate his rational part. It could be said that the mind is the number one enemy of propaganda. Critical thinking is the great enemy of propaganda. His goal is exactly the opposite: to gain control of the human being to advertise what interests him: politics, fashions, lifestyles, fake news, art and cinema.
On the other hand, propaganda, with its total pervasiveness provided by the mass media, produces marginalization and social exclusion. This can happen in less serious industries like entertainment. There may be individuals who are seriously marginalized because they do not align with the dominant social contract, but a person who does not look at the fashion TV series and can no longer relate to friends in the bar who only talk about that.
The marginalization and exclusion that propaganda creates for certain individuals explains very well the decline of culture and art in the contemporary world. These are topics that the propaganda does not talk about or in which it proposes the new unique samples that it is interested in promoting. Today, in a context where man lives daily immersed in the flow of the media, art and culture are nothing more than further appendages created specifically by propaganda to strengthen his ideology.
Here in this case the story comes to safety: What are the works of art that have withstood the erosion of time? Time is a kind of magic potion that completely nullifies the poisoning of propaganda. No false construction withstands the relentless judgment of Time. But it can take ages. And in any case, history can be manipulated in a context where all information and data are digitized and can be subsequently modified.
