Book: What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda & the New Face of American Politics
$15.00
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Our aim [with this anthology] was to assemble a group of journalists and experts from various fields to chart the complex topography of propaganda within the new landscape of American politics [today]... This compilation predates the 2008 elections by exactly one year... The point of this book is to urge politicians on all sides to keep their words tethered to facts. It is an invitation to speak clearly and act honestly. And it is a reminder to the press, and to students of journalism, that keeping politics clean is a tough job. It is the daily task of reporters and editors to disenthrall public debate from bias, hyperbole, bombast and lies...
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of George Orwell's classic essay on propaganda, "Politics & the English Language," this collection contains essays from writers who explore what Orwell didn't – or couldn't – know, from the effects of television and computers to the merger of journalism and entertainment.
Manipulation. Bias. Spin. Dishonesty. Half a century after George Orwell's death and six decades after his classic essay, "Politics & the English Language" – in which he tied the corrosion of language to the corruption of politics – American public life is riddled with the symptoms of obfuscation and doublespeak Orwell so vividly diagnosed. A Big Brother-style dystopia has not come to pass, but tools are available to spinmeisters and image-makers that allow them to detach politics from reality on a daily basis.
Repeatedly Orwell returned in his writing to this idea that a state of health in a body politic is dependent on a careful and deliberate use of language. Newspeak, used by state propagandists in Orwell's famous futuristic novel "1984", was effective, in Orwell's view, because it had "the power" to render people incapable of "grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest argument, if they are inimical to Ingsoc [the official ideology], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction."
Twenty prominent voices consider the outlooks for reality-based politics in this anthology. From the use of deceptively murky jargon, to the emotional pull of phrases like the "War on Terror," to the rise of infotainment and pseudo-science, to the disinclination of big media to provide real news, these writers address unsettling development's in today's public discourse. Reflecting on Orwell, they shed new light on the power of politicians and the media to deceive and to repair, to fracture and to unite American democracy.
From the Introduction:
George Orwell, who did so much to call attention to the ways in which totalitarian movements of the last century corrupted political life, understood almost intuitively how propaganda was fundamental in their success. Drawing on his experiences with Fascism in the Spanish Civil War and his knowledge of Russian Communism, he examined how, by controlling language and discourse, and through the relentless repetition of half-truths and lies, official propaganda could sway and control the thinking of ordinary people (often with such finesse that many never comprehended the full measure of their actual compromise)...
But, what offended Orwell most about this kind of propaganda was that it engenders a "protective stupidity."
In "1984", one of Orwell's own fictional characters – his Trotsky-like Newspeak-Doublespeak ideologue "Goldstein" – observes, "By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient."
If Orwell were to return to our post-1984 world, it would be interesting to know what he might make of the situation. For, as horrified as he was during the middle of the last century by what he saw of propaganda's capacity to distort and corrupt, he nonetheless retained naive optimism in the inviolability of the individual soul, where, he liked to imagine, human qualities such as love, loyalty and devotion must still find refuge. Indeed, he almost quaintly believed that though "they" could control everything around one in the external world, "They can't get inside you."
So, despite his rather gloomy prognosis about the powers of Totalitarianism and propaganda, Orwell harbored a somewhat innocent belief
that there were nonetheless aspects of a human individual still not fully accessible to propaganda's predations. In "1984", his hero, Winston, proclaims that "they could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregable."
What Orwell could not know in the 1930s and 1940s was that Totalitarianism and its propaganda apparatus would ultimately succeed in penetrating "the inner heart" of individuals. Nor could he have known how much more sophisticated and persuasive propaganda was still destined to become, how in the latter part of the 20th century latter-day avatars would graft onto this already dark art a whole host of new and extremely powerful elements In fact, what was in Orwell's time already a frighteningly manipulative tool, would over the next few decades take several more quantum leaps forward in its ability to subliminally deceive and influence. It did so by evolving in a Darwinian manner, by confronting the challenges of capitalism and democracy, and then, under the pressure of this natural selection, mutating to incorporate traits from each as if it were cloning new genetic material onto its figurative genome. It was in this manner that propaganda's genetic makeup gained a new hybrid vigor, achieving an unforseen level of sophistication ... that would doubtless have astounded Orwell. In this process, there were several major evolutionary breakthroughs worthy of note.
the first came as China imported Stalin's form of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and imbued it with "Chinese characteristics," turning it into "Mao Zedong Thought."
The second significant evolutionary step occurred because of explicit advances in the burgeoning world of psychoanalytical thought. A new approach, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, plumbed the depths of human unconsciousness to form a revolutionary corpus of systematized theories on how to understand, and even heal, the inner workings of the human psyche. Through a quite unholy matrimonial convergence, "old-style" political propaganda became fortified by Freudian insights about human insecurity, weakness, yearning and guilt. The result: new forms of manipulation in which overt political coercion merged with an array of subtle but powerful covert psychological mechanisms.
One of the pioneers of some of these new psychological mechanisms was Edward Bernays, the father of "public relations," who also happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew, a fact that conveniently allowed him to borrow some of his famous uncle's understandings about human psychology in order to write a fugurative textbook on how to induce people to buy more consumer goods.
"If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind," Bernays presciently observed, "is it not possible tyo control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it? The recent practice of propaganda has proven that is possible."
In this brave new world of "mass persuasion," Bernays hoped to use innovative advertising to wean consumers away from what he called a "needs-based" culture toward one that was :"desire-based." As his business partner, Paul Mazur, succinctly put it, "We must shape a new mentality. Man's desires must overshadow his needs." And if there was one thing Bernays' eminent uncle understood, it was how important people's unconscious desires are in forming who they become, how they develop, and what they want to consume.
When public relations theory and its application to commercial advertising...became available to authoritarian regimes as a means to bolster their own propaganda and control efforts, a new industrial-strength brew that was infinitely more subtle and convincing than anything that had preceeded it was born. Its power lay in its capacity to sway people into either passively accepting whatever version of reality "the powers that be" wished them to accept or making them want things that were manifestly illogical or antithetical to their interests. The most impressive feature of this second evolutionary stage in propaganda's historical progress was that although it had originally evolved as a form of "selling" goods and services, it soon migrated to politics. Here it took root not only in capitalist societies but also in societies labeled "socialist," or "revolutionary."
The third, and last, evolutionary development in propaganda was brought about by the development of technology, particularly in the electronic media. What could be achieved visually on television (and later on the Internet) was far higher on the periodic table of persuasiveness than anything that had preceeded it. This new medium was capable of making almost any message seductive and convincing. Even in the most pluralistic, diverse societies with decades of dedication to a free press, television soon managed to create such powerful images and such a forceful one-way conversation [monologue] that there was little room for the kind of interactive discourse imagined by the architects of modern democracies, such as Enlightenment thinkers in Europe and the founding fathers in the United States. When crossbred with forms of 20th century totalitarian ideology and propaganda, television became a powerful new form of indoctrination for both commercial and political purposes...
