Propaganda
Based on Wikipedia: Propaganda
In 1622, Pope Gregory the Fifteenth established a new department within the Catholic Church with an unwieldy Latin name: the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or Congregation for Propagating the Faith. Its mission was straightforward—spread Catholicism to countries where it hadn't taken root. The word "propaganda" simply meant "things to be spread." It was neutral, administrative, bureaucratic.
Four hundred years later, that same word makes us recoil. Propaganda has become synonymous with manipulation, lies, and the darker arts of persuasion. How did a neutral term for spreading ideas become one of the most loaded words in our political vocabulary?
When Spreading Became Manipulating
For nearly two centuries after that papal decree, propaganda remained relatively neutral. By the seventeen nineties, people started using it to describe secular persuasion campaigns, not just religious ones. But the real shift happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the English-speaking world began treating propaganda as inherently suspicious.
Interestingly, this negative connotation is largely an English-language phenomenon. In Chinese, the term xuanchuan serves a similar function and remains officially neutral—though Chinese citizens certainly use it pejoratively when protesting their government. In Portuguese and Spanish-speaking countries, particularly in South America, "propaganda" simply means advertising.
But in English, propaganda became the term for what the other side does. As public relations pioneer Edward Bernays put it after World War One, propaganda meant "what you don't like of the other fellow's publicity."
The Printing Press Changes Everything
Before we dive into modern propaganda, we need to understand a crucial technological shift. For most of human history, spreading ideas meant speaking to crowds or copying manuscripts by hand. Propaganda existed—the Behistun Inscription from 515 Before the Common Era shows the Persian king Darius the First celebrating his rise to power in carefully crafted language carved into stone. During the last Roman civil wars, Octavian and Mark Antony slandered each other mercilessly, accusing one another of degrading origins, cowardice, incompetence, and drunkenness. Genghis Khan sent men ahead of his armies to spread rumors about his forces, making his opponents think his army was larger than it actually was.
But these were isolated efforts, limited by the speed at which information could travel.
Then came the printing press. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian the First, ruling in the early fifteen hundreds, became the first leader to truly weaponize this technology. He published one-sided battle reports—early ancestors of modern newspapers—to stir patriotic feelings and demoralize his enemies. During the Protestant Reformation, printing presses throughout Europe, especially in Germany, allowed new religious ideas to spread faster than ever before. The Catholic Church's monopoly on religious truth crumbled partly because pamphlets could be produced faster than the Church could suppress them.
By the American Revolution, the colonies had developed a flourishing network of newspapers and printers who specialized in patriotic messaging. These weren't neutral observers reporting facts. They were advocates, funded by the Patriots and sometimes by the Loyalists, explicitly designed to shape public opinion.
The First World War: Propaganda Goes Industrial
The twentieth century transformed propaganda from an art into a science. When World War One broke out in 1914, governments launched the first large-scale, organized propaganda campaigns. Britain established a sophisticated operation to influence neutral countries, particularly the United States, to join the Allied cause.
After Germany's defeat, this became a convenient scapegoat. General Erich Ludendorff and other military officials claimed British propaganda had been instrumental in breaking German morale. Adolf Hitler, a young veteran, absorbed this lesson. In Mein Kampf, published in 1925, he wrote that British propaganda had been a primary cause of the collapse of the German home front and navy in 1918. This was part of the "stab in the back" legend—the false narrative that Germany hadn't lost militarily but had been betrayed by internal enemies.
Hitler's theory of propaganda was chillingly simple: people will believe anything if you tell them often enough and emphatically enough, while silencing or smearing anyone who contradicts you. Historian Robert Ensor summarized Hitler's view: he "puts no limit on what can be done by propaganda."
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they put this theory into practice through the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, led by Joseph Goebbels. Symbols like justice, liberty, and devotion to country were weaponized. The regime understood that propaganda wasn't just about spreading messages—it was about controlling the entire information environment so that contradictory messages couldn't gain traction.
The Golden Age: Film and Radio
The nineteen thirties and nineteen forties represent what scholars call the "Golden Age of Propaganda." Two new technologies—motion pictures and radio—allowed governments to reach mass audiences with unprecedented emotional power.
The Soviet Union pioneered propaganda filmmaking after the 1917 October Revolution. Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin glorified Communist ideals through innovative editing techniques that made audiences feel the revolutionary spirit. Nazi Germany followed suit with highly emotional films designed to build support for territorial expansion. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, documenting the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, remains one of the most technically accomplished—and morally troubling—propaganda films ever made.
During World War Two, every major power used film as a weapon. Nazi filmmakers produced movies justifying the occupation of the Sudetenland and the invasion of Poland. Finland created the propaganda song "Niet Molotoff" during the Continuation War, mocking the Red Army's failures in the Winter War and ridiculing Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.
In the United States, Hollywood enlisted in the war effort. Animated films like Der Fuehrer's Face, released in 1942, ridiculed Hitler while celebrating freedom. Other films were designed to build understanding of America's allies—Know Your Ally: Britain explained British culture to American audiences, while Our Greek Allies did the same for Greece. Stage Door Canteen, released in 1943, featured segments specifically designed to dispel American mistrust of the Soviets and bigotry against the Chinese.
Polish filmmakers in Britain created the anti-Nazi color film Calling Mister Smith in 1943, documenting Nazi crimes in occupied Europe and exposing the lies of Nazi propaganda. John Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down, published in 1942, told the story of resistance in an occupied Norwegian village and was widely presumed to support Norway's struggle against German occupation. In 1945, Norway's King Haakon the Seventh awarded Steinbeck the Freedom Cross for his contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
The Cold War: Propaganda Without Borders
If World War Two was propaganda's golden age, the Cold War was its long twilight. The United States and Soviet Union deployed film, television, and radio to influence their own citizens, each other, and the developing world.
The Central Intelligence Agency created a front organization called the Bedford Publishing Company, which operated through a covert department called the Office of Policy Coordination. Over fifteen years, this operation disseminated over one million books to Soviet readers—novels by George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, and Boris Pasternak—all intended to promote anti-communist sentiment and sympathy for Western values.
Orwell himself was writing about propaganda even as his books became propaganda tools. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four both portray how totalitarian societies use propaganda to control reality itself. The Party's slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four—"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"—represents propaganda taken to its logical extreme, where language no longer describes reality but replaces it.
Fidel Castro, during the Cuban Revolution, stressed the importance of propaganda in controlling public opinion. Communist forces used it extensively during the Vietnam War. During the Yugoslav wars of the nineteen nineties, both the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Croatia deployed propaganda to create fear and hatred, particularly inciting Serb populations against Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians, and other non-Serbs. Serbian media worked hard to justify, revise, or outright deny the mass war crimes committed by Serb forces.
How Propaganda Actually Works
In the early twentieth century, as propaganda became ubiquitous, researchers began studying how it actually worked. They developed "suggestion theory"—the idea that emotionally resonant messages could influence people below the level of conscious reasoning.
Harold Lasswell, one of the field's pioneers, defined propaganda as "the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations."
In 1928, Edward Bernays—often called the father of public relations—published a book simply titled Propaganda. His opening lines are striking: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
Bernays wasn't describing this as sinister. He genuinely believed that expert manipulation of public opinion was necessary for democracy to function. But his contemporary, Everett Dean Martin, saw it differently. In a 1929 debate, Martin argued: "Propaganda is making puppets of us. We are moved by hidden strings which the propagandist manipulates."
During the nineteen twenties and thirties, some theorists described propaganda as all-powerful—an irresistible force that could shape public opinion at will. This view has been tempered over time. Modern research shows that propaganda works best when it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices rather than creating new ones from scratch. It's more effective at mobilizing people who already lean in a particular direction than at converting true opponents.
The Digital Firehose
If the printing press was propaganda's first revolution and film and radio its second, we're now living through its third: the digital age.
The RAND Corporation coined the term "Firehose of Falsehood" to describe modern propaganda techniques. Unlike traditional propaganda, which aimed for consistency and plausibility, the firehose approach broadcasts a large number of messages rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels without regard for truth or consistency. The goal isn't to convince people of a particular falsehood but to create so much noise that people can't distinguish truth from lies.
Computational propaganda takes this further. Bots and algorithms manipulate public opinion by creating fake or biased news and spreading it on social media. Chatbots mimic real people in online discussions, creating the illusion of grassroots support for positions that may have been manufactured by a small group or even a single person. When you argue with someone online, you may not be arguing with a person at all.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 2011 guidance for military public affairs defines propaganda as "information, ideas, doctrines, or special appeals disseminated to influence the opinion, emotions, attitudes, or behaviour of any specified group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly." This definition is notable for being institutional and neutral—NATO acknowledges that it engages in what could be called propaganda while trying to distinguish its efforts from those of adversaries.
Is All Persuasion Propaganda?
This brings us to a thorny question: what's the difference between propaganda and legitimate persuasion? Between marketing and manipulation? Between public relations and deception?
Some scholars argue for a neutral definition based on intent and context. By this view, propaganda is simply organized persuasion, and its ethics depend on whether the message is truthful and whether the methods respect audience autonomy.
Others define propaganda as inherently unethical—the deliberate manipulation of representations with the intention of producing effects in the audience through deception or emotional manipulation rather than rational argument.
Emma Briant, a propaganda researcher, defines it as "the deliberate manipulation of representations, including text, pictures, video, and speech, with the intention of producing any effect in the audience." This definition focuses on manipulation rather than mere persuasion—the key difference being whether you're helping people make informed decisions or exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to bypass their rational judgment.
The word remains essentially contested. When a government runs a campaign encouraging people to quit smoking, is that public health messaging or propaganda? When a company advertises its products, emphasizing benefits and downplaying risks, is that marketing or manipulation? When a political candidate crafts a message to appeal to voters' emotions rather than laying out detailed policy positions, is that effective communication or propaganda?
Perhaps the most honest answer is that these categories blur into each other. The tools of propaganda—emotional appeals, selective presentation of facts, repetition, appealing imagery—are also the tools of advertising, political campaigns, public health initiatives, and even education. What distinguishes propaganda is often a matter of degree, intent, and most importantly, truthfulness.
Living in the Information Ecosystem
We live in an information environment that the founders of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide could never have imagined. Every day, we're exposed to thousands of messages designed to influence our opinions, emotions, and behaviors. Some are transparent about their intent. Others pretend to be neutral information when they're actually advocacy.
The challenge isn't that propaganda exists—it always has. The challenge is that the tools for creating and disseminating it have become so powerful and so cheap that the information environment itself has become contested territory. We can no longer assume that trending topics on social media reflect genuine public interest, that news stories in our feeds were written by humans, or that people arguing with us online are real.
Understanding propaganda doesn't make us immune to it. But it does give us a fighting chance to recognize when someone is pulling our strings—and to decide whether we want to dance.