I still don't think we understand propaganda; commentary on an editorial
I was prompted to discuss modern propaganda when a friend sent me the following article: The man who tricked Nazi Germany: lessons from the past on how to beat disinformation
The conversation was coherent enough that I thought I'd turn it into a short essay. I do not, and cannot really cover the entire topic of modern propaganda in this essay, but I felt at least some of these observations were worth sharing.
Initial thoughts
Before I get into the article itself, I have seen quite a bit of Russian propaganda. I'm sure sometimes I misidentify it or otherwise get fooled, but sometimes it's just too obvious. Almost all of it focuses on what I might call "tribal associations." The idea would be that you take a topic the target audience hates, and then try to associate a new topic with the preexisting, hated topic. I'm trying to recall specific examples. One might be a 4-frame panel showing "npcs" blindly following different causes: vaccination, then BLM, maybe something transsexual, and then finally supporting Ukraine. The obvious implication? All those other causes that you "hated" that were "pushed on you," and that all the "NPCs blindly followed" are all equivalent to supporting Ukraine in the war. Another example, which I remember more vividly, had a caption that said "remember what you're fighting for." It had a crude cartoon of a soldier with a little Ukrainian flag somewhere on him. He was looking at the picture in his locket. The second frame shows the contents of the locket, which is a picture of Hunter Biden with his shirt off, and high on drugs. So, the implication is clear here as well: the "corrupt Biden crime family" are the ones who support Ukraine in the war, so how can you also support Ukraine?
These are just the contemporary (as of 2024) examples that I'd seen, but they all follow the same tactic. Take a thing one group hates, and try to smuggle your cause in by association.
What I can't decide is how much any of this propaganda actually works, and how much of is simply touching on a nerve that is already present.
Thoughts on the article specifically
There are a few quotes I pull from the article which are worth discussing and picking apart.
"Meanwhile the allure of "strongmen" has never gone away."
That's odd phrasing my mind. It feels a bit like saying "meanwhile, the allure of [watching football] has never gone away," or perhaps "meanwhile, the allure of [hugging your children] has never gone away." On the one hand, the author dislikes strongmen and would like society move past needing or wanting them. To me, this just feels like an aspect of human nature. Perhaps an aspect we would all do better to dampen, but a constant nonetheless.
"Secret microphones installed in PoW camps picked up on the soldiers’ latest slang and complaints about their higher-ups."
I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the article. Understanding how your audience talks, and what they care about is crucially important. Being able to spot the speech of an outsider (there's even a word for this: shibboleth) is a crucial aspect of tribalism. Successfully disguising your own speech as being from your opponent's side is difficult. It strikes me that western-style internet memes are themselves a sort of shibboleth. In other words, real Americans already think of political discourse in terms of low-quality internet memes told from a western perspective.
"If the principle of Goebbels’ propaganda was to try to entrance you, to dissolve you into the loud, angry crowd, then here was media that required you to make a series of autonomous, conscious steps to engage."
I'm not sure I agree with this point. I don't know if there's a proper phrase for this sort of literary technique, but you see people do it all the time. The sentence is "balanced" in the sense that one clause at the beginning is offset by the opposite clause on the other end. People seem to find the allure of balancing their sentences so strong that the actual valid facts underneath get muddied. It's not clear to me that Goebbels' propaganda required "passivity" while Delmer's propaganda drove you to "action." This feels like a rhetorical conceit more than anything else. (eg: joining a war, becoming an active member in a party, burning books, etc -- those are all quite active activities.)
In other words -- we can all agree that Nazism is wrong -- but is a different mechanism actually at play when using propaganda to pull people to fight against Nazism? I would claim that propaganda can be used for good or for evil, and for the most part people we tend to only identify something as propaganda when we disagree with it.
"People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories, for example, when they don’t feel they have any agency or influence over their lives and rely on conspiracies to explain the world."
I think this point -- and really the whole article -- ignores (or fails to understand) that foreign propaganda is a very, very small part of the modern problem. Foreign propaganda, at least in my opinion, is a small enervating force on a large problem with purely domestic causes. The article does not once mention populist rage, or the degradation of the power of institutions. Put another way, foreign propaganda can be used to stoke racism (a preexisting condition) but could not be used to trick people into practicing calculus or studying law. (a purely intellectual pursuit which is not quite so "built in" to human nature, nor one suffused with so much emotion.)
What the article failed to address
This is only somewhat of a tangent. I've heard people say that political comedians are funny because they say things that are true. This is usually stated in the context of a comedian making a politically uncomfortable joke: the audience laughs because they agree on some level. (the last context I heard this sort of concept conveyed in had to do with Dave Chappelle's comedy routines about modern trans politics) This is not really correct in my opinion, but only requires a minor adjustment: political comedians are funny because they say things people believe to be true." In other words, in the case of Dave Chappelle there is real angst about modern trans politics, and some of those people (rightly or wrongly) don't feel like they have a voice.
I bring this up because it strikes me that modern internet-based propaganda plays something of the same role; it finds a preexisting nerve and touches on it, and it says "yes, this deep and possibly negative emotion you feel is felt by others too! -- and therefore, it is at least partially valid."
The article seems to address this somewhat when focusing specifically on Delmer's work during WWII -- but largely abandons this when speaking about contemporary issues. It moves directly back to talking about how "people only believe conspiracy theories because they feel they lack agency" -- which I don't buy whatsoever. I think people dive into conspiracy theories when they feel estranged by society -- which could be related to lacking agency, but is really not the same thing at all. Almost no one is equipped to measure reality for themselves. Most people could not offer even a weak proof that the earth is a sphere. I would argue that most people adopt the belief that the earth is a sphere simply because that a dominant and accepted belief -- not because they have specific knowledge of the actual scientific proofs that this is the case. (if your intuitions are offended by this, imagine walking around with a microphone and camera in Las Vegas, and asking people to prove the earth is a sphere.)
In any case, this too (ie, the cultural belief that the earth is round) seems to be relying on the same mechanisms of the propaganda war described by the article -- belief is just as much tribal as it is rational. The fact that it is true that the earth is round does not prevent it from largely being a tribal belief; if it spread tribally, and the institutions which prove and support belief are trusted, at least partially on a tribal basis. The fact that it is a scientific allows it to operate outside of the sphere of tribalism, but that is sort of a "bonus." And depending on the belief, it might be primarily tribal. Imagine actually killing your neighbors over a dispute whether the wine in church truly is the blood of Christ, or merely represents it. My whole life, people described this with an implication that people in the past were ignorant. The last few years of experience has taught me that this was just tribalism, and it's the same sort of thing we're mired in today. At least from the article, it sounds like Delmer's propaganda was effective just because it leaned on those tribal mechanisms. It didn't drive people to "action", and it didn't treat them like "individuals." It said, "hey, I know you're having this doubt, but other authentic people are having the same doubts -- you're not alone, and you should join our group." That is what the modern propaganda is doing as well. And I think there's no escape from it. Propaganda of this variety is purely amoral (rather than immoral) -- it can lead either to negative or positive outcomes, but the mechanism itself is just a tool that relies on human psychology.