Propaganda and... Iraq

I was reading Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com Sunday when it occurred to me that I should write about the term "propaganda". All I would have to do, you see, is to give a definition and let the article I was reading, "Everyone we fight in Iraq is now 'al-Qaida'", to handle the rest.

So here I am, giving definitions.

Propaganda is any information that is spread to promote some cause, especially some political agenda. It's not that much different from advertising, actually, in that both promotes something. And both try their best to pass off as news.

An argument can be made, in fact, that all news we read in the media are propaganda or advertising in one sense or another. But I'm not making that argument. Here, I want to focus on propaganda at its worst, or propaganda strictly as a derogative term.

Propaganda finds its roots in Latin. A certain Dr. Wheeler, at Carson-Newman College in Tennessee, United States, explains in his literary terms and definitions webpage thus:

PROPAGANDA (Latin, "things that must be sent forth"): In its original use, the term referred to a committee of cardinals the Roman Catholic church founded in 1622 (the Congregatio de propaganda fide). This group established specific educational materials to be sent with priests-in-training for foreign missions. The term is today used to refer to information, rumors, ideas, and artwork spread deliberately to help or harm another specific group, movement, belief, institution, or government...

Propaganda usually gives only one side of the argument while belittling all counter-arguments or ignoring them altogether. For it to work, one of the common tricks is to repeat it and repeat it. Governments, backed by a virtual monopoly of the mainstream media, often are able to do so.

McCarthyism, the witch-hunting for Communist sympathizers in the United States in the 1950s, is a good example. The worst example belongs to the propaganda machines run by Nazi Germany, without which a systematic massacre of millions of Jews would not have been possible. The Nazis gave "propaganda" a bad name. Noam Chomsky, I think it was Chomsky, said something to the effect that the Nazis gave "propaganda" such a bad name that after the Second World War, propaganda in the United States began to take a new name, and that is PR, public relations.

We in this country have no doubt suffered our fair share of propaganda over the years. One thing I fondly recall of the Cultural Revolution - yeah, time heals, you know - is a piece of propaganda that constantly urged people to approach life with this attitude: "Always bear in mind that more than two-thirds of the world's population are still suffering in poverty and misery…." A lot of people believed it at the time, I believe. At least it appeared so. I conjecture that some people even chose to believe it for the dubious little comfort that might be in it. You see, when you were as poor and miserable as we were, you just might be pervert enough to wish others bad (or worse in this case - worse off than we were) and believe it.

Propaganda, or life, does that to you sometimes.

Anyways, the current example of government propaganda is over Iraq, how the Bush administration sold, and continue to sell, the war to the American public. An excellent example it is too, but to keep you fresh and awake on the subject, I will re-introduce the article "Everyone we fight in Iraq now is al-Qaida" by Greenwald in the next column.

Greenwald, a former lawyer, is the author of New York Times Best-selling book "How Would a Patriot Act?", a critique of Bush Administration's use of executive power.