I talked previously about how Stanley argues in the second chapter of “How Propaganda works” that propaganda does not need to be inherently false, or inherently insincere.
He lays out a short argument here against what he calls the “falsity condition” and then comes back to it later in chapter 4. He uses a case that should be very familiar to us here in the US:
There are obvious cases of demagogic speech that involve the expression of truths. Imagine, for example, a non-Muslim politician in the United States saying, “There are Muslims among us.” The assertion is true; there are many Muslims in the United States. But the claim is clearly some kind of warning. The speaker is raising the presence of Muslims to the attention of his audience to sow fear about Muslims. Therefore, even demagogic claims can be true.
This example is interesting. The sentence itself doesn’t mean to accomplish much in isolation. It requires a particular context to give it shape and intention. On the surface it is just a true statement asserting that some of the people around us are Muslims.
If the intent of this statement is to cause fear, then it relies on some sort of flawed ideology that pre-exists for this particular audience so the connection doesn’t have to be made directly.
The fact that the ideology that says “we should be suspicious and afraid of Muslims” is present in the background here is enough. The effectiveness of the statement “there are Muslims among us” doesn’t require the explicit statement “be afraid of them” to accomplish the same goal among the target audience.
Taking this a step further, Stanley points out that though this statement expresses a truth, what is being communicated is actually the emotion of fear, and emotions are neither true nor false.
So here we have a solid example of propaganda working against a backdrop of flawed ideology in a way that doesn’t actually require any falsehood to be effective.
The point worth focusing on here from my perspective is this:
Sometimes we frame things as a “battle for the truth”, and act like the way to dispel flawed ideology is by simply shining the light of truth.
I think this is a good reminder that “truth” can serve different purposes in different contexts. Those purposes are not always what we would call good, or right, or beautiful.
Oftentimes, communication uses truth, but truth isn’t the core of what is being communicated. Emotion is what is being communicated, and the purpose is to bring on a certain response - whether that is action, or resistance, or the further entrenchment of a particular ideology. Some of those ideologies are built on falsehood and untruth, but the propaganda that promotes and deepens those ideologies doesn’t need to be false itself.
Ultimately we need to dismantle ideologies and unmask the emotional manipulation in order to effect change. Propaganda thrives in contexts where emotions are high and the ideologies at play are layered thick under the surface.