"'Historians, storytellers, and poets, throughout the ages, since the fall of Egypt to the end of the Roman Empire, have written much about the last queen of ancient Egypt. Almost all of them have wondered at the charms of a woman who could beguile two of Rome’s most powerful leaders. Surely, such a woman must have been the great beauty of her time—or was she? What is the truth about Cleopatra’s beauty? Is it a lie or propaganda?" Laluna mentioned a statement of a painter, after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam. Then she went on, "The Painter said, 'We certainly understand what lies are, while the latter, need a little elaboration.Have you ever had a dramatic change of heart or a strong emotional response after looking at something as simple as a billboard or a commercial? If so, you may have been looking at propaganda. It is everywhere you turn, from the newspaper to the Internet to your favorite sitcom. In fact, we are so inundated with propaganda that much of what we see and hear inevitably affects us, informing everything from the brand of shampoo we buy to our ideologies and worldviews.Propaganda, in the most neutral sense, means to disseminate or promote particular ideas. In Latin, it means 'to propagate' or 'to sow.' In 1622, the Vatican established the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, meaning the sacred congregation for propagating the faith of the Roman Catholic Church. Because the propaganda of the Roman Catholic Church had as its intent spreading the faith to the New World, as well as opposing Protestantism, the word propaganda lost its neutrality, and subsequent usage has rendered the term pejorative. To identify a message as propaganda is to suggest something negative and dishonest. Words frequently used as synonyms for propaganda are lies, distortion, deceit, manipulation, mind control, psychological warfare, brainwashing, and palaver.
Noam Chomsky wrote like this,'Let's begin with the first modern government propaganda operation. That was under the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform 'Peace Without Victory.' That was right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic [holding the belief that war and violence are unjustifiable] and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact organized, pushed much of this work, and it was, in general, a great success.Among those who participated actively and enthusiastically in Wilson's war were the progressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle, who took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in having shown that what they called the 'more intelligent members of the community,' namely, themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism. The means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history books. Much of it was invented by the British propaganda ministry, whose own commitment at the time, as they put it in their secret deliberations, was 'to direct the thought of most of the world.' But more crucially they wanted to control the thought of the more intelligent members of the community in the United States, who would then disseminate the propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. That worked. It worked very well. And it taught a lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.Another group that was impressed by these successes was liberal democratic theorists and leading media figures, like, for example, Walter Lippmann, who was the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic and also a major theorist of liberal democracy. If you take a look at his collected essays, you'll see that they're subtitled something like 'A Progressive Theory of Liberal Democratic Thought." Lippmann was involved in these propaganda commissions and recognized their achievements. He argued that what he called a 'revolution in the art of democracy,' could be used to 'manufacture consent,' that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, 'the common interests elude public opinion entirely' and can only be understood and managed by a 'specialized class' of 'responsible men' who are smart enough to figure things out. This theory asserts that only a small elite, the intellectual community that the Deweyites were talking about, can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things 'elude the general public.' This is a view that goes back hundreds of years. It's also a typical Leninist view. In fact, it has very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals take state power, using popular revolutions as the force that brings them to state power, and then drive the stupid masses toward a future that they're too dumb and incompetent to envision for themselves. The liberal democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism are very close in their common ideological assumptions. I think that's one reason why people have found it so easy over the years to drift from one position to another without any particular sense of change. It's just a matter of assessing where power is. Maybe there will be a popular revolution, and that will put us into state power; or maybe there won't be, in which case we'll just work for the people with real power: the business community. But we'll do the same thing. We'll drive the stupid masses toward a world that they're too dumb to understand for themselves.'In its defense, propaganda is not always harmful; in fact, in some situations it has been considered benign, or even positive. However, by its very nature, propaganda is always manipulative; it is intended to give someone else control over your thoughts and actions. For that reason, it is crucial to be able to identify propaganda when you see it. There are many propaganda techniques, including, the simplest form of propaganda is assertion. Despite being the most basic technique of propaganda, assertion is surprisingly effective. It consists of simply stating a debatable idea as a fact, with no qualification or explanation. For example: 'Men never stop to ask for directions.'The assertion technique takes advantage of our desire to believe what we’re told. The bandwagon technique, by contrast, exploits what is sometimes referred to as 'the herding instinct.' People like to belong to the majority group and dislike being left out. The bandwagon technique manipulates people by appealing to these instincts. For examples: 'More and more couples are living together without being married, so it must be all right.'Card stacking is a technique in which the propagandist gives an unfair advantage to one point of view, while weakening another. While arguments that use the card stacking technique are usually honest in terms of the information shared, they may be misleading because they present information out of context or obscure important facts. For example, 'A young doctor wants to practice a new surgical procedure on a patient. There are risks to the surgery that she does not disclose to the patient for fear that he will cancel the surgery.'An extremely common tool of the propagandist is the false dilemma. This fallacy is known by many names, including “black-and-white thinking,” “false dichotomy,” and “false choice.” Most commonly, it consists of reducing a complex argument to a small number of alternatives and concluding that only one option is appropriate. One product always works, and the other never works. One group intends to save the country, and the other is out to ruin it. In reality, however, there are usually many possibilities that go unmentioned. For example, 'You are either an ally or an enemy.'While most false dilemmas offer a 'good' and a 'bad' alternative, the lesser of two evils technique is a specific type of false dilemma that offers two 'bad' alternatives. This technique is often used when the propagandist is trying to convince people to adopt a perspective they will be hesitant to accept. In order to make the choice more appealing, an even worse alternative is presented as being the only other option. It is argued that an imperfect option is, at any rate, better than the horrendous alternative. For example, 'Williams may have lied under oath, but at least he never embezzled money from his campaign, like his opponent.'The word propaganda has strong negative connotations in the modern world. It takes an extreme propaganda campaign, to fully dehumanize a group. It takes nearly as intense an effort, however, to raise a group or an individual far above everyone else. Nevertheless, clever propaganda can make even the most ordinary human being seem like a god. The figures that are deified are often at the center of a pivotal social movement, or are important leaders of a country. In totalitarian nations, the leader is nearly always deified—indeed, a great deal of the state’s propaganda efforts may be geared towards that purpose—in order to further cement the power of the state.However, that doesn’t mean that propaganda cannot be used for good. Like most tools, propaganda is not necessarily evil, in and of itself. It is true that manipulative advertisers and unscrupulous politicians can use propaganda to suit their own ends. But propaganda can also help to end slavery, promote peace, or encourage people to improve their world. One of the most positive ways propaganda can be used is inspiring sympathy: encouraging people to share in someone else’s suffering. Sympathy is a very useful tool for the propagandist and for people in general. Understanding what others are feeling helps us relate to others and allows us to function in a community. A propagandist knows just how to trigger these compassionate feelings and use them to gain an advantage.So, back to our talk about Cleopatra. The presentation of Egypt’s Cleopatra as one of the most gorgeous women of ancient times comes to us most recently from movies. In those movies, some of the most beautiful women of the film industry have played the Egyptian queen. All of the films on this topic depict a young and beautiful Cleopatra who uses her physical charms to woo Roman leaders into saving her and favoring her country. Down through history, legends also speak of her beauty and ability to physically charm leaders of Rome to her way of thinking.The fact is she wasn’t a great Egyptian beauty, neither by the standards of her day or by our own. She wasn’t even Egyptian. She was a Macedonian Greek—and instead of beauty, she used her wealth and power to compensate for her physical features.However, there's one thing we'd like to give thumbs-up about Cleopatra. Through the chaos of the times and with a government filled with envious officials wanting to seize her power, Cleopatra ruled and ruled well. She used her family position and her ability to bear sons to hold her control of Egypt. As history spoke of her, the queen of the Nile became a beauty able to charm any man with her form and seductive ways. While Octavian referred to her as the Egyptian whore, there is no historical evidence that she was unfaithful to either of her Roman lovers. She was merely a queen looking to see her country prosper. And indeed, there is repeated evidence that as she dealt with the awesome power of Rome, she had the interests of her people constantly in mind.'"Laluna added as a closing, "Not because of their geographies or cultures that poor countries are poor, it's because their leaders, do not know or don't want to know, which policies will enrich their citizens. And Allah knows best."
Citations & References:
- Noam Chomsky, Media Control - A Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Open Media Pamphlet Series
- Garth S. Jowett & Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, Sage
- Magedah E. Shabo, Techniques of Propaganda & Persuasion, Prestwick House, Inc.
- Bill Fawcett (Ed.), You Said What?, Harper-Collins
