by Jacques Ellul
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Brave New World?, 2007-05-10
If one has read George Orwell's 1984 1984 (Signet Classics) you will have an idea of how powerful propaganda, or mind control, can be. An updated version of that is when one listens to or reads the daily news and the Orwellian doublethink that currently comes out of Washington (war is peace, etc). In his work, Propaganda, Ellul's analysis of propaganda as a tool of government control is unmatched, with the possible exception of Bernays' Propaganda Propaganda.
Ellul is a French writer and theorist, therefore verbose. However, if you get past that and think in terms of his analysis, a bleak picture of how the public is treated like so many cattle, can be drawn. We are inundated with information at an increasing and alarming rate on a daily basis. What is truth, what are lies and what is propaganda? As Ellul points out, propaganda is often a thinly veiled "story" - a combination of both truth and lies, about what some entity, whether it be government, advertising companies, the media, etc., want us to believe.
The story of bending minds to a single will is as old as history. We don't have to look much further than today to see it in action. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were masters of mind control. War makes it an absolute necessity for control over the populace. The problem is, as Ellul saw, that increasing technology makes it easier for the "controller", or propagandist, to do his or her work, which, as several have noted previously, obviously undermines the very basis of democracy.
This was one of the books I used when working on my Master's thesis in political science. However, I have read it since and it actually makes even more sense today. Read it, be afraid, but above all, be aware of what is going on in your name.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Absolutely brilliant!!!, 2006-10-26
Ellul has written a marvelous volume on the topic of propaganda. He has covered every aspect of this political socialization machine that has been impregnating, manipulating, and corrupting our society with pseudo-ideologies, education, and attitudes in order to perpetuate complete control over the people by the elites and the propaganda masters.
Individualism, ideology, myth, literacy, and technology make the essence of this powerful and successful propaganda that brainwashes every recipient that is exposed to it. Ellul's book is mesmerizing as well as enlightening and would leave you spellbound and flabbergasted.
I would strongly recommend this book for every reader who is interested in comprehending the dynamics that mobilize our society and the strategies that form our attitudes.
24 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
A classic work that is relevant today, 2005-10-11
I've witnessed the phenomenon of bright people falling for propaganda, hook, line, and sinker, on numerous occasions. I'm sure I'm taken in by much of it as well, but even I can't be fooled all the time.
Still, the answer is not to simply give up. On a few topics, I actually am well enough informed so that (while I still may be susceptible to propaganda myself) I can recognize the symptoms of others falling for it. And this is definitely a phenomenon one ought to look for in others if one wants to cure oneself! I do think we ought to try to become so informed about at least a few topics that we can recognize nonsense. On these topics, we ought to listen, but we also ought to be unafraid to state facts and make judgments. On other topics, we ought to be much more careful.
Perhaps the most dramatic examples for me have been some truly amazing statements about the Arab war on Israel made by some rather well-educated and generally skeptical people. It makes me wonder why those who are ready to challenge all sorts of claims in so many other areas accept some extremely dubious, afactual, and illogical nonsense about this topic without question, and repeat it to me. Are they unaware that they are making statements that may well be false? Are they unable to discuss this issue without making very controversial comments as if they were not only accepted and indisputable facts, but relevant facts as well?
On one occasion, when I suggested to a colleague that I happened to know quite a bit about the Arab war against Israel, hoping to politely give him a way to defer to me, temporarily, on a couple of facts, I merely got an outraged reply. Was I not aware that my colleague was a highly intelligent and well-informed person? What made me think that I knew something he didn't? I was more than a little surprised by such a reaction: normally if a person claims to know something better than we do, we listen, even if we disagree.
This book, written over four decades ago, helps explain a little of what is going on. It shows how intellectuals can be so horribly susceptible to propaganda. As both the book and Konrad Kellen's preface to it state, intellectuals absorb a great deal of second-hand and unverifiable information. They often feel a need to have an opinion about such information. In addition, they consider themselves so smart that they can "judge for themselves." And they seriously underestimate their susceptibility to propaganda given that they can see mere idiots reject some of it with ease.
The truth, as Ellul explains, is that high intelligence, a broad culture, constant use of critical faculties, and access to and use of sources of information are indeed the best weapons against propaganda. They simply aren't used often enough.
Ellul shows how propaganda can have a powerful effect if one is saturated with it. It is useful, he explains, to have someone from one's own frame of reference come up with it. The German National Socialists were careful to put Englishmen on their radio. Anti-Zionists, by the way, are very proud to have Jews state their case, although we should all know that there is no objective reason to trust every Jew, any more than there is to trust every person.
We readers see how propaganda is most useful when it reinforces earlier biases and misconceptions. And how it becomes extremely powerful once a person makes an active commitment to a cause: that person finds it very tough to recant.
The book also shows how propaganda gets one to come up with strange ideas about what is relevant material to support one's arguments. That has the effect of precluding dialog with those who disagree with you. That's why my colleague "knew" better than to take anything I said seriously or reply to it coherently. And it is why careful and cautious statements on my part sounded not merely like admissions that truth was fiction, and vice-versa, but evidence that I was hopelessly biased, impervious to reason, and hooked on rather wild propaganda myself.
This book is fascinating. It made me realize that propaganda is indeed more effective than most of us might realize. And that it is dangerous. Ellul implies that propaganda may well be the most serious threat we humans face. And I think we ought to treat it as such.
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Monumental!, 2005-01-22
Ellul's study still stands out as one of the greatest achievements in the history of the study of propaganda, in terms of how it is practiced, how/why it is effective and how it is inescapable and tied to the very nature of democratic society. Ellul's picture is not a pretty one. He views propaganda as ultimately dehumanizing, necessary and inevitable at the same time. Propaganda, ANY propaganda, regardless of motives or veracity, serves to reduce the individual to function as a meaningless syphon. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, it is still a well-argued, compelling and frightening look and modern societies.
The biggest drawback is that the book published today is the same as that published in 1965 (Ellul died in 1994 and no real updated edition was ever produced), and the cases analyzed may seem obsolete, in that he focuses primarily on National Socialist, Maoist, Soviet and US cold war propaganda. But the analysis of is still second to none. For those familiar with the study of propaganda, Ellul's work was by far the most comprehensive and penetrating study of propaganda to that point. It was a HUGE and monumental advance from the previous research into propaganda of Bernays, Lambert, or Fraser. This book ought to be required reading for anyone who wishes to consider themselves even remotely literate or intelligent. Although one may not agree with all his conclusions, it nonetheless provides a compelling argument and portrait of modern man and how frighteningly easy it is to systematically 'persuade' him. Any thinking person cannot but attempt to be cognizant of how we are influenced.
This book is relevant for several reasons. 1) The student of history will appreciate the Ellul's examples. 2) The book analyzes what are, essentially, the beginnings of modern propaganda making it important for anyone studying the phenomenon. 3) Ellul breaks the phenomenon down into easily understood categories and places them in the context of the modern 'technological', urbanized society and what Ellul calls the predicament of modern man. 4) The research and sources that went into writing this book are as comprehensive as they could have been. 5) It provides an excellent explanation of much of 'modern life'. 6) Ellul was also an interesting writer and individual (simultaneously an Evangelist and Anarchist).
Again, the only real drawback is that some might find the examples obsolete and there are more recent studies of modern propaganda techniques, which have naturally advanced since from those used during the cold war. One would also be well served to read the more recent studies of propaganda by Chomsky, Cialdini (a more psychological approach), Jowett or Cunningham. I would still give Ellul's book more than 5 stars if I could.
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
Orwell's 1984 = fiction; Ellul's Propaganda = prophecy, 2003-09-16
Jacques Ellul is meticulous and thoughtful, so this book is occasionally dense and hard to follow. In addition, most of the examples and allusions will strike modern Americans as dated and obscure. Nonetheless, Ellul saw long ago where moderns were headed. He saw that authoritarian use of modern technologies would mesmerize, stultify, and reduce humans to thralls, just as Orwell and Huxley, in far more hysterical prose, had dramatized.Orwell's electronic miracles monitored citizens directly or indirectly. Huxley's miracles were far more therapeutic or medical. But routine surveillance or treatment is inefficient and overwhelms any state that would depend on omniscience or envelopment. Ellul foresaw tools both electronic and human that would so condition subject-audiences that close monitoring and careful prescriptions would be unneeded. Ellul also argued that this "Brave, New World" could not but subvert democracy and decency. Once the will of the citizen is not his or her own, then democracy in any meaningful sense is at least devalued and perhaps transformed into reassuring internment. Perhaps Ellul's most important insight was that the educated believed themselves immune to propaganda when, due to their proclivity for reading and watching news and other governmental outflow, such "intellectuals" were actually far more vulnerable than masses who did not receive propaganda as often. So turn off the set and log off the internet and settle in with a truly life-changing read.
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