``I find it hard to imagine that propaganda this crude could be effective...'' CD
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I do too.
But then I couldn't believe anybody would buy the Bush administration crappola on Iraq.
I mean Bush and Company were so obviouly lying that about the only questions in my mind, were they so arrogant that they didn't care whether it was believed or not? Or, were they so cynical and confident in their command over political power that they really didn't need to do anything more that put up the thinest of pretences?
I recieved the shock of my life when more than half the country apparently decided it was a good idea to invade Iraq. I am serious. I was utterly dumbfounded. What complete fools. I still can't quite believe it. I keep looking around for some other explanation, and I can't find any.
I think one direction toward an explanation for the complete transparency of most propaganda is that the manufacturers somehow believe it themselves. Hitler believed he was loved by the people because his mass rallies proved it to him. His title proved it. And I am guessing, his own sentimentalism towards cute children and flowers must have proved it. More, guessing. The proud happiness of the peasant women in their best traditional outfits come to show off their children was probably geniune. Concieved on this level, the film I saw was just a news reel report, i.e. the truth! It only looked staged in the sense that any visit by officialdom almost anywhere was and is arranged in advance.
I mean I was proud of my kid when he got his picture in the local paper. He and about five other kids (somehow coincidentally black, asian and hispanic, symbols for the success of integration) got the most donations to UNICEF in their school. This I think was a deliberate propaganda piece because Reagan cancelled US government funding for UNICEF about that time.
There are some giant black holes in my understanding of human nature and how people form their belief systems. It's that domain itself that is an engima to me, and I think all forms of propaganda tap into it in ways that I don't understand. This region has very little or no rational explanation at all. And yet we (or I have) spent endless posts, endless hours trying to figure it out.
It's like a magic theater on the inside something like that of Proust. Wave a word or two, an image, even a facial expresssion around and the weird world of the human mind goes off in some inexplicable direction.
The way I can sort of understand propaganda and its effects is if I conceive the totality of the state as a symbolic or mythological universe, almost identical in its psycho-social and cultural aspect and modes of function to the religious based cultural systems. The secular system is not a rational construct at all. It is an imaginarily informed superstructure of beliefs, with a vast catalog/calendar of official rituals/events where public attendence and obedience to authority is manditory. These secular rituals are performed in all manner of activities with the state: birth certificates, ss cards, taxes, driver licenses, passports, addresses, schools, degrees, the whole social service systems---not to mention the truly vast legal structures that have created the political economy of capitalism, empire and certainly all the rest.
While some of these dances with the god of state are functionally necessary in order to live and therefore do have a rational basis, most are merely bullshit permission slips, some conferrence of blessedness or grace added on, value-added even, and have no more rational an explanation that the mysteries of Eucharist or Microsoft.
I mean Kafka was a realist!
So living within such a mysterious world of beliefs, rituals, mystic sayings, symbols of power and submission, we mostly don't function in rational ways in a rational world at all. I think this is so not because we are primative or stupid, but because rationalism itself is not the means through which we understand our world. If we only had rational methods and beliefs I think we would be completely non-functional in our society. Instead, our only entrance to the mysteries of state are thorough feelings, intuitions, our limited understanding of human nature, our working experience with the necessary rituals of these systems, in short our belief systems which only have a certain internal consistancy that we use in place of rational thought.
For example, the US voting public are supposed to follow their intuitions, their feelings, their divining powers about this or that personality, institution, ritualistic symbol, or some series of laws and so forth. I supect the reason is not some weakness of mind peculiar to the US. Rather I would propose that most of us have no other alternative. How the hell can I figure if this asshole or that in public office will do the right thing. They are all lying through their teeth, or acting, or pretending to be something they clearly are not. Look at the Obama v. Hilary posts here. It's impossible to make rational political judgement in this world. You have to trust your own limited experience with people who seem like Obama or Hilary. In my experience, I don't trust either one, but forced into a vote, it would go to Obama, because I don't like Hilary at all. She reminds me of Diane Feinstein who was mayor of SF and was a hard ass social conservative with a mean streak.
On the other hand, my rational judgement is that voting and other limited forms of official participation allowed the laity before the little wooden fence that seals the holy mysteries of the altar of state, are made irrelevant by the sheer power (mystical and divine forces) of the state over us.
We are habiuated and acculturated into a what I call a mythological universe. While we can rationalize its machinations all day long, the deeper truth is that there are no logical interconnections. Instead the inner connections and linkages are all formed through cultural traditions and a consistancy principle which is very much like logic and rational thought, but in fact isn't that kind of system at all. In a strickly logical or rational system there are not two or more points of view. There is one. (Skipping multi-variant truth values and paraconsistancy). But in our mythological world there are not one or two, but many points of view.
For instance, moral thought is theoretically made to appear rational through such consistancy principles. At the state level these consistency principles are the subject of law and legal argument and judgements this way or that. Certainly these judgements are made to appear rational by demonstration of their consistancy, and by all manner of mystic ritualistic nonsense, chants, incantations to the dead white great fathers of yore, oaths, and so forth. Only smoke, chicken feathers and rythm instruments are missing from the courts.
I probably can't get back to Hitler from here, but I'll try. The pure wickedness of Hitler smiling is only available to us now, because we can rationally re-construct the history. The people emerced in that history may not have had any rational idea what was to come or become of them. We forget the only reason the Jewish and Leftist academic elite got out before anyone else is because they were all fired from their state teaching and research jobs by the first legal decrees ruling over the state employment system. They left because they had no alternative. I don't think they had any special insight. It was not known how events would turn out for at least some couple of years. Mann for example was on a late winter ski vacation in Switzerland during February when Hitler took power. He stayed in Zurich because he knew he had made himself a public enemy through his writing. He feared a public show trial of some sort. But even he didn't quite grasp where this was going. He sent his college aged kids and his wife back to make legal arrangements to get his estate out of Germany--techically it was mostly her estate anyway. Meanwhile his kids took up political activities as high profile privilaged lefties living dangerously between Germany, France and England for a few years before they left. You could still believe it wouldn't be so bad, despite whatever rational faculities you tried to muster.
I am certain Strauss didn't understand the potential disaster at all. He was busy in Paris on a Rockefeller foundation grant studying Hobbes and Rousseau, furthering his intellectual career. His application for that grant included a recommendation letter from Carl Schmitt, along with Cassier and Guttmann. Arendt left Germany in October of 1933, I think, to join up with other Germans and German Jews in Paris where she worked with a refugee program and the Zionists to get Jews to Palestine---an effort eternally frustrated by the British in their imperial triangulations with the Arabs. Arendt had to escape again when France was partitioned under Vichy and made her escape through the Pyrenees on an American visa gained through political friends in New York. But even Arendt wasn't entirely clear about what exactly was the nature of the presentiment of things to come. She wrote:
``You see, I had been primarily occupied with academic pursuits. Given that perspective, the year 1933 made a lasting impression on me---both negatively and positively. I should give you first a negative impression impression and then a positive one. Many people think these days that the shock undergone by the Jews in 1933 was a function of Hitler's seizing power. As far as I and those of my generation are concerned, this is a curious misunderstanding. That was of course, terrible. But it was political, it wasn't personal. That the Nazis were our enemies---God knows we did not need Hitler's seizing power to demonstrate that! It was clear to everyone who was not a little crazy for at least four years prior to 1933. That a large number of Germans sympathized with the Nazis was also qutie apparent to us. Therefore, we were not taken completely by surprize by the events of 1933... [But] the general political realities transformed themselves into personal destiny as soon as you set foot out of the house. And, also, you know what cooperation (Gleichshaltung) is, of course. And cooperation meant that your friends cooperated. The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies might be doing, but what our friends were doing...'' (For Love of the World, Young-Bruehl, 108p)
In other words, mass conformaty to the order of the day. Merely make the official pronouncements, let the word go forth from this day forward... And the ranks close in formation. That's the core of fascism. The mythological systems of thought finish the tasks at hand. And it is my firm belief that is exactly what has happened in the US, and may hopefully be dissolving.
Well, and then back to the news media. I have to think most of them or at least their editorial oversight believed in the Bush dogma leading up to war and the years of disasters before and after. How that is rationally possible, given the news media's mystic genuflection to empiricism, is beyond me. After more than fifty years of work of all kinds on the nature of mass conformity, how they would fall prey to exactly the same powers of delusion is and will always be inexpliciable to me. I can explain it forever in rational terms, but I will never understand it.
Of course I know it isn't over, but I feel it's over. They lost.