Propaganda Decoded E-Book

Birand Bingül

• Herausgeber: Grand Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 134

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Nothing less than our democracy is at stake. Hate, anger, fake news, and alleged conspiracies: Our debate culture is in a state of emergency, and polarization has become a central phenomenon in our society. In this insightful wake-up call, reporter Birand Bingül argues that this is part of a propaganda strategy that seeks to collapse our social dialogue. With historic context as well as examples from present-day politicians, Bingul provides thorough, structured insight into the various elements that make propaganda so effective, even in a time when information and facts are at everyone's fingertips. A deep analysis into how propaganda and populism works, with helpful and hopeful ways to counter these strategies.

Leseprobe

Birand Bingül

Propaganda Decoded

How Manipulation Endangers Democracy

Translated from the German by Oliver Latsch

W1-Media, Inc.

Grand Books

Stamford, CT, USA

Copyright © 2023 by W1-Media Inc. for this edition

Original title: Alles Propaganda! Wie Manipulation unsere Demokratie gefährdet

© 2023 by Atrium AG, Zurich

First English edition published by

W1-Media Inc./Grand Books 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

The Library of Congress Control Number is available.

English translation copyright © Oliver Latsch, 2023

Coverdesign: Annemike Werth, Hamburg

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

ISBN978-1-64690-637-6

www.arctis-books.com

IntroductionMonsters and Shock Waves

If you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you follow the news or use social media on a regular basis. In that case, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that for some years now the Western world has been rocked by political shock waves, which have particularly been rolling through the liberal democracies of Europe and the United States. Time and time again, there is fresh anger, hatred, fake news, and alleged conspiracies. Attacks on parliaments and parliamentarians, courts and judges, academic institutions and researchers, and media outlets and journalists have been reported. It has not stopped there. In recent years, there have been politically motivated murders in many countries. Polarization is one of the central social phenomena of our time. Right-wing populists and authoritarians are generally identified as being responsible for this. In practically all Western countries, politicians and parties in recent years have established themselves in ways that can be called anything from populist to authoritarian: Donald Trump in the United States, Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, and the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) in Germany. In Europe, right-wingers can also be found in Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, Spain, and the Czech Republic. But there are also left-wing variants, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. The list is long. And there is no end to their electoral successes. In the fall of 2022, Giorgia Meloni won the election with the radical right-wing Fratelli d’Italia and became prime minister of Italy. Shortly before that, the Sweden right-winger Democrats won more than 20 percent of the vote and became an influential force in this traditionally social-democratic country.

This phenomenon of populism and authoritarianism has recently been analyzed extensively by experts from various disciplines.[1] Nevertheless, as the editor in chief of the German weekly Die Zeit, Giovanni di Lorenzo, stated soberly in a front-page story: “Democratic parties have yet to find effective means to counter their enemies.”[2] Finnish investigative journalist Jessikka Aro concludes that Western states are “inadequate for meeting the challenges of organized online hate dissemination.”[3] Aro knows what she’s talking about. She has built an international reputation as an expert on Russian information warfare in the face of severe personal harassment and smear campaigns against her.

But how is it that the so-called authoritarian parties have been able to gain so much power and influence? We wonder because we do not understand well enough what these enemies do nor how and why—and without a thorough diagnosis, there can be no helpful remedy.

This book aims to contribute to such a diagnosis, a better understanding from the perspective of a communications expert. To this end, the parties and movements labeled as populist and authoritarian must first be understood for what they are: They are parties that systematically use propaganda. They are propaganda parties. They use a complex and elaborate playbook. There is a blueprint for propaganda parties and those who aspire to be propaganda parties: strategies and actions, and terminology and techniques that come together to form a system of propaganda machinery in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This propaganda concept is based, to a surprising degree, on the deeper propaganda logic of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels described propaganda as the “avant-garde” and the “pioneer of Realpolitik.”[4] Anyone who wants to decode the present situation must come to terms with the National Socialist “fathers” of all modern propaganda. Therefore, these historical references will be repeatedly made in Propaganda Decoded.

Propaganda pursues specific goals. Propaganda parties seek power for power’s sake. They polarize to contaminate social dialogue. If dialogue is made impossible, we experience a petrifaction of opinion forming, and democracy is paralyzed. Democracy struggles to deliver results, especially on contentious issues. All this plays further into the hands of the propaganda parties.

Propaganda deceives and seduces. It undermines and confuses. It destroys and annihilates. Anyone who wants to protect Western democracy must recognize and see through contemporary propaganda in its entirety and depth. Otherwise, counterstrategies will remain piecemeal at best, and the propagandists’ advance will continue. Propaganda is the most significant contemporary monster. It has many arms and heads. And yet, standing in the middle of the political stage, it sometimes seems overlooked or invisible—with fatal consequences for liberal democracies.

Chapter 1Propaganda Parties

To fully understand the monster of propaganda and counter its shock waves, we must first understand the nature of propaganda parties. In this context, various terms are generally bandied about, but these miss the core of the phenomenon. The term “populism,” for example, is simply misleading. It focuses on the relationship of populists to the electorate. However, the desire to be the people’s voice is only an affectation. It is really about seducing the populace to secure their loyalty. The vital essence is how propaganda parties communicate with the people. In other words, a politician can act populist in principle without becoming a propagandist. Many politicians in liberal democracies act populistically—at least from time to time—and it is only right they do so as representatives of the people.

On the other hand, those who speak of authoritarians are too intent on setting up a bigoted antithesis to liberal democracy. In addition, the term “authoritarian” tends to focus on the domineering behavior of the respective politicians, further obscuring the core of the matter. Descriptions such as “protest”—or “anti-politician”—are also misleading because protest and antagonism are not the essence of these parties. It is much more accurate to describe parties like the German AfD, Trump’s Republicans, the Turkish AKP, or the Hungarian Fidesz as propaganda parties. The reasons for this will become apparent in a moment. Such parties are, at their core, propagandists. Propaganda politicians lead them.

According to standard definitions, propaganda has a negative connotation. Propaganda can be characterized as very aggressive, ideologically motivated political communication carried out on a massive and permanent scale. Propaganda aims to influence with all available means, particularly dishonest and manipulative ones, toward a particular goal and in a certain way, especially when it comes to changing people’s emotions, opinions, and behavior. The actual plans and interests behind such propaganda are obscured. Parties that submit to propaganda place it at the beginning and center of their political action. In such parties, all political activity serves a propagandist function. The electorate and the content are secondary. Their politics is propaganda. Propaganda is their policy.

What all propaganda parties have in common is that they invest a conspicuous amount of resources into their communications work. They have the largest communication departments and are more active on social media than other parties. They pursue creating and using their own media and other channels to reach the electorate. It is typical for propaganda parties to, on the one hand, attack established media and, on the other, appear in them wherever possible and ideally gain power over them in general.

Propaganda work is influenced not only by politicians but also by political advisers, communicators, specialized media agencies, opinion researchers, and pollsters, who often provide the internal party strategy for propagandistic core messages and actions. Troll factories or troll farms should also be mentioned here. Paid trolls deliberately spread false information on the Internet to manipulate opinions, influence election results, and silence critics. The best-known troll factory is the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which, among other activities, has influenced elections in the United States and Europe. Although Russia’s president, Putin, claims it is a privately run institution, there is some evidence that this troll factory is state controlled.[5] According to one study, thirty governments worldwide employed troll factories in 2017.[6] When propaganda parties come into power, they are supported by collaborators in state media and intelligence services, i.e., highly functional parts of the state apparatus in terms of their potential use for propaganda.

The contemporary propaganda party deliberately recruits as many supporters as possible from a group of disappointed, worried, doubting, frightened, angry individuals. The much-invoked will of the people plays, at best, a subordinate role. In an often marginalizing, ceaseless campaign, propaganda parties attempt to gain approval through skillful and radical misuse of political communication. Propaganda parties are not driven by content; the content is ultimately arbitrarily interchangeable if it does not catch on as desired. The masses are the key to the power they crave. Once the propaganda party has won the affection of the masses, the reversal kicks in: the leaders declare what the will of the people is—and the people follow. Maximizing or maintaining this power at all costs is the propaganda party’s hidden fundamental impulse. That is their sole raison d’être. Let it be repeated: propaganda parties are about power for power’s sake.

The fact propaganda parties are not concerned with content can be seen, for example, in a phenomenon we might call the Uncertainty Paradox: The propaganda politicians claim that they are running to do something about the insecurity and uncertainty of the masses. But on the contrary, they constantly increase uncertainty and insecurity because this brings them closer to their covert goal.

Moreover, it is anything but a coincidence that propaganda parties are politically more often located on the right than on the left of the political spectrum. After all, they usually reference a past in which the country was supposedly better off. The people had more reason to feel national pride—a fundamental conservative motif. Especially in Europe and North America, emotional connectivity is much more significant in the conservative camp than on the left. The Russian essayist Svetlana Boym speaks of “restorative nostalgia.” A past—transfigured and idealized—homeland is to be restored, and the old identity is to be given new luster. As impossible as it is to restore the past, Boym says, the supporters of restorative nostalgia act with paranoid determination, renouncing critical thinking while under the spell of grand symbolism. In this way, restorative nostalgia can give birth to monsters.[7]

It is apparent how much the propaganda politicians resemble each other in their actions and behavior. The fact they exchange strategies and copy each other is documented and unsurprising. For example, Steve Bannon, former Trump adviser and head of Breitbart News, is frequently in Europe, exchanging ideas with Alice Weidel of the AfD, the Hungarian head of government Viktor Orbán, and an adviser to Marine Le Pen. He participated in exclusive meetings of the relevant circles. Bannon wanted to unite the right-wing nationalists of Europe with his Brussels-based foundation, “The Movement.” It would be naive to assume that similarities in propaganda are solely the result of fleeting agreements and a lively copy-and-paste mentality.

Yet, despite the similarities and interconnections, propaganda parties must also be appraised differentially. A brief typology will help to classify propaganda parties in their various stages and developmental phases.

In her epoch-making work The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, after analyzing Hitler’s Nazi state and Stalin’s Soviet Union, distinguished between totalitarian and pre-totalitarian propaganda. According to her work, pre-totalitarian propaganda aims to win over sympathizers and party followers. In the totalitarian world, pure indoctrination prevails. It is directed at everyone and is wholly disinhibited. Totalitarian propaganda does not allow for any other point of view and makes the coexistence of ideas impossible.[8]

Arendt’s distinction between pre-totalitarian and totalitarian propaganda can be translated and refined to apply to today’s conditions, especially regarding parties as propagandistic actors. Totalitarian propaganda goes hand in hand with war propaganda in a nondemocratic—at best, sham democratic—regime. In this form of propaganda, preexisting contempt for others is heightened to an ideology of annihilation. As Arendt worked out, the method of totalitarian propaganda is indoctrination—if necessary, even on a global scale. Nowadays, this also includes destabilizing propaganda through hacker attacks and troll farms that steal and spread compromising material, especially around elections. Such attacks were used to discredit candidates, such as Hillary Clinton in the United States and Emmanuel Macron in France, to influence the citizens’ electoral decision. Part of totalitarian propaganda is increasing communication output to absurd levels to maintain a painstakingly constructed worldview free of cracks and fractures. Yet this also exposes the significant instability of totalitarian propaganda.

In times of war, propaganda is used intensively—and is also discussed more, following the wisdom that “in war, truth is the first casualty.” Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine was accompanied by shameless, often crude war propaganda that has long been effective in Russia. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president has performed and allowed the performance of totalitarian propaganda in its purest form during the Ukraine campaign. However, totalitarian war propaganda is only the tip of the iceberg. Pre-totalitarian propaganda parties are characterized by the fact they are often the only party in government—sometimes for a long time—and have achieved certain milestones. These include, among other things, that the leader is endowed with extraordinary power and that a cult has been established around this leader.

Furthermore, pre-totalitarian propaganda parties can maintain core democratic elements while weakening institutions such as parliament and the judiciary. They also control the opposition, nongovernmental organizations, and independent media. They are characterized by communicative dominance, which significantly controls and shapes public and published discourse. As a result, pre-totalitarian propaganda can potentially organize much more stable conditions than totalitarian propaganda. Today’s pre-totalitarian propaganda politicians include Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Pre-totalitarian propaganda parties include several subtypes. The category of voted-out pre-totalitarian propaganda parties includes, for example, Donald Trump’s Republicans—with the next elections already casting their shadows. Coalition propaganda parties have made it into government but cannot govern outright. These parties currently include Poland’s PiS, which Jarosław Kaczyński shaped. This party has also ruled alone and in a pre-totalitarian manner in the past. As a junior partner, for example, the Austrian FPÖ governed with the conservative party of then-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz between 2017 and 2019 before the so-called “Ibiza affair” catapulted the FPÖ out of the government.

An oppositional propaganda party is characterized by having no direct political power. Still, it exerts great influence and pressure on governing parties. It shapes crucial public debates and helps to influence decisions. As a result, it makes substantial gains in votes without winning overall victories and gaining government power. Oppositional propaganda parties include Germany’s AfD during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and the French Rassemblement National, with Marine Le Pen’s two consecutive second-place finishes in presidential elections.

Last but not least, we can identify failing propaganda parties that, for various reasons, operate unsuccessfully in opposition, fail to penetrate in terms of propaganda, and assume a marginal role, which is fatal, especially in the propaganda logic of pure group acquisition. The German AfD, in its current form, fits in here.

This typology of propaganda parties is based on a dynamic, not a mechanistic understanding: progress can be followed by a reversal and vice versa. And not every propaganda party will—or must—strive to become totalitarian.

According to the typology outlined, from a historical point of view, the German Nazi party NSDAP