Book Review: PROPAGANDA by Edward Bernays
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays)
No matter what political
position you take, or do not take, PROPAGANDA is a must-read.
Edward Bernays (1891-1995),
the world's pre-eminent and most influential propagandist, was a nephew of
Sigmund Freud, to whom he refers in his book PROPAGANDA a couple of times. Bernays
considered the dissemination of propaganda, that is the shaping and
manipulating of public opinion, not only respectable, but absolutely necessary
in modern society. He considered it a science, most certainly based on
psychology, and appeals to the authority of the eminent uncle in order to
convince business people and especially politicians that the "engineering
of consent" can, and must, be carried out coldly and systematically – and
all this for the benefit of society.
In addition to his uncle
Sigmund Freud, Bernays was influenced by and worked with Walter Lippmann who
coined the blood chilling phrase "the manufacture of consent". He was
also influenced by the research of Ivan Pavlov (!).
Bernays' clientele was most
impressive and achievements were formidable.
It is not for naught that he was called the "father of public
relations". Counted among his clients were President Calvin Coolidge, Proctor
& Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, John D. Rockefeller and General Electric. His
propaganda campaign for the United Fruit Company is said to have led to the
CIA's overthrow of the government of
The candor with which Bernays
speaks about propaganda is remarkable. Actually, it is his most brash, and one
assumes he thought most effective, propagandistic technique. He is so very sure
of the absolute sway that propaganda has over the public imagination that he
has no qualms whatsoever about informing society of what he is doing. He is
quite certain that knowing that they are being propagandized will in no wise
protect the public against it. Quite the contrary, in informing the public
about the power and persuasiveness of "scientific" propaganda being
administered by expert hands it is his intention to have the public surrender
to it as inevitable, omnipresent and irresistible. Evidently, he succeeded.
Bernays informs us that the
modern "science" of propaganda, used to control and "regiment"
public thinking, as he puts it, is a direct outgrowth of the propaganda that
was used in order to demonize the Germans in the eyes of the
Bernays refers to
crackerjack propagandists as "invisible governors". Propagandists,
while employed by big business people and politicians, are not their servants
and not acting at their behest. It is the propagandists who are the invisible
pullers of the politicians' and business people's strings. The propagandists, Bernays
informs us in no uncertain terms and wholly devoid of inhibition, control every
level of society from large numbers of former proletarians who were recently
(as of 1928) allowed to go upscale socio-economically and attain parity with
the lower rung of the petit bourgeoisie in order to stave off revolution all
the way up to the level of big business and politicians. He goes on to apprise
us of the fact that "propaganda is here to stay". That is not so much a statement of fact as a
command to become resigned to the fact, like it or not.
In 1928 there were still
enough Americans who were socially aware and Left-oriented that propagandists
had a bad name. Bernays attempts in his book PROPAGANDA to give propagandists a
better name, to make them appear more society-friendly, but he lets the public
know that their acceptance of propaganda or not will not be the determining factor
in whether or not it is influential and certainly not whether or not it continues
to exist and exert tremendous influence.
In his book PROPAGANDA
Bernays devotes a chapter to a brief overview of how propaganda can be made to
affect and can, in turn, be put into effect by:
Business
Political Leadership
Women
Education
Social Service
Arts and Science
Those that are
"scientifically" and "well" propagandized become, in turn,
agents for the dissemination of propaganda.
The edition of PROPAGANDA
presently available is published by Ig Publishing (See: www.igpub.com) is
riddled with typographical errors, the most amusing of which is:
"Czechoslovakia officially became a free state on Monday, October 28,
1918, instead of Sunday, October 17, 1918 [sic] because Professor
Masaryk realized that the people of the world would receive more information
and would be more receptive to the announcement of the republic's freedom on a
Monday morning than on a Sunday, because the press would have more space to
devote to it on Monday morning."
The most entertaining
aspect of reading Edward Bernay's PROPAGANDA, of course, is finding as many
propagandistic techniques in it as one can.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan,