VLVL2 "The Anti-Propaganda Tradition in the United States"

[pynchonoid]

The Anti-Propaganda Tradition in the United States

[...] Americans' suspicions of propaganda by their own
government have a long history. It would not be
surprising if this anti-propaganda tradition were to
resurface given the growing controversy over the
reasons the Bush administration led the country into
war. 

[...] A second accusation against propaganda was its
violence to language. As early as 1915, the novelist
Henry James said in an interview in The New York
Times:

"The war has used up words; they have weakened, they
have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have,
like millions of other things, been more over-strained
and knocked about and voided than in all the long ages
before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation
of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss
of expression through an increase of limpness, that
may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to
walk."

Hemingway, a witness in the ambulance corps to the
horrors of World War I, "contemptuously rejected the
language of officialdom," the historian Brett Gary
writes. He'd had enough of what the philosopher
Bertrand Russell calls "the foul literature of glory."
The antihero in A Farewell to Arms laments: "Abstract
words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were
obscene behind the concrete names of villages, the
numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of
regiments and the dates."

[...] Advertising was not held in high regard at the
time by Americans, who believed that "the truth
sometimes seemed lost in the drive to sell new goods,"
according to Winkler. Propaganda's similarities to
publicity were a fourth reason for the low reputation
it acquired.

Eager to refute this anti-advertising, anti-propaganda
stance, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations
and Viennese-born nephew of Sigmund Freud as well as a
Committee on Public Information graduate, wrote in his
Propaganda (1928) that "intelligent men must realize
that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they
can fight for productive ends and help bring order out
of chaos."


<http://www.publicdiplomacy.org/19.htm>

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