“A Means of State Control”

Posted on March 25, 2020 by James Thomas Snyder

The Origins of Propaganda (Part One)

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum held an exhibition titled “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” in Washington, D.C., from 2009 and 2011. This dramatic collection of German National Socialist state artifacts included photos, posters, newspapers, radio broadcasts, film productions, even children’s games and toys. It was a frightening, lurid, and claustrophobic display of the most puerile, racist, warmongering politics witnessed during the 20^th century.

Germany’s propaganda program was deep and vast. It left virtually no aspect of life uncontrolled by the regime. Over the course of its 14 years, the National Socialist regime exerted control over not just the entire government but the churches, universities, schools, radio, press, publishing, cinema, civic organizations, artist guilds, medicine, and sports. No other regime besides the Soviet Union wielded such totality over the daily lives of its citizens.

If there were a single, accepted definition of propaganda, then, it would be found in this definitive collection of propaganda’s greatest horrors. Helpfully, the Memorial published a guidebook to the exhibition using the same title. Propaganda, it explains,

as used in this book refers to the dissemination of information, whether truthful, partially truthful, or blatantly false, that aims to shape public opinion and behavior. Propaganda simplifies complicated issues or ideology for mass consumption, is always biased, and is geared to achieving a particular end. In contrast to the ideal of an educator, who aims to foster independent judgment and thinking, the practitioner of propaganda does not aim to encourage deliberation by presenting a variety of viewpoints and leaving it up to the audience to determine which perspective is correct. The propagandist transmits only information geared to strength his or her case and consciously omits contrary information. Propaganda generally uses symbols, whether in written, musical, cinematic, or other visual forms, and aims to channel complex human emotions toward a desired goal. It is often employed by government and private organizations to promote their causes and institutions and denigrate their opponents and is linked to both advertising and public relations. Propaganda functions as just one weapon in the arsenal of mass persuasion.

That is a comprehensive definition of a complex but dangerous phenomenon of contemporary political life and one whose effects we live with every day. It represents the general consensus of experts in the field. Its examples are easy to identify in the exhibition and the book. I do not doubt, in any way, that the examples on display and catalogued in the hardbound guidebook are examples of Nazi propaganda.

Unfortunately the definition falls apart almost immediately on any close or critical inspection. This definition, in whole and in part, can precisely describe not just propaganda but all political expression—the latter of which I’m sure the authors and experts would agree encompass much more than propaganda itself. This is dangerous ground. If we could hypothesize banning propaganda by fiat based on this definition, we would find ourselves banning all political expressing or legitimizing all propaganda. This definition, then, is a logical cul-de-sac from which political speech—the most important and therefore most protected of type of expression—cannot escape. If propaganda is political speech, and political speech is propaganda, then everything we say or think has the same taint. Common sense tells us this cannot be true. Propaganda and political speech are different things. If they were the same we would have one word to describe them both.

It is important to start with a definition because, unfortunately, the word propaganda needs one. In popular use, it has been abused so much that it has lost practically all intrinsic meaning: A satirical talk-show is propaganda. News is propaganda. An advertising campaign is propaganda. A public health announcement is propaganda. Scientific studies are propaganda. A newspaper editorial is propaganda. A child’s television program is propaganda. A radio call-in show is propaganda. A social media meme is propaganda. The President’s speech is propaganda. An art exhibition is propaganda. A music concert is propaganda.

Propaganda, in this context, is not a positive connotation (and certainly begs the question of whether the accusers read and applied the sophisticated definition quoted above). It concerns leave us to distill this already utterly denatured word into something far simpler and clearer than the official understanding recorded above: propaganda is political speech I do not like.

Let us examine the Memorial definition line by line to demonstrate convincingly that propaganda, as defined here, can easily be applied to virtually any other sort of political expression.

1) [D]issemination of information, whether truthful, partially truthful, or blatantly false, that aims to shape public opinion and behavior

The sole purpose of political speech is to shape public opinion and behavior. If I nail a poster to a wall that reads only VOTE FOR SMITH, I am disseminating information about a political candidate. Let us presume that Smith actually exists, so it is truthful. I aim to shape public opinion – to support Smith – and behavior: I want people to VOTE FOR SMITH. Under this definition, then, the most elemental political speech – advocating a candidate for political office – is propaganda.

Let us suppose that instead of a poster reading VOTE FOR SMITH I post a sign that reads VOTE FOR FIDO. Presuming I am not running a dog for office, this is blatantly false. And yet it, too, is political speech: it suggests that voting for a dog would be better than voting for somebody else. I am still disseminating information. I am still aiming to shape public opinion – questioning their faith in the electoral system or the candidates themselves – and their behavior: who knows whether they will vote at all?

This is not hypothetical at all, as this antique Yippie poster from the Chicago Convention of 1968 demonstrates:

yippie

2) Propaganda simplifies complicated issues or ideology for mass consumption, is always biased, and is geared to achieving a particular end.

I could write a letter to the editor of my local newspapers arguing that climate change requires immediate policy changes to avoid hurting people. This would summarize an immensely complex issue in about 200 words. It is for mass consumption, since I have written the newspaper and not my friend across town. It is prima facie biased: I am not going to make the argument of my detractors for them. And it is geared, perhaps naively, to a particular end: the change in policy to avoid the consequences of climate change. And yet under this definition, the staple of popular political speech – the humble letter to the editor, used by newspapers for a century to reflect and reach their democratic readership – is propaganda.

(3) In contrast to the ideal of an educator, who aims to foster independent judgment and thinking, the practitioner of propaganda does not aim to encourage deliberation by presenting a variety of viewpoints and leaving it up to the audience to determine which perspective is correct. The propagandist transmits only information geared to strengthen his or her case and consciously omits contrary information.

These two sentences taken together define the trial lawyer, defending an innocent person against a charge that may end their life. The trial lawyer does not want to foster independent judgment and thinking: they want an acquittal. They do not aim to encourage deliberation by presenting a variety of viewpoints and leaving it to the audience to determine which is correct: those are the jury instructions. The defense attorney ignores or attacks the variety of viewpoints in order to make the most convincing case to the jury. Under this definition, then, the defense attorney engages in propaganda.

(4) Propaganda generally uses symbols, whether in written, musical, cinematic, or other visual forms, and aims to channel complex human emotions toward a desired goal.

When we take this into account, we probably think of something like this famous poster produced during World War II to encourage women in the workforce. It remains fresh and the symbols are not hard to parse: a woman in coveralls rolling up her sleeves to take on what had been exclusively a man’s job in wartime production. It is designed to focus attention and distract from any complex concerns about a woman’s place in the workplace. It is easy to see this as propaganda since encouraging weapons production during wartime war is generally seen as an overriding concern of the state. It is regularly described as such.

rosie

But, importantly, its bold and unmistakable iconography has been recycled many times over during the many iterations of the feminist movement. It can still speak in new ways, challenging our understanding of propaganda as presented by the Memorial. The appropriation this American icon to support the work of the Pakistani children’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai, below, demonstrates the enduring power of visual imagery and symbols, no matter the cultural context. Its goal, as seen in the text written next to the mural, couldn’t be clearer. And yet under the definition outlined above, this image of a young girl shot in the head for trying to go to school would be defined as propaganda.

malala

As a practical matter, particularly in developing democracies, the use of symbols is important because illiteracy or a lack of a common language makes the printing of ballots particularly fraught. In this example, Nigerian political parties have been distilled to their logo and party initials. This is hardly propaganda but it is clear to see how bold, simple symbols and compelling graphics would help a candidate or party.

ballot

(5) it is often employed by government and private organizations to promote their causes and institutions and denigrate their opponents and is linked to both advertising and public relations.

This is a strange paragraph for its peculiar qualifications, vague definitions, and tenuous connection to related disciplines. By tying together private institutions and governments it breaks down an important legal divide between people and those they elect to lead them. If the First Amendment gives the people the right freely to assemble, to petition their government for redress of grievances, to publish and to speak, then this paragraph erases the moral distinction defining a group of people protesting on behalf of themselves. “Cause” is a mushy synonym for what is properly called a political agenda.

And what do advertising and public relations have to do with this? The weak language used here to tie them to propaganda suggests the authors recognize they are not the same thing but they are unclear about the nature of the relationship. They are related because they use the same technical tools: various media (text, radio, television, etc.), language, images, audience surveys, targeted marketing, and so on. But so, too, do news organizations. Is propaganda “linked to the news media”?

This definition could have drawn a bright and important line if it had simply asserted that propaganda is the exclusive domain of the state. But that would have legitimized the vile collection of Nazi paraphernalia collected for the purpose of defining propaganda: the National Socialist party, prior to taking government control, used the same tactics as the National Socialist government. This Hobson’s Choice demonstrates that without the benefit of hindsight there is simply no bright line to be drawn dividing propaganda from political expression under this definition.

(6) Propaganda functions as just one weapon in the arsenal of mass persuasion.

What other weapons are there? The Memorial’s definition does not define the actual means or media – the specific vehicles for delivering the propaganda product. Here we find the Memorial’s definition both overbroad and stunningly limited. The definition refers to the “dissemination” and “transmit” of “information” and only later broadly identifies “written, musical, cinematic, or other visual forms” to deliver desired emotional responses in an audience. Presumably these must be delivered in some medium, which is left unidentified. But there is no “dissemination” without a platform, whether that is a live performance, a publication, radio or television broadcast, web site, e-mail, or even a telephone call. If we leave aside coercion – the threat of violence and the total control over all aspects of civic life – then there are no other means of mass persuasion. But this definition does not consider the idea of total control of society.

While the Memorial has condensed the expert consensus defining propaganda, it does not parry other arguments that define propaganda. One of the major modes of thought emerging in the last 100 years posits that propaganda is a product of both the technological era and the emergence of mass culture in the 20^th century. Mass literacy, improved living standards, and consumerism created a market for popular periodicals, radio, television, and movies that were the result of technological innovation. World War I not only saw the wireless radio, mass newspaper distribution, basic literacy, and the strong central state converge on information “dissemination,” it also inaugurated mass organization as the belligerents mobilized tens of millions of young men for military service and their home fronts to support them. Many observers believed that this was the only era in which propaganda could exist in pure form.

This argument is in one sense obvious but in another completely fallacious. Political communication has always used all means available to it. Those making political arguments did not simply ignore one medium in favor of another. As the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany emerged, their regimes took advantage of all these methods to reach a wide audience. Many of them were very new, including motion pictures with soundtracks, and propaganda experts in the West conflated the emergence of these new media and technology with propaganda itself.

As I will argue later, the nature of propaganda is such that the state uses all means available to them. It is control of the means of production – and not the produced means or messages by themselves – that define propaganda. Any state that can control communication with the public engages in propaganda. The means change, evolve, expand or become obsolete, but the aspect of control does not.

I do not mean to attack the Memorial and what remains an important exhibit at a critical moment in our political history. We both have the same goal, in fact, which is to point out both the fundamental evil of Nazi ideology and the danger of unchecked and weaponized political speech. My main concern is that the Memorial did not go far enough. In addition to the racist bile and agitation, race-baiting and war-mongering, hate and lies and distortion, the root of Nazi propaganda was the control of all those things which meant that decent people could not reach the same audience and a subject population had no alternative means to learn the truth. Additionally, as we’ll see later, Germany’s coercive state apparatus served as the stick to propaganda’s carrot to enforce political conformity and mobilization.

Moreover, propaganda distracts. Calling something propaganda allows us to dismiss it. It keeps us from understanding what is really being done. Calling a Nazi poster propaganda doesn’t help us identify why it bothers us, why it challenges our conscience. Other words work better because they are clear and precise: incitement, racist, subversive, disloyal, hysterical, divisive, hateful, false, incomplete, distorting, twisted. That way we can really and honestly attack and respond to political expression that calls out our devils.

We have many ways and means of political expression: polemic, opinion, argument editorial; satire, parody, caricature; exaggeration, hyperbole, overstatement, embellishment; mockery, scorn, disdain, ridicule; judgment, verdict, condemnation; endorsement, praise, celebration. All of these would be, and have been, swallowed by the single pejorative propaganda. And if everything is propaganda, then there is no open and legitimate means of political expression.

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Garry Wills’ Qur’an (Part One)

Posted on March 18, 2020 by James Thomas Snyder

Is Islam as American as apple pie? Both are early imports from Asia Minor – Islam from the Arabian Peninsula by way of Africa and Iberia, apples from southern Kazakhstan by way of Europe – that have grown deep roots in the New World. Islam has directly affected the New World in ways that have been obscured for generations but deserve better understanding today.

The history of Islam in the Western Hemisphere has long been debated in the Near East. There are some interesting, if apocryphal, suggestions that early Muslim navies traveled to North America from the Mediterranean before Columbus, but evidence is scarce. Islam definitively arrived in the Americas with the Spanish conquista. With them the Spaniards brought tens of thousands of African slaves, a large plurality of whom were likely Muslims, as early as 1501.

The conquista was profoundly affected by the Spanish experience of both Moorish rule and the reconquista that expelled Muslims from the Iberian peninsula in the late 15^th century. The pursuit of gold in the New World was motivated in part by the financial burden of the war and the sheer fact of reconquest in Spain drove a self-fulfilling narrative for the brigands and ne’er-do-wells who led the pillage. In their minds the conquest of the New World was an extension of the liberation of the old.

What the quran meant

But the Spanish could not purge the cultural influence of Muslim rule as easily as it could the population that brought it to them. Just to start, the entire Spanish language was heavily influenced by Arabic including hundreds of adopted words. You may never view Arnold Schwarzenegger the same when you consider that his characteristic line, “Hasta la vista, baby,” is a direct Arabic import from hatta meaning “until”. Likewise, Spanish speakers from Argentina to Canada still use the expression ojala, invoking God, meaning the same thing as the Arabic inshallah: God willing.

Consequently, the Spanish left an Islamic-inspired legacy across the hemisphere. The geometric tile mosaics of Seville, Spain, were inspired by Islamic art whose legacy can still be found as far away as Mexico and California. The famously beautiful enclosed balconies of Lima, Peru, are a direct import from North African moucharaby latticed windows. Place names influenced by Arabic terms proliferate. Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, means “Valley of the Stones” in Arabic. The Catholic patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, has Arabic roots: Guadalupe is an Arabic-Latin mash-up meaning “Valley of the Wolves”. The historical influence doesn’t stop there. Matamoros, a Mexican border town opposite Brownsville, Texas, means “Moor-Slayer,” the epithet applied to Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to Muslims as el Cid (el sayid), a Spanish holy warrior of the reconquista. Santiago de Chile and San Diego, California, are named for St. James, a mythical hero of that war.

This influence persists even in the United States. There is strong if not conclusive evidence that California’s etymology is rooted in the term “caliph,” which applies to a Muslim leader descended from the prophet Muhammad. Similarly, it is possible that Albuquerque stems from the Arabic term Abu al-Qurq, meaning “father of the oak”. Andalucia, Alabama, may have adopted a residual place name from the Spanish colonialists who explored the south during the 16^th century. Al Andalus was the name of Islamic Spain.

African slaves poured into the hemisphere shortly after the conquista. At least 10 percent of the 400,000 Africans kidnapped to the United States were Muslims. This is a fair if low estimate for the rest of the Americas. The most notable slave uprising in Brazil, to which the Portuguese brought three million Africans, was led by a Muslim community known as the Malê. While most Africans were converted to Christianity, it is well-documented that many of these men and women retained their names indicating Islamic roots: Muhammad, Fatima, Ayisha.

Two African American slaves, Ibrahim Abd Al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, achieved modest fame in the 19^th century when they demonstrated literacy in Arabic. Through a dramatic political intervention, Al-Rahman was manumitted to Morocco with his wife. (Sadly, not their nine children.) Ibn Said remained property in the United States and died two years before the 13^th Amendment was passed that would have freed him.

moors account

The Moor’s Account, a recent novel by Laila Lalani, tells the true story of Estevanico, a Moroccan slave who accompanied the Panfilo de Narvaes expedition to Florida in 1527. Estevanico, whose real name was probably Mustufa Zemmouri, was one of four surviving members of the expedition whose numbers were decimated by shipwreck, disease, exhaustion, and native population raids on the invaders. Before he died, probably in 1539 in what is now New Mexico, he traveled from Florida along the Gulf Coast, across what is now Texas and northern Mexico, all the way to Mexico City. He was among the first non-natives to see what we now call the American southwest.

Muslims did not exist in individual vacuums in the United States: there were communities of Muslim believers, including one led by Bilali Muhammad in Georgia. Muhammad was literate in Arabic and wrote a short treatise on Islamic law before his death. He also commanded 80 men during the War of 1812. Indeed, Muslim soldiers served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and the Union Army during the Civil War.

jeffersons quran

Separate from the faith of the African population, which did not interest their owners, Islam conceptually and politically affected the founders of the American republic. In Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, Denise Spellberg’s comprehensive survey of the influence of Islam on the Founders’ debate over religious freedom, tolerance, and political participation, she reveals a radical, if wholly theoretical, acceptance of plural belief in the early United States. In contrast to Great Britain, whose monarch is also head of the Church of England, and most European countries with their own state church, the Americans imagined their new state purged of church influence and religious society protected from government action. At that time, the country was utterly dominated by Protestant sects. Catholics were a distinct Christian minority, except in Maryland (which they founded) and Jews were considered so rare as to be exotic. The belief systems of the indigenous people of the Americas were barely acknowledged and the Islamic beliefs of the enslaved population virtually unknown.

The drafters, in sum, made an extraordinary concession to a future they only could imagine when writing the constitution to forbid religious discrimination explicitly. The founders, in an extraordinary leap of faith, embraced the distinct possibility that future U.S. officeholders, including the president, may not be Christian. At that time, in a country dominated by Protestants, Muslims were routinely lumped together with other religious and cultural minorities of the age, including Catholics, Jews, pagans, Hindus, Indians and “infidels”. The political principle of religious inclusion is a cornerstone of revolutionary American democracy. The vision of religious freedom appears, in retrospect, astonishingly clairvoyant – an almost science fiction vision of their country 200 years in the future that actually came to pass. Today, in that envisioned future, Christians still predominate in the United States but Protestants do not. Catholic justices now hold a majority in the Supreme Court. Jewish Members of Congress serve at three times their representation in the population. And Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States.

While clearly none of the American founders was an Islamic scholar, they appear to have been better acquainted with Islam and the great Islamic civilizations than the contemporary generation. The early Americans, in exalting “foundation,” placed the experimental United States alongside the world’s great civilizations, which included Rome and Athens but also the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire as well as ancient Egypt and Persia. The founders knew their history and drew from the historical experience in crafting the government.

This homage is found in the physical structures that symbolize the republic. A relief of Suleiman the Magnificent graces the chamber of the House of Representatives. Islam is depicted as an allegory for physics on the ceiling of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. And the Prophet Muhammad himself is depicted in relief in the U.S. Supreme Court as a great lawgiver.

Unfortunately, an intellectual caesura has opened up between the revolutionary generation and today’s leaders and thinkers. Indeed, a concerted collective attempt by the Christian majority to understand Islam only occurred after September 11, 2001. The gap in knowledge unfortunately remains evident.

But it was not universal. Today about half of the U.S. Muslim population consists of American-born converts, and the largest representation of those are African Americans. This American Islamic tradition dates back more than a century to the founding of the Moorish Science Temple of America in 1913. A follower known as Wallace Fard Muhammad broke from the temple to establish the Nation of Islam in 1930. Both organizations were syncretic religious/political movements with roots firmly sunk in African American history and experience. Nevertheless, the Nation of Islam reformed itself into an orthodox Sunni Muslim organization, still dominated by African American converts, following the death of Elijah Muhammad. No American today can claim absolute ignorance of Islam if they know the names Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam’s two most famous converts. But these movements have always been considered fringe, both politically and theologically.

How can we account for this collective loss of knowledge? One way may be examining the vaunted Western Canon, that corpus of literature spanning back to Greece two thousand years before Jesus Christ. The definition of the canon varies, which is what makes Harold Bloom’s definitive list so important. In The Western Canon, Bloom specifically extols the Qur’an as a source of law, ethics, and poetry as part of the Western tradition. (Strangely, this is his only other mention of Islam in the book. The Qur’an isn’t even noted in the index.) He includes the Arabian Nights, The Poem of the Cid, the apocryphal Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, William Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose framing story involves finding the manuscript written in Arabic by an “Arab Historian”. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while not hospitable to Islam, nonetheless represents its core tenets accurately. Goethe’s last work, West Eastern Divan, was inspired by the Muslim Persian poet Muhammad Hafez e Shirazi (and inspired Muhammad Iqbal to write an homage to Goethe in return). Herman Melville’s character Ishmael in Moby-Dick (his name is the Biblical progenitor of the Arabs) describes the fasting and prayer of his harpooner bunk mate Queequeg as a kind of “Ramadan”. Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, though not included in Bloom’s list, was widely read contemporaneously and involved descriptions of the Grand Tour that includes the Holy Land and Egypt. Clearly, literate Americans were familiar with the Islamic world as late as the 19^th century.

But all of that prologue is forgotten in the contemporary era. The answers to why Islam’s cultural and philosophical influence in the United States fell away since can be explained in part by examining Bloom’s modern canon. Not a single great 20th century American writer wrote on these themes. This suggests a deterioration of collective knowledge and experience in American letters. The Arabic writers Bloom cites, including the Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, were largely secular in nature (a sin for which he was stabbed in the street by an Islamic extremist). Other Europeans address these themes to a lesser extent: Albert Camus (The Stranger), Ivo Andric (The Bridge on the Drina), Amos Oz (The Perfect Peace), and Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet). Still other writers aren’t included in the list but probably should be: Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), T.E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom), Gertude Bell (The Desert and the Sown).

In the 20^th century, American writers were grappling with modernity and affluence, war and peace, the immigrant experience and the African American struggle for justice. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 learned Americans had little reason to include the Islamic world in their thinking until that fateful second Tuesday in September 2001. That is where the reckoning with our intellectual history began.

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