I do realise that not everyone will like this, but as an exercise in dispassionate observation I absolutely know that a few orgers will like to read it.
Noam Chomsky on Propaganda
January, 1992 (?)
Transcripts from a WBAI interview.
(Contains some transcription errors.) ... This became a part of contemporary political science, the founder of the modern field of communications, one of the leading american political scientists, Harold Laswell he explained a couple of years after this in the early 1930's that one should not succumb to what he called democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests, because they're not, they're not the best judges of their own interests, WE'RE the best judges of their interests and we have to therefore just out of ordinary morality make sure that they don't have an opportunity to opt to act on the basis of their misjudgements and the way we nowadays in what's nowadays called a totalitarian state/military state or something, it's easy you just hold a bludgeon over their heads and if they get out of line you just smash them over the head, but as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda.
The logic is clear -- propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state and that's wise and good because again the common interests elude the bewildered herd, they can't figure them out. The public relations industry not only took this ideology on very explicitly but also acted on it, that's a huge industry, spending hundreds of..by now probably on the order of a billion dollars a year on it or something and its committment all along was to controlling the public mind.
In the 1930's big problems arose again as they had during the first world war. there was huge depression, there was substantial labor organizing, in fact in 1935 labor won its first major legislative victory, namely the right to organize with the Wagner Act, and that raised two serious problems for one thing democracy was misfunctioning, the bewildered herd was actually winning legislative victories and it's not supposed to work that way, the other problem was it was becoming possible for people to organize and people have to be atomized and separated and alone.
They're not supposed to organize because then they might be able to actually exert some, they might be something beyond spectators of action they might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena, that's really threatening and a major response was taken on the part of business to ensure that this would be the last legislative victory for labor and that it would be the beginning of the end of this democratic deviation of popular organization and in fact it worked, that was the last legislative victory for labor and from that point on, although the number of people in the unions in fact increased for a while, from the second world war it started dropping, the capacity to act through the unions began a steady drop. and it wasn't by accident.
We are now talking about the business community which spends lots and lots of money and attention and thought into how to deal with these problems through the public relations industry and other organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable these days and so on. They set to work immediately to try to find a way to counter these democratic deviations, the first major effort, the first trial was a year later. In 1936 there was a major strike, the Bethlehem Steel strike out in Western Pennsylvania, Johnstown, the Mohawk Valley and business tried out a new technique of destruction of labor which worked, worked very well, it was through propaganda.
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