Propaganda

A contemporary reading of the persuasive power of propaganda confronts the deliberate attempt to shape the perceptions, thinking, and behavior of others through a systematic use of language, ritual, and images. The manipulation of perceptions, thinking, and behavior is premeditated to accomplish a purposeworking to shape identities that are inclined to respond favorably to, or in affiliation with, the desired intent of the propagandist. The propagandist's desire to shape identities is inherently political, serving both in the original case and in the modern era to secure and extend a base of power and influence across social arenas.

Originally, however, the term propaganda derived from a missionary body called the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide or, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV. This body was charged with fostering the spread of the Catholic faith to the New World and with reviving and strengthening the Roman Catholic Church in Europe as a means of countering the threat posed by the success of the Protestant revolution. However, although the origin of our modern usage of the word propaganda is derived from a benign missionary effort by a committee of cardinals in service to a religious intent, an important aspect of that intent was to propagate the widespread demonstration of the Catholic identity with all of its accompanying ritual social interaction, liturgical language, ecclesiastical costuming, and ceremonial visuality.

The principal intent of propaganda is to persuade a desired social behavior by influencing the opinions of large numbers of people, either by the omission or obfuscation of information or the fabrication of a useful fiction or misinformation that elicits the desired response. The original proselytizing intent of propaganda is revisited by any secular organization or institution employing similar techniques for manipulating opinion and injecting the memes of particular beliefs through any medium into the thinking of potential acolytes within its sphere of influence. Thus, those who are schooled in the propaganda of a political belief, public policy, or sociocultural norm are also schooled for the purpose of perpetuating a regime of influence.

In the polyglot visual culture of the modern and postmodern eras, the regimes of influence that shape social identities and individual behavior have gone global with propaganda being employed in everything from media product advertisement to political campaigns to Olympics competitions. For example, the intent to caricature one group of people as insignificant, foolish, or dangerous in the eyes of another group of people is often executed by the act of stereotyping. Propagandists may produce their caricatures willingly, as in the malicious [Page 599]stereotypes of identity that were first conceived in the minds of demagogues before being unleashed as propaganda to the embrace of an overzealous or bigoted populace. Or, regimes of influence may produce their caricatures unthinkingly, simply creating en masse the thin experience that a dominant and generally homogenous sociocultural group has had in interfacing with its local minorities. Stereotyped imagery, fraught with omissions about the familiarities to be found in the lives of those being targeted as abnormal, is one means of constituting the power of visual regimes to shape individual and social identities.

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